by Rene Fomby
“Oh, none of that, Harry,” she demurred. “It’s just Martha today. We’re all just friends, trying to see if we can move the rock in this case a little further along today. Are you comfortable, by the way? Did Elise explain how to use the wifi?”
“I’m good. Just ready to get this whole thing rolling.”
“Speaking of which, I thought your partner was going to join us today…”
“Right here, Martha,” Sam’s voice chirped up from Harry’s cell phone. “Unfortunately, I wound up getting stuck, literally on the other side of the world, but I’m here if you and Harry need me. And Harry’s had the lead on this case the whole way, so he’s more than capable of working out a deal if it comes down to that.”
Martha looked a little uncomfortable. “Well, I guess that will have to do. It’s just that, it always works out better if we have all the parties engaged in this sort of thing.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Sam agreed from the speakerphone. “And we are, at least from our side. Again, if there are any hiccups, I’ve got my phone right here. And there’s nothing I can do in person that I can’t handle over the phone. But, really, I think you’ll find Harry to be right on top of the whole shooting match. And he has our client’s complete confidence, to boot.”
“Fine, fine. Well, then, let’s get started, shall we?” Martha grabbed a seat and motioned for Harry to join her. “To begin with, I guess, I take it there’s no argument about causation? Have both sides stipulated to that?”
“No,” Harry explained, shaking his head slightly. “I wouldn’t say they’ve completely stipulated to that, but the facts are pretty straight-forward. My client has an advanced case of Huntington’s Disease. This particular problem all started when her family checked her into the hospital for management of some of the symptoms, which had gotten out of hand. The hospital had her lying flat on her back in a hospital bed when the injury occurred.”
“Huntington’s?” Marta asked. “I’m not all that sure I know much about that one.”
“Sure. I had to look it up, as well, when I took on the case.” Harry pulled a piece of paper out of one of the folders lying on the table. “Here’s a short information sheet on it I downloaded off the Internet from the Huntington’s Disease Society website.”
She took the sheet from him and quickly scanned it. “Is this mine? Do you mind if I make some notes on it?” she asked.
“Sure. Go ahead. I’ve got a couple more copies in my trial case if you need them.”
Grabbing a pen out of her case, she bent over the sheet again, this time studying it more intently.
Huntington’s disease (HD) is a fatal genetic disorder that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain. It deteriorates a person’s physical and mental abilities during their prime working years and has no cure. HD is known as the quintessential family disease because every child of a parent with HD has a 50/50 chance of carrying the faulty gene. Today, there are approximately 30,000 symptomatic Americans and more than 200,000 at-risk of inheriting the disease.
Many describe the symptoms of HD as having ALS, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s – simultaneously.
Symptoms usually appear between the ages of 30 to 50, and worsen over a 10 to 25 year period. Ultimately, the weakened individual succumbs to pneumonia, heart failure or other complications. Everyone has the gene that causes HD, but only those that inherit the expansion of the gene will develop HD and perhaps pass it on to each of their children. Every person who inherits the expanded HD gene will eventually develop the disease. Over time, HD affects the individual’s ability to reason, walk and speak.
Symptoms Include:
Personality changes, mood swings & depression
Forgetfulness & impaired judgment
Unsteady gait & involuntary movements (chorea)
Slurred speech, difficulty in swallowing & significant weight loss
Finally, after underlining a few points, she set the sheet down in front of her. “Wow. Sounds like an awful burden to have to carry through life.”
“Yeah, but Louise has kept up pretty good spirits throughout the whole ordeal. That is, up until the coffee incident.”
“Okay, yeah, tell me about that. How exactly did she get burned?”
“Well, as I said, she’s pretty much bed-bound at this point. Her disease has progressed to the point where she really can’t walk at all without someone supporting her, to keep her steady. And her hands display some of the worst palsy I’ve ever seen. She can’t even sign her name anymore.” He pulled out a document and pushed it across the table. “That was her signature several years ago. Today she can’t even hold a pen or pencil.”
The mediator glanced at the indecipherable scrawl at the bottom of the page. “I see. So why was she trying to hold a cup of coffee? That doesn’t make any sense, given her condition.”
“Exactly,” Harry said. “And the short answer is, she wasn’t. A nurse came in that morning to feed her, and for some stupid reason, he handed her a full cup of coffee. Didn’t even have a lid on it.”
“I think I’m understanding this now. The nurse stuck it in her hands, but with the palsy, she spilled the coffee on herself.”
“Actually, she immediately dropped the entire cup, right onto her chest,” Harry explained. “The coffee splashed up, covering not only her chest, but her face and shoulders as well.” He reached into another folder. “Here. Take a look at these pictures, taken several days later.”
Her eyes widened like saucers as she flipped through the pictures. “Oh my God! This is incredible! And this is just from the coffee burn?”
“That’s right. I mean, first of all, if you or I spilled some coffee on ourselves while we were standing up or sitting at a table, we would immediately brush it off our bodies and pull our coffee-soaked clothing away from us, minimizing the exposure to the scalding liquid. But, lying down as she was, and with limited ability to move, she didn’t have a chance. The damage was done long before the nurse finally reacted and tried to help her.”
