The Amtrak 188 Derailment and the $265 Million Fund for Its Victims
Won by Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman, P.C. (steering committee), Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck, P.C. (steering committee), Kline & Specter, PC (steering committee), Kramer Dillof Livingston & Moore (steering committee), Morelli Law Firm PLLC (steering committee), Saltz Mongeluzzi & Bendesky (steering committee) and Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner (steering committee).
After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia in May 2015, killing eight and injuring more than 200, Kline & Specter's Thomas R. Kline led the plaintiffs' negotiations that produced a $265 million settlement fund for the victims.
What happened
On the night of May 12, 2015, Amtrak Train 188, a Northeast Regional bound for New York, pulled out of Philadelphia's 30th Street Station. Minutes later, in the Port Richmond section of the city, it reached a curve where the posted limit was 50 miles per hour. The train was traveling at 106. It jumped the rails. Cars overturned and broke apart. Eight passengers were killed and more than 200 were injured, some of them catastrophically.
Federal investigators traced the cause to the speed entering the curve. The engineer, Brandon Bostian, had accelerated moments earlier and, by some accounts, was distracted by radio reports that another train had been struck by a rock. The stretch of track lacked the automatic speed-control system that could have slowed the train before it entered the turn. The crash ranked among the deadliest passenger rail disasters in the Northeast in years.
The lawsuits that followed were scattered and difficult to manage. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation sent them to U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania as MDL No. 2654. On April 12, 2016, Judge Davis named Kline & Specter, Saltz, Mongeluzzi, Barrett & Bendesky and The Morelli Firm temporary liaison counsel. On May 24, 2016, he appointed a seven-member Plaintiffs' Management Committee and named Thomas R. Kline of Kline & Specter its chair. The other members were Robert J. Mongeluzzi of Saltz, Mongeluzzi, Barrett & Bendesky, Benedict P. Morelli of the Morelli Law Firm, Kenneth M. Rothweiler of Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck, Judith A. Livingston of Kramer, Dillof, Livingston & Moore, and one lawyer each from Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman and Stein Mitchell Cipollone Beato & Missner. The committee negotiated the settlement program with Amtrak on behalf of all plaintiffs.
One legal limit shaped everything. Under federal law, Amtrak's total liability for a single accident was capped, and for years that ceiling had stood at $200 million. After this crash, Congress raised it, and Amtrak agreed not to contest applying the higher figure retroactively. That created room for a recovery larger than the old cap would have permitted.
In October 2016, U.S. District Judge Legrome D. Davis approved a $265 million settlement. The figure was not any single client's award. It was an aggregate fund, the money Amtrak would pay to resolve every claim arising from the derailment, to be divided among the many passengers and families who came forward. Kline & Specter represented a number of those victims.
Rather than fight one another for shares of a fixed pool, the attorneys built a non-adversarial process. Two court-appointed masters would hear each victim's losses and set individual compensation, with Amtrak agreeing not to challenge the claims. The committee lawyers gave up the extra fees they could have charged so that more of the fund reached the injured. Claimants had until November 21, 2016 to join the settlement, and Amtrak was ordered to pay it in full by February 28, 2017.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.In re Amtrak Train Derailment in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 12, 2015, MDL No. 2654, Memorandum of Judge Legrome D. Davis (E.D. Pa. July 31, 2017), n.6 and p.14
- 2.CBS News·Archived copy
- 3.Philadelphia Inquirer: Lawyers discuss Amtrak settlement (date not confirmed)·Archived copy
- 4.Philadelphia Inquirer: Amtrak settles train crash claims for $265 million (Oct 28, 2016)·Archived copy
- 5.6abc Philadelphia: $265 million settlement in fatal Amtrak crash·Archived copy
- 6.CBS Philadelphia: Historic $265M settlement in 2015 Amtrak derailment·Archived copy
- 7.NBC Philadelphia: Amtrak 188 crash victims awarded $265M·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Kline & Specter, PC
All Kline & Specter, PC proven verdicts →As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.
A Philadelphia jury found that Monsanto failed to warn that Roundup could cause cancer and awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion. The trial judge later reduced the award to $400 million.
A Philadelphia jury found the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania liable for the brain injury a newborn suffered when staff delayed a cesarean section, a $182.7 million verdict that grew to a molded judgment of about $207.6 million, the largest medical malpractice award in Pennsylvania history. Kline & Specter argued and won the appeal, where the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment in July 2025.
A Philadelphia jury awarded Ernest Caranci $175 million after finding that decades of Roundup use caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto failed to warn of the risk. Kline & Specter tried the case, the first Roundup trial in Philadelphia, and the verdict was later upheld on appeal.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.