Carl F. Thelin

SLAM DUNK   

            It was a Wednesday and I was sitting at the big round table in the local Denny’s restaurant. Seated around the table were my new friends from church at a weekly men’s breakfast. After the introductions, Sam, the fellow seated across from me asked, “Carl, what do you do for a living?”

            I said, “I fight dragons for a living. Sometimes I win”.

            It was the kind of answer that invited further inquiry. Intrigued and amused, my new friend asked, “What do you mean, Carl?

            I took a moment to compose an answer, then, held up my hands (I tend to talk with them) “The dragons I fight are the lawyers working for the companies that make automobiles. I work for the lawyers who are suing them. The carmakers in turn call our side “greedy bastards who sue big companies for big bucks”, and the car people hate me because I once worked for the General Motors lawyers before I realized that I was working on the wrong side. They now say I’m a whistle-blower.”

            Apparently I’d caught the attention of a few others at the table and another man asked, “What do you do for the lawyers?”

            I’d been fiddling with my fork, but I put that down and held up an index finger, my son says that it looks like I’m conducting. “A lawyer’s job is to ask questions,” I said, “Mine is to give him answers that the judge and the jury will believe.”

            “Is that all there is to it?” asked one of my new friends, “How can you know what to tell them?”

            “The trick is to get the judge to agree that I am qualified to say those things. Otherwise, the jury will not get to hear what answers I have.” I let that settle in for a moment.  “The court clerk swears me in, so I can sit in the witness box. The first question is to identify myself. Next, the lawyer asks me to tell the jury what credentials I have. Normally, the court gives me some time to tell the jury about what I have done that makes me an expert in this business. Usually, the defense lawyers let me go on talking for a while, but if I start to make a long speech they’ll object. Sometimes, for instance, if it’s a case involving GM, their lawyer will challenge my qualifications, hoping to destroy my ability to testify as an expert. Actually, one time a General Motors’ lawyer did have me disqualified before I said anything useful to the plaintiff.”

           

            “Why?” asked Jack, the man asked seated next to me, “How?” 

            “Well,” I replied, “I’ll never forget that, nor will I forgive the lawyer for the plaintiff who failed to get my qualifications into the court’s record before asking about my opinion about what I thought was the problem with a defect in a car’s design. The defense lawyer objected, saying I was not entitled to testify as an expert. The judge agreed that I had given no reasons to believe that I was one. I became an “eye witness” only allowed tell the jury what I saw or heard. I was limited to saying what actual evidence I found, but nothing about what I thought it meant. Only an “expert” is allowed to interpret what he saw for the jury I don’t want to explain that now. It’s pretty technical – hard to explain without more background.”

            But hey! Let me tell you about the time that General Motors had their expert witness blow up their case. He was telling a funny story.

            During this lawsuit, we heard testimony from a body interior designer who worked in Sweden for Saab. This case was about a man who was hurt when his elbow slid back along the armrest and caused the door to open by accident. The Swedish guy told the jury us why Saab kept the door handle exposed above the armrest near the passenger’s right elbow – only on the two door model. They reasoned that the driver and passengers would be safe if they locked the doors. On the Saab 900 with two doors, the door was locked by pushing down on a button sticking up from the windowsill near the shoulder of the front passenger. The Saab designer told us why that was important, too.

            The Swedish body engineer chuckled when he told us that Saab had once experimented moving the door handle to a safer location at the front of the door on two-door models. That was fine until they got a complaint.

            One night, he said, two Saab executives, along with their wives, went on an extended ride together. The men sat in front, the women in back. After a while, the driver stopped at a gasoline station and both men went out to the men’s room, our witness was told. Later, when the men came back to the car, the women were screaming at their husbands. “We needed to go to the bathroom, too,” they said. “We could not get out. We could not reach over the back of the front seat to reach the door handles way up front”

            One of the women was the wife of a vice-president of Saab. She demanded that her husband take care of that problem. The Saab body engineers had to move the door handle back to where it could be operated by reaching around the side of the seatback. They had to move the lock button from inside a front pocket back to the top of the windowsill, too.

