I had a situation in Montana where an employee was working with one of these little vehicles they use in the railyards and she was working at night and the accelerator pedal stuck. And she had put the vehicle in reverse and it goes backwards and slams into a switch and she ends up with a head injury out of it. Well, then you gotta go after the manufacturer. This was hard because, of course, they change the evidence. We ended up talking to the local dealer that did all the maintenance on this vehicle and found out there’d been complaints about it prior to this accident. And then we brought our own experts out to inspect it and it was all perfect.

Well it turns out the railroad had secretly shipped it to another dealership 100 miles away, done testing, and fixed the problem. And we ended up taking those depositions down in California, ended up proving what the defect was, what caused the pedal to stick. It ended up being part of the mat that was on the flooring. If little rocks would get underneath it, it would catch the top of the pedal when you put it all the way down and it wouldn’t come back. And that’s what caused the accelerator to stick and that’s how we proved the case. So that’s how you do that type of situation. Again, it’s hard work, investigation, the sooner you can do it, the better your chances of finding the evidence even if somebody tries to destroy or spoliate it.