Michael Warshauer

Douglas Burchfield, a General Mills employee at the company's cereal plant in Covington, Georgia, suffered the partial amputation of both legs when a loaded railcar rolled loose and ran him over during a routine railcar switch in June 2005. He sued CSX Transportation, which had delivered the car, arguing it put the car into service with a defective handbrake. A first jury cleared CSX, but the 11th Circuit reversed after finding the trial court had improperly let CSX show the jury a reenactment video, and a retrial jury found Burchfield zero percent negligent, CSX 100 percent negligent, and awarded him $20,559,004. CSX appealed, and while that appeal was pending the parties settled the claim for $16 million, which CSX paid.

Adelaida Anderson lost her left leg below the knee after falling from a stand-up forklift with an unguarded rear entry at a FedEx warehouse in Effingham, Illinois, and being run over by the machine. A first jury sided with manufacturer The Raymond Corporation in 2021, but the Seventh Circuit reversed in 2023 for wrongly excluding Anderson's alternative-design expert. On retrial, a jury awarded Anderson $13,045,776 in January 2024, covering disfigurement, loss of normal life, pain, medical costs, lost wages, and a loss-of-consortium award to her late husband's estate. The trial judge denied Raymond's post-trial motion to undo the verdict in July 2024.