            That was a funny story. One could not make up a story like that. GM did not try to deny it. The jury loved the story, too. However, from our standpoint it was a crucial admission. Saab had admitted that they designed this ejector door handle with a defect and it could be responsible for the ejection of the driver.

            Later, we pretty much finished our breakfast along with concluding the church business we were there to talk about. Now, relaxing over coffee, the subject of my trial experience came up again.

            “So Carl,” began my neighbor, “what was that about you getting disqualified at some trial?”  With more time now, I could go into more detail. I explained that we call a lawyer who is suing a defendant company on behalf of an injured party the plaintiff’s attorney. The lawyer is prosecuting a civil case called Products Liability – PL for short. That kind of case means that the client is claiming that his injury is the result of a defect in the product – in this case an automobile. The lawsuit is a special kind of a personal injury case. We say it is a product, a manufactured thing that caused the injury – not a person. Oh a better way to put it – even if the other guy caused the car crash, the claim can be made that the injuries to the plaintiff were made much worse by a defect in the car design.

            A carmaker is not very concerned about a case claiming an injury that resulted from a simple manufacturing defect, the sort of thing that was found in just a few bad cars, which escaped the factory inspection. People in this business call this kind of defect a bad sample. I call it a bad day at the factory. The car companies do not fight this case if the defective part is in evidence – they might even offer a settlement before trial as soon as they are allowed to inspect the bad stuff.

            “I must convince the jury that the design of the car contains a defect that causes crash injuries to be worse that would have been otherwise. The car companies will fight nasty on a case which we claim resulted from a design flaw. The auto company will bring out their best engineering witness and present some elaborate charts and displays to bedazzle the jurors. When a jury agrees that our side proved that vehicles with these defective designs are unreasonably dangerous – that is a huge matter. First, it means that any or all of those cars contain the defect. Each one of those cars that crash that may produce another lawsuit. Paying for damages caused by one badly made car is not a problem. Being hit with dozens or hundreds (yes!) of similar cases is a big deal.”

            “Oh, you mean like the movie with Julia Roberts?”

            “Yes. The really big deal – the kind that makes the headline news - is one that goes beyond claiming that negligence by the company engineers allowed a defectively designed car into the market. If the evidence shows that the engineers and officers of the company knew of the defect but ignored the danger, then we call for punitive damages. I personally wish we could put the people in jail for putting that kind of car out.  However, that seldom is even considered. Instead, the court applies the punishment to the corporation. It is like a multi-million dollar fine. And a multi-million dollar “fine” really punishes the company shareholders by reducing the company profits. I suppose the purpose is to encourage the company leaders to pay more attention to engineers who warn them (if they dare) that might not be safe.  While I was at GM, I would have been fired if I said that in writing.” 

            “For the plaintiff trial lawyer, this kind of case can be worth big bucks. A defective-design verdict might allow one or more lawyers to put together a giant case with dozens or hundreds of plaintiffs who claim injury because of that defect. A victory in a class action case with punitive damages can produce an award of billions from a large automobile company. As a result, the trial lawyers seek class action suits against defendants with ‘big bucks’, deep pockets, such as the tobacco or drug manufacturers.”

            “But, I hear that those kinds of cases take forever to get done”, said Jack.

            “Oh yeah. I had some cases that took about ten years. But, given a victory, the lawyers will first recover (take) from the victims the money that was spent for all the expense of pursuing the plaintiff’s case. Then the lawyers take a big share of the remainder. Typically the law firms get 40 percent. The injured families divide what money is left.”

            “Not me. I do not get any share of the award. That would be illegal. The lawyer just pays for my expenses and he pays me for my time, by the hour or by the day - period. I am not paid for my opinion – even if people insinuate that. ” I let that bit of information sink in for a moment.

            But, I am paid $250 per hour while testifying. Most of the work leading up to my testimony is charged at less than that. The law firm does not have me on a salary. I am paid for doing my job, my work – not for being on their side. I cannot, by law, benefit from the jury award. I don’t get $250 an hour for a 40 hour work week.”