“But even then,” Martha noted. “It’s just hot coffee. I know I’ve made the mistake myself of sipping on a cup when it’s too hot, and even blistered my tongue a little bit. But I’ve never experienced a burn anything even remotely like this.”
“Right,” Harry agreed. “Even hot coffee shouldn’t normally result in third degree burns. At worst, this should have been a minor incident, something that would disappear on its own in just a few days. But it didn’t. Louise wound up having surgery to correct the damage. Lots of surgery. Skin grafts on her face, neck and chest. And even then, the damage to her appearance was pretty devastating.” He pulled out another photo to show her. “This is what Louise looks like today.”
The picture showed a woman with patches of slightly discolored skin covering her face and upper body, with one prominent scar cutting across her right forehead, sloping across her nose and continuing across her left cheek.
Martha studied the picture carefully. “I imagine she was a rather attractive woman before all this happened.” Harry nodded in agreement. “But now—not only did she have to endure the initial pain and the surgery, now she has to face the end of her life looking like this.”
“That’s exactly right,” Harry explained. “And that’s what this lawsuit is all about, in the end. You have a woman who has bravely suffered through the debilitating effects of a horrible disease, never once complaining. And then, when almost every ounce of happiness has been drained from her life, this happens. She’s left to face the end of her life without the one last ounce of happiness she had left. She was always a beautiful woman. And now she’s a monster.”
“Hmm. I wouldn’t say monster, exactly, but I get your point. And as a woman, I definitely get it. But again, we’re talking about a coffee burn. From a tragic accident. How exactly is the hospital culpable in any of this?
“That’s a good question. And the answer to that lies in this little investigativ
e report.” He handed her a stapled sheaf of papers. “The law firm that originally had this case—before they turned it over to me—hired a private investigator to look into the temperature of the coffee they served patients in the hospital. And, as you can see, when he tested the coffee machine on that floor, it read over 200 degrees.”
“And is that high? I don’t know—what temperature is coffee usually served at?”
“The experts on that subject recommend somewhere between 160 and 175 degrees. Apparently, most people prefer their coffee at the higher end of that scale.”
“The mediator looked confused. “So we’re just talking a few extra degrees, here, right? Extra hot coffee, maybe, but still in the reasonable range?”
“No,” Harry explained. “That difference makes all the difference. At 205 degrees, you’re just seven degrees shy of boiling. You remember the famous McDonalds case?”
She nodded yes.
“Well, in that case, McDonalds had an official policy, stated in their operations manual, that coffee should be served at somewhere between 195 and 205 degrees. Even though, at just 190 degrees, the skin can be burned away down to the muscle/fatty-tissue layer in just two seconds! And the thing is, the case everyone knows about wasn’t the first lawsuit the company had faced over coffee burns. In the ten years prior to that suit, McDonalds coffee had seriously burned over seven hundred other people, including children and infants, and the company had been settling these kinds of cases privately for a very long time. Apparently, the higher temperature makes the coffee smell better, and their coffee was a major factor in drawing people in for breakfast. So McDonalds management most likely played the numbers game and decided the higher profits were worth more than the settlements. Why they changed that policy for that final case is anyone’s guess. Maybe someone just didn’t get the memo.”
“And you’re saying the coffee the hospital served was even hotter than that?”
“Precisely. And, as the report explains, that was true not just on the floor where Louise was injured, but on every single floor in the hospital. So it wasn’t just an equipment malfunction. Those coffee machines were set like that. Intentionally. Deliberately.”
“But why would they do that?” she asked. “They’re not in the restaurant business. People don’t check themselves into a hospital because of the enticing aroma of hot coffee—”
“Yes, and I don’t have the answer to that,” Harry said. “My personal guess is, they started it off extra hot so it was still drinkable when the breakfast cart got to the other end of the floor. But you’ll have to ask them. At any rate, it doesn’t matter. They set those machines to dispense coffee at a dangerous temperature, so it’s on them. The only thing left to argue about is how much that mistake is going to cost them.”
“Okay, Harry, you’ve got me convinced. But why don’t we take a break for a moment and let me discuss all this with the other side. Then once I get a feel for the—temperature—in the other room, I’ll swing back by and we can talk numbers. Deal?”
“Deal,” Sam chimed in, jolting Martha, who had almost completely forgotten Sam was listening in.
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Harry agreed, silently deciding to double his ask, now that he had a good read on the mediator. In the past, Sam had always been the one doing all of the talking, all of the arguing, while he just sat back and watched. And, starting off the day, that had left him still a little uncertain about his case. But now, having talked through all of the facts of the case, he was beginning to have a really good feeling about how this would all turn out. This might settle for as much as ten, maybe even twenty thousand. And at forty percent for his contingency fee, that meant somewhere around four to eight thousand bucks for him. Not bad for a day’s work. Not bad at all.
