Verdict in Blount County

Dear NONE,

A Blount County jury returned a verdict today in the amount of $950,000 for a woman whose hand was cut in two while working on a chicken heart and liver harvesting machine at the Tyson plant.  Attorneys Nat Bryan and Brandon Essig of our law firm tried the case to conclusion this week. 

According to Nat, the case focused on the lack of an emergency stop device on the harvester.  The machine was manufactured by Cantrell Machine Company.  Nat says "the whole defense was that the plaintiff caused her injury but the jury understood that Wanda was a working woman who was just doing her job the way she was supposed to".

The firm's research indicates this is the largest personal injury verdict on record in Blount County.

In other news, Marsh, Rickard & Bryan was disappointed over a decision released last Friday by the Supreme Court of Alabama because we believe it creates real and practical problems for lawyers, mediators and trial judges keen on fashioning fair settlements under difficult circumstances.  In Ex parte Williams, No. 1020034 (August 27, 2004), the firm implored the Court to stand behind a trial judge who, in trying to follow Ex parte BE&K Construction Co., 728 So.2d 621 (Ala. 1998), had determined that no portion of a settlement agreement was attributable to future medical expenses.  Instead, the Supreme Court of Alabama affirmed the Court of Civil Appeals' holding "that because [Wiliams] recovered for his on-the-job injury from third-party tortfeasors and the evidence indicated that the worker will have future medical expenses, a portion of the recovery must, by operation of law, be attributed to future medical expenses".

Michael Williams was a 30 year old laborer at a mobile home assembly plant when, on April 23, 1997, an overhead scaffold fell on him.  The scaffold injured Mike's spine, resulting in paraplegia.  David Marsh and Jeff Rickard proudly represented Mike in a lawsuite against named defendants who designed, constructed, and installed the scaffolding.

The decision was a close one: 5 to 4, with the Court's newest member, Chief Justice Drayton Nabers siding with the majority.  Justice Champ Lyons, who voted with the majority in Ex parte BE&K Construction Co., has changed his thinking and wrote an interesting and well-reasoned dissent.  He now believes that in the BE&K Construction holding, the Court "put aside the principles of strict statutory construction to which we normally adhere".