           

            THE REAL SAAB STORY

            I felt strange watching our client come into the courtroom. Mr. Gerald Ronamm came down the center aisle into the courtroom. He pushed the gate open. Then he pushed a well-padded office chair into the space to the left of his attorney. Even though he was using the tall back of the chair as a walker for support, he was struggling with his stiff right leg. He plopped down next to Ms Goodman. She was the lawyer who contacted my firm (CSI) for technical assistance with her lawsuit. The plaintiff’s case seemed like a triple slam-dunk. He was a yuppie professional man who suffered serious leg injuries during a rollover of his Saab Turbo. He was a grim-faced fellow who was not look like somebody you could call Jerry.

            A Triple slam dunk? Yes. First, his Saab automobile had a hidden handling defect than contributed to the cause of the rollover.

            Second, his car had been designed with a driver’s door handle that a driver could open by accident.

            Third, the design of the seat belt failed to keep the driver in place, allowing the driver to hang outside the car while it overturned several times.

            I’ll explain what we told the jury about those defects later. This was a great case to work. General Motors is the owner, now, of Saab the maker of cars in Sweden. Because I once worked for GM, GM hates me now as a whistle blower. GM will spend a lot of talent and money to prevent me from helping a lawyer to win any case.

            This case did not start out very well. I made several mistakes that were hard to correct later. Bear in mind that I travel all over the USA, from Maine to California, Florida to Seattle. I visit junk yards to examine cars, lawyers to plan cases and offices or courts to testify. So, it is not uncommon for me to be asked to “stop by sometime when you are in the area”. I think I should have learned that is doing nobody a favor. Stopping by in the middle of a trip never allows enough time to do anything well. In this case, I was able to drive a rental car quickly to visit Ms. Goodman at her small, all-woman office in Williamsburg, a small city in rural Massachusetts. When we met, she told me that we should hurry to a barn where a car was stored. It was mid winter so it would soon be dark. There were no lights in a barn.

            Well that was mistake number one. A rush inspection in a dark barn using flashlights is really doing a poor job. I should have insisted, as we do for a big auto company cases, that the vehicle be put on a trailer and taken to a car body repair shop with a hoist. But I did not. Wow! This car, a two-door hatchback Saab had a lot of roll over damage. Just about every surface was banged up. The driver’s door was severely mangled showing that it had been open during some of the flips. The rear of the door window frame was tied securely to the B-post to keep the door nearly closed. The rear side window was broken out, and there was a large separation between the inner and outer skin of the fender below the window opening. The driver’s door was also bowed out like that. Looking down inside the door with the flashlight, I could see that the innards of the door were distorted in every way. Not a surprise.

            Ms. Goodman directed my attention to the gap in the fender behind the door. I was surprised when she pointed out that the shoulder belt retractor mechanism was plainly visible. It was not covered with a plastic baggy, as many are, to keep dirt and moisture away. The real surprise was to see overspray everywhere. This car had been given the Ziebart rust protection treatment. The person who did that job probably is the one who drilled holes into the hidden cavities do spray the under coating. Late, he covered the holes with plastic caps.

            I doubt that the spray been directed at the seat belt retractor. However, there was a cloud of fine black, sticky drops everywhere inside the fender from the overspray. It seemed like a good theory proposed by Ms. Goodman – the sticky stuff had rendered the seat belt retractor unable to lock when the collision sensor was stuck. She pointed out that not only had the Saab door come open during the roll over, but that the driver was found fully outside the car, partially crushed under it. She said the driver had worn his seatbelt, so he should not have been fully ejected.

            I had to leave to complete my other travel mission. We agreed that she would have the seatbelt retractor and the entire seatbelt and associated hardware removed for later close inspection. The proper way to do this is to invite the defendant to cooperate, with both parties being side by side.

