When a client asks me, ‘When does the railroad have to pay after trial?” I have to say, “It depends, because the fight isn’t over after the verdict.”

You’ve probably seen this yourself. You hear your buddy won a couple of million suing the railroad, but he hasn’t seen a dime yet. Most think that once the jury has spoken, the railroad has to pay up. Wrong. In fact, that is where the railroads really excel, because they enter into a starvation mode, where their financial resources come to bear in an effort to starve you out.

Here’s how:

There are generally two additional bites at the apple after a successful verdict. Take my client with a devastating eye injury. He was awarded $3.75 million dollars and hasn’t seen a penny.

If you’ve been hurt on the railroad your first question is probably, do I have a case? Once you decide the answer is yes, almost assuredly, the next question is how much is my back injury claim worth? How much is my finger injury worth? How much is my knee injury case worth?

They’re important questions, because you want to make sure that the value of what you could recover from a settlement or trial is worth your time and sharing a portion of any recovery on legal fees.

There isn’t a calculator where you can enter an equation like:

Shoulder injury x 2 surgeries x 4 months off the job = Y dollars  

But you can get some idea of the worth of your claim by looking at several factors that we’ll take a look at in this post.

Three weeks after his 30th birthday, my client started working for the railroad as a temporary employee in the track department. He had previously worked for the county as a tree climber and for Poland Spring delivering water.

Six months later, on his first day as a permanent employee, my client, whom I'll call "John", was pulling pin spikes in the tunnels using a claw bar and a half washer, a technique created by the railroad. It was a tough spike, and he and his partner did what they had been trained to do, muscle it out.  But the spike head was corroded, and the heat-treated washer popped through in an instant.

Less than half a second later, John was on his knees clutching his right eye. In the ambulance and at the hospital, John was told they did not expect to save the vision in that eye.

After the accident, John learned the railroad had a hydraulic spike puller which could have been used in lieu of the manual technique.  

At the hospital he learned he had a ruptured globe. When the washer hit John’s eye, it sliced it open from 12 o’clock to 3 o’clock, which led to five surgeries, 29 weeks lost work and a net loss wage loss of $27,000.