Railroads know that certain injuries have very high potential liability for them. Injuries like when someone’s killed, when someone loses a limb or when they have severe burns. Those are usually what we call catastrophic injures because everybody knows immediately this is going to be a big case. Normally the railroads will send out a team of people to the site. Lawyers even from their home company’s, you know their home offices and they’ll do a whole bunch of things. They’ll contact the family saying we’re going to take care of you. We’ll do everything. They’ll promise everything. I had a fellow that lost two legs many years ago, one very high and one low on a railroad and the railroad said, oh, we’re going to take care of you, we’re going to take care of you. They even bought him a handicapped Porsche where he could hand control it. Well, he had to end up paying for it later, but they didn’t want him talking to lawyers or doing anything.

Well, all the evidence started to get stale, by the time he finally realized they weren’t going to pay him fairly for his case and his dream was just to go back to work as an engineer. He wanted to be an engineer. And they originally said, “Hey, if you can get onto that engine, walk down that plant, and put yourself in that engineer’s seat we’ll make you an engineer.” Well, the guy did it. He had stubbies on and everything, he walks all the way down and he gets in the engineer seat and he’s crying and everything else and they wouldn’t let him be an engineer. Well, that guy hired me and unfortunately, the evidence was a little stale but that’s one of my best cases of all time because not only did we win, not only did we prove everything right but this guy had enough money he bought his own railroad. And today in southern Minnesota, he’s the engineer on his own locomotive even though he’s a double amputee.