            STICKY STUFF

            Eventually, that hardware was sent to my offices at CSI. There I enlisted the help of our resident materials specialists, named Jerry Crown. He was the kind of expert that used to be called metallurgists. I asked him to examine the effects of the fine droplets of undercoating. The collision sensor in this Saab retractor was a small ball of light white plastic that is housed in a plastic birdcage-like structure attached to the side of the housing of the seat belt retractor. Normally the ball would rest in a shallow pocket at the bottom of the cupped cage. When the retractor is subject to high lateral collision inertial forces, the ball would roll to the side, freeing a plunger to drop down. The plunger released the spring loaded pawl that would engage the saw tooth ratchet on the edge of the belt spool. That is what locked the retractor, preventing the shoulder belt from paying out from the reel during a crash or a roll over. This is the fundamental purpose of the occupant crash restraint. We thought that perhaps the sticky black undercoating had cemented the plastic ball in the bottom of the cage, and had been jarred or pried loose later.

            There was some concern that perhaps the evidence had been surreptitiously altered by the visiting experts from General Motors during the so-called joint inspection. I was told that there were several of them present at the same time. They had managed to distract the Goodman representative, so that the GM guys had some private time with the seat belt retractor. I do not think that opportunity mattered. In my opinion, there was another realistic reason why the seat belt had failed to keep the driver completely inside the car.

            As Mr. Crown spent time with the microscope, it became obvious that the bits of black sticky stuff were not sticky enough. The drops were too small. They were unable to get a grip on the polished surface of the plastic ball. It was too late. Ms. Goodman had already framed her legal complaint with that allegation.

            Ms. Jane Goodman is a very nice woman with a good heart. It seemed like she had not much experience with major products-liability suits like this. I paid for this omission. I let the people from General Motors inspect the hardware without flying there to keep an eye on those guys. If I had been with them, I might have noted that they discovered the same thing as Mr. Crown did.

            BOY. WAS I WRONG – AND EMBARRASSED

            Another complaint was my allegation that some of the hardware in the door was distorted so that the door latch self-released during the multiple rollovers. Often when examining a door that came open inadvertently, I find that some linkage rods inside the door were bent. Here is the picture. Front car doors have an outside handle, and inside handle, a manual lock on the inside, and a key lock on the outside surface. Good design dictates that the linkage from the inside and outside handles becomes disconnected from the latch hardware when the lock is engaged.  The latch is a small metal box of small links and levers located at the back edge of the door.

            In the 1950s, most cars had the front and back ends of the door handle fastened to the door. There was a thumb operated push button below. A button-headed knob stuck upward out of the rear edge of the inside windowsill. You pushed it down to lock the door. That knob was behind the shoulder of the front passenger, so most people didn’t lock the door until they got out. If the car did roll over onto its side while the door was not locked, the outside door handle was pressed onto the ground. The ground pushed the thumb button into the door. Then the door was unlatched but still held closed. If and when the car continued rolling over, the door would fall open.

            That kind of disaster led to two design improvements. One was to move the inside door lock to the front of the door, just below the window. It would be either a slider or a small lever to flip. Now it was easy to lock the door after being seated. Better, both the inside manual lock and the key lock were arranged so that the locking mechanism simply disconnected those door handles from the latch. Later, as safety awareness increased, many cars also adopted automatic door locks that were engaged when the engine was started and put in gear.

            That was not the problem with this two door model Saab. I have an excuse for not knowing what the real problem was before we saw the photos taken during the joint inspection. I thought I was familiar with the inside layout of the Saab 900 series. We had tested them when I was working at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in Buffalo. I also had driven a few during my days of testing numerous cars for Consumer Reports. I was not aware that the two-door model was markedly different in an important way. Testing is almost universally done on standard four-door cars, unless there is no option, such as on the original Honda Accord. The four-door Saab had its inside door handle and lock located at the front of the inside of the door, just below the window, in the thickened portion of the window sill. The two-door Saab did not. I will tell why that was too important to overlook later. 