※
Martha returned to the conference room in less than thirty minutes. “They put up a little bit of a fight on the causation issue at the start, but in the end they simply insisted that it was going to be a mitigating factor. And they gave me a number, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”
“Really? How much?” Harry asked, eager to get a finger on the pulse of this case, a fresh perspective on how much money might be reasonable.
“Well, don’t shoot the messenger, but they threw out ten thousand, plus any medical expenses.” She saw his sour look and smiled, knowing just what he was thinking. She’d been there, too, back in the day, a new lawyer facing her first mediation. “Look, that’s just a starting offer, and I think everyone knows it’s not very realistic. They just know you’ll probably want to come back with something north of a million dollars, so starting that low might reset your expectations a bit. So, what do you think? What number sounds good to you to start off with?”
Harry chewed on the inside of his lip, thinking. “Okay, I ran some recent jury verdicts for cases very similar to this one, and the results were all over the map. One came in at ten grand, similar to this offer. But that was for a really minor injury, and it affected the guy’s upper leg, not his face.”
“And how about the high end? What did that look like?” she asked.
“The highest number was for one and a half million. And the injuries were very similar to this one, except that the victim in that case had a much longer life expectancy, so the psychological burden of living with the burn scars would stretch out over maybe ten to twenty years.”
“So, what I’m hearing is, your client is pretty close to dying?”
“Yeah,” Harry answered. “In fact, she’s in hospice right now. That means they don’t think she’ll make it past six months. Her family says three. That’s one of the reasons I was so willing to go ahead with mediation. To see if I could get her some form of satisfaction before she dies.”
“Well, that raises an interesting issue, Harry. Does she have any children who stand to inherit here?”
Harry shook his head. “No, and that’s probably a good thing. Like the paper I showed you said, any child of hers would have a fifty-fifty chance of getting Huntington’s, as well. And, as far as the money goes, her family is all pretty well off, so they don’t need any kind of payoff. Their plan—one that Louise herself came up with—is to donate the money to the Huntington’s Society to pay for more research, try to find a cure. I think if we could make that happen, Louise would be able to die in peace. Die knowing that at least something good came out of her injuries.”
“That sounds pretty noble, and it might be something I can work with here. Of course, if they paid out the money directly to your client, they’d ultimately have no control over what happened to it. She could just keep every dime, and give it to her family members when she died. But …” She bent over and scribbled some notes on her pad. “What if they donated the money directly? In her name. That might help them justify a much higher number. They are a research hospital, after all, so maybe this wouldn’t sound so much like being held at gunpoint …”
“And what would that do to my fee?” he asked.
“Oh, that can be worked out, not a problem. And, of course, there would have to be something worked out as well regarding any expenses you incurred, and all of her medical bills for the skin grafts and such. If that sounds at all doable to you, why don’t I swing back and try it out on them?”
“Go for it, Martha. And, just between us, if the donation is large enough, I might be willing to discount my fee a bit. Just to make things work.”
“Got it. But no, that’s not something I would want to share with them. That would have to be worked out between you and your client.” She stood up to leave. “I’ll be back as soon as I know something. In the meantime, I see you haven’t touched the coffee. Can I get you something else? A soda, maybe?”
“A Diet Dr Pepper would be great, if you have it,” he suggested.
“This is Texas, honey. Of course we have Dr Pepper. I’ll have our receptionist bring one right in to you.”
With that, she left the room, leaving Har
ry to suddenly remember he had never once mentioned a final number. So she was going it alone in dreaming up a settlement right now. But, on a positive note, she seemed to have settled in firmly on his side of the case. She never even arched an eyebrow when he mentioned the one and a half million. That could be a promising sign, he hoped. A very promising sign, indeed.
※
This time it was almost an hour before she returned. Harry had already finished off the Dr Pepper, visited the restroom and was well into his fourth game of solitaire on his phone when she walked in. The first thing he saw was her big, shit-eating grin.
“I do believe you’re gonna like this.” she drawled, grabbing a seat next to him and spinning her notepad around so he could see the details of the proposed agreement.
58
Houston
Sam was completely blown away by the agreement. For Harry’s first solo case, he had somehow slammed it completely out of the park. Now she just needed to temper his expectations a bit.
“Okay, Hare, I don’t mean to throw cold water on your parade, but remember that this is a bit of an aberration.”
“No, I get you, Sam,” Harry agreed, barely able to contain his excitement. “But three hundred thousand! Wow!”
“I’m proud of you, Harry. Almost as proud as your client must be. I know you said the law firm that passed on this case thought it was worth, at max, ten to twenty big ones. Who was that, by the way?”
Harry snickered. “You never would have guessed. It was Truman Walker. Hailey was the one who steered the case our way.”
“Isn’t that against the firm’s rules on nepotism?” Sam asked.
“No, that’s the beauty of it. Since Harry Crawford still doesn’t have a law degree, the case went to some chick named Tulley, who, by the way, used to be a shining star at Truman, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The partners were more than happy to throw one of their prized alumni a bone. Especially since it was such a tiny little bone.”