            Yes, it should have been a slam-dunk case, but we discovered, as time went by, that the client himself was not a sympathetic person, to put it mildly. The forensic expert industry has rules that require the client to be caught up on all his bills before trial. The client’s lawyer also must pay ahead for the estimated charges during the trial. CSI will pay cash for the many travel and hotel expenses, and CSI charged many hours for my time at the weeklong trial. Ms. Goodman, the lawyer, was our client, not Mr. Ronamm. She’s a small town lawyer, so she was getting her money for case expense from Mr. Ronamm. While that was an excuse for letting her get behind on paying our charges, CSI demanded that our up-front money be ready before trial. But there were delays, there too.

            Well, our side lost in court. The jury found for the defense. Mr. Ronamm did not collect a dime. And he did not pay for our time or our expenses, and I suspect that he shortchanged Ms. Goodman for her time, too.

            My firm, CSI, sued Mr. Ronamm. Then he turned around and sued CSI for losing his case. He actually wanted us to pay for his trial expenses and the award he should have earned from GM.  What a mess! Tell you more, later.

            THREE DEFECTS IN THE SAAB

            The first defect is a common one. Some call it “power-off oversteer”.

Saab, of Sweden, was one of the first carmakers to adopt front wheel drive (FWD) long before it became popular in the USA.  A car with FWD has most of its weight on the front wheels, unlike the regular rear-wheel drive cars and trucks. FWD was an advantage for traction in Sweden, a country with heavy winter snow. The early Saabs were tiny cars with two-stroke engines. They were weird in many ways and appealed only to FWD fanatics. In later years Saab made cars big enough to appeal to the general car buyer in the United States. The basic model name was Saab 900. Mr. Ronamm had just bought a new 900 Turbo model, with a turbocharged four cylinder engine. Buyers considered this car, with a five speed manual transmission, a sport sedan even though it had only two doors.

            At the time Mr. Ronamm lived in upstate Massachusetts, somewhat northwest of Northampton, where he had a profitable business. One bright, sunny Saturday morning he washed his new car. Then, grabbing the keys, he went for a ride to “dry it off” on the isolated two lane roads in his neighborhood. He enjoyed buzzing around the curves of the rolling terrain in the wooded area. He was in third gear speeding up a hill approaching a wide curve to his left. Mr. Ronamm knew the remote area well and expected a long gentle down hill section that crossed a small river beyond the curve.

            When he reached the apex of the curve, Mr. Ronamm was surprised to see a woman walking her dog along his side of the road facing him. He got off the gas pedal, but (he said later) he did not apply his brakes.

            Oh Boy! The Saab had a response he would not expect. It swerved suddenly hard toward the left side of the curve, easily missing the woman and her dog. I swerved so quickly that it was headed into the sandy shoulder at the beginning of the downhill straight section before the driver could counter steer.

            I know that Mr. Ronamm did not hit the brakes first because that would have prevented the power-off over steer response.  After finding himself on the left side shoulder, the brakes locked the front wheels on the gravel, preventing his next maneuver from being effective. He did turn hard to his right to avoid going completely off road into the woods. With locked front tires, that did not work until he foot came off the brake pedal. The Saab turned back toward the road and had its front wheel up over the sharp edge of the pavement when the left rear wheel slid laterally into a large, almost buried rock in the soft shoulder. That tripped the car into a violent rollover. We were able to see the mark made by a wheel rim on the rock.

            MISTAKEN BELIEF

            A front wheel drive car works its front tires hard. There is always a limit to the traction between the tires and the road. There is more driving (accelerating) traction when a majority of the weight is on the front, as it is on FWD cars. There is more traction on one front tire when it is on the outside of the turn. That is good, and makes one think that the way to drive a FWD vigorously around a curve it to power through it. Not so. Mr. Ronamm was driving in a sporty mode, buzzing around using lower gears to make more engine noise, as if he believed that he should go around a curve under power. That is what makes fast driving fun.

            He did not know that the FWD Saab’s front tires are working double duty. The front tires divide the available tire-road friction between the driving forces pulling the car ahead, and the cornering forces making the car turn. This required Mr. Ronamm to steer more to his left in order to balance the driving and corning force. That is, he had to make more left steer than would be needed if the car had been coasting neutrally through the curve or if the car was driven by the rear axle like most sport cars.

            When Mr. Ronamm saw the woman and the dog, he got off the throttle quickly. As a result, the Saab experienced power-off tuck-in, also known as oversteer. Relieved of the requirement to pull ahead, the front tires suddenly had more corning force available at the given steering angle. The Saab now turned more sharply to the left as the throttle closed. With a manual transmission, this reduction in driving force is quicker than with an automatic. There are ways to minimize this effect. I was a chassis engineer at General Motors when the Engineering Staff was developing the prototype for the Oldsmobile Toronado. Unlike the early Saabs, that car had a huge V8 engine. GM planned to sell the new Olds only with an automatic transmission. It had tuck-in anyway because of the prodigious traction capability of the big engine and tires. We had to calm the tuck-in for the American driver’s taste. European sporty drivers do not mind tuck-in, knowing when to expect it and what to do. Let me just say that there are several engineering solutions to tame tuck-in which I do not want take the time to describe just now.

            EJECTOR DOOR HANDLES

            The second defect was a more common problem before Consumer Reports magazine began criticizing it. We called it the “ejector door handle”. Maybe you can even recall those cars which had the door handle positioned just below the front door armrest. If you reached your fingers down through the opening in the armrest, they could curl around the slender door handle. That was convenient if you wanted to get out quickly.

            The engineers at Consumer Reports thought that if the passenger was feeling anxious as the driver went around a sharp turn to the left, he might instinctively grasp the armrest, inadvertently pulling up on the handle and causing the door to open. The danger there was obvious - then.

            GM developed the E-body car body to use on the Toronado, the Buick Riviera and the Cadillac Eldorado. I worked on the Olds prototype. We put a very long front door on this car body to make it much easier to get out of the back seat. Remember that these FWD cars were not compacts. In those days, the door handle that was popular on large GM models was a flat paddle that stuck out of the front of the long armrest. You could open the door by pulling it up with your fingertips. General Motors body designers read Consumer Reports. This early design could have been an ejector door handle. Today most cars have power door locks that work as soon as you put the car in gear. Now you know why.

            Did the designers at Saab know about this issue? Of course they did. They positioned the inside door handle near the very front of the door just below the windowsill. Oh, that was only on the four-door Saabs. They did not make that change on the much older design two-door models. The two-door Saab had a short vertical lever that stuck from the center of the arm rest. The stubby lever stuck upward out of the armrest. A person could operate it just by sliding his elbow back along the door. It was near the elbow for either person seating in front. If the elbow pushed the lever rearward, the door was accidentally unlatched.

            General Motors brought a body interior designer from Saab, Sweden, as one of their expert witnesses. I told you about this explanation earlier – it was a funny story. I doubt that he knew he had really hurt GM with that one. Maybe the Swedish engineers really did not like being owned by the monster American company.

            GM did not try to deny or explain their expert’s testimony. The jury loved the story and the guy. However, from our standpoint it was a crucial admission. Saab had admitted that they designed this ejector door handle with a defect and it could be responsible for the ejection of the driver.

            Drivers demand convenience, too. Typically, when the driver operates the inside door handle, that action also overrides the lock. It does not work that way on the other doors. That was the problem in this case. The door handle was near the driver’s left elbow as the Saab overturned four or five complete revolutions before coming to rest on its left side – way down the hill. The driver’s door opened during one of those flips. It became mashed and flattened against the front fender whenever the car landed on its left side before coming to rest on its left. Mr. Ronamm was outside, on the ground. The Saab was resting on his crushed legs, pinning him to the ground. He was badly hurt and could have been in even greater danger if he had not been rescued soon.

            I did not mention that when Jerry took his Saab out to “dry off”; he took a neighbor along for the ride. The rapid, violent rollover shook up that fellow pretty badly but he was still fully inside with the passenger door closed. He is the one who got out and went to get help for Jerry.

            INCREMENTAL PAYOUT

            The third design defect, we claimed, was that the Saab seatbelt retractor is defective. Considering that the Volvo and Saab Swedish cars advertise their safety so strongly, that was a shocking claim. At first, we had gone along with the suggestion that the careless application of car-body undercoating froze the crash sensor in place.

            Designers use all sorts of mechanisms in a retractor to prevent the seat belt from paying out during a crash. The seatbelt strap winds around a spool inside the retractor. There are one or more springs that make the spool wind up the slackness of the seat belt. The edge of the spool has a saw tooth profile. A strong steel bar will engage the teeth if and when a crash sensing trigger works. There are many design variations of the sensor that we call the crash force belt-locking trigger. In response to large crash forces in any horizontal direction, the sensor causes the latch to move into engagement. Some cars have seat belt retractors that also lock the belt when it is pulled out very rapidly, even if a crash is not occurring. In the early days, that is the only kind cars had, until the government required what is now called emergency locking retractors” – the ones that use crash sensors.

            Some sensors operate quickly in time of need. That sensor can also allow the spool to unlock quickly, too. I said that it was that feature that was defective. That lightweight plastic ball in a cage was a fast-acting crash sensor. The Saab rolled over four or five times. We and GM argued about that number – was it four or five? We both had the measurements of the distance from the tire gouge in the shoulder to the resting place of the wreck. That was enough room for four or five flips. We still could see the marks in the pavement where the car bounced on the roadway before ending up down in a shallow ditch. It was certain that this car did bounce around alike a football. Car testers roll over cars on purpose. The slow motion films show the hopping motion. But, I doubt that the jury cared if the number was four or five. It was pretty violent, and the repetition was what allowed the seat belt to fail to do its duty.

            I claimed that the seat belt retractor did lock when the Saab made that first hard turn to the left onto the shoulder. Then it briefly unlocked each time the car was in free flight, bouncing along the road down the hill. The driver’s door probably opened when Mr. Ronamm was sliding around inside. His passenger, who was only shaken up and got out safely, told us that Ronamm was fully outside the car with lots of seat belt webbing wrapped around him when it all came to rest.
            I called that “incremental payout”. It meant that the belt webbing was able to pull out from the spool at little bit each time the car was in free flight – each bounce caused a very brief zero gravity effect. Now, I have to admit that the retractor issue was not the major defect in this case. Others had described similar effects in other cases, but it was not a subject that had received much research.

           

            THE TRIPLE

                        Here we had a case where we could say that one defect – the tuck-in – caused the rollover collision. Any impact, even when bouncing, is a collision. Usually I focus on the crashworthiness and occupant restraint systems. The defective design of one or both of those systems allows the injuries to be worse than would have been otherwise. Here, in this case, I claimed that without the FWD tuck-in, the car would not have gone into the left shoulder and begun rolling over.

            We claimed the second defect was the ejector door handle on the driver’s door. At first, I did not recognize that was a defect. Most of my experience with the Saab automobile was with the four door models, I admitted.

            Thirdly, I claimed that the incremental payout allowed the driver to be outside, on the ground, when the car came to rest on his legs. We noted that the passenger who stayed inside was hardly injured.

            Backtrack for a moment. My experience with these cases against the auto companies like General Motors is a plaintiff’s lawyer has to squeeze hard, frequently and relentlessly to get anything from GM. The car company will seize any excuse in the wording of our side’s request for discovery.  Discovery is a word meaning that each side is expected to ask of the other for what information they hold that might be pertinent to the case. They are also expected produce their witness for questioning in a deposition if we ask for those before trial. The company carefully chooses a person with the appropriate generalized knowledge in the field. Usually that individual is not familiar with the specific defect alleged in the case. The designated witness is smart, but not so smart that he can hurt the defense case. He cannot accidentally reveal anything of importance. There were people who actually know what they did and why they did it. However, the company usually claims that they have retired, or are unavailable for some other reason.

            So, it was a surprise when GM produced a real expert who worked at the factory in Sweden. Because he had to come so far, we did ask to hear his testimony before trial. His written report did not contain the funny story. This fellow was so honest we were amazed. He told us, in court, the real reason why this car had the ejector door handles. It was that funny story. I really thought that this story was a winner – for us.

            Here is the rest of the funny story. I saw the same problem when I was working on the prototype of the Oldsmobile Toronado. That car introduced a long but wide fast-back coupe, called the E-body by GM engineers. It was added to GM’s line up to compete with the Ford Thunderbird upscale coupe. The Toronado had very long doors. They were equipped with fancy hinges that allowed it to open wide enough to make a wide gap between the back of the front seat and the opening in the car body. Access to the back seat would be easier. The then-standard paddle-type door handle protruded out of the front end of the long door arm rest. It was too far forward to reach from behind, like in the two-door Saab. GM thought of a neat-looking solution. They put a second door handle in the cars with those extra long doors. That handle stuck out of the rear end of the long armrest. If you unlocked the door first, you could lift the paddle to get out. The door lock was the old fashioned button sticking out of the top of the window sill. No problem there. So, the funny story was sort of familiar to me.

           

            THE JURY FOUND FOR THE DEFENSE!

            People with me were originally sure that this was a slam-dunk winner of a case. The first defect was a bit shaky because it is hard to convince laypersons on a rural jury what it really means. The automobile fan magazines all talk about power-off tuck-in, but those jury people had no experience with it themselves.

            The business about the door handle was easy to understand. The jury could see that the opened door was the reason for the ejection and subsequent injuries of the driver.

            Incremental payout of the seatbelt seemed important to me. It was to explain why the driver was fully outside the car with his seatbelt still wrapped around him. GM argued that, despite the testimony of the passenger, there was no objective proof that the driver was using his seat belt at all. GM’s experts said that a properly restrained driver would remain almost entirely within the car. His passenger would not find him fully outside the vehicle, and in this case partially under it. I had to admit that I thought this is usually true too. We would admit that these were a weak, a strong and a weak arguments. Those three ought to be enough to get a victory from the jury.

            So, why did we lose? I have been in several cases that resulted in jury nullification. The Los Angeles O.J. Simpson trial was one like that. In that case, commentators speculated that the jury did not like the Los Angeles police department and those on the jury plainly favor the famous football player.

            So, despite a lot of evidence, the jury found that GM and Saab were not responsible for the injuries. Ms. Goodman and CSI lost this slam-dunk case for a similar reason. It became obvious during the trial that the jury saw the ostentatious limping behavior by Mr. Ronamm, and did not like him at all. He made a big deal of needing his orthopedic office chair at the table with the lawyer. Another reason to dislike him was that Ronamm was not consistent about his limping. There were other times when Mr. Ronamm seemed youthfully spry and forgot his exaggerated limp. He was in upstate Massachusetts. Mr. Ronamm made a big deal of needing to swim in a heated pool, as therapy for his injuries. The heated swimming pool was installed at his home. Outdoor heated swimming pools are an extravagance in that neighborhood. One of the local restaurant keeper told us this was in keeping with his ostentatious showing of wealth which some of his neighbors resented.

            Mr. Ronamm managed to offend his team, as well. As I mentioned, he was always giving his lawyer and CSI excuses for delaying his payments. When the three CSI experts came to the lawyer’s office to meet everyone for the first time, we were dismayed. One expert was there to tell the jury about orthopedic injuries. Another was Mr. Crown.

            Although we found that this testimony was not crucial we had to produce him. These fellows are genuine experts in their fields being paid more than $200 per hour for time testifying.

            Normally, Ms. Goodman, the trial lawyer in this case, is the commander of all aspects of the plaintiff’s portion of the trial. The three CSI people are independent experts. So we were surprised and upset when Mr. Ronamm began to tell us exactly what we had to say. Some of his orders were simply not true and we objected. I told him that this was just one case for him. On the other hand, our expert testimony, if proven false, would end our careers. We resisted his urging.

            Mr. Ronamm owned a furniture store. The company was paying our bills. After all he was the boss. He bossed around some of the staff in the law office. He was even telling his lawyer, Ms. Goodman, what to do. She resisted most of his crazy ideas, too, but not as well as we did.

            Still, it was a good case. Maybe not a slam-dunk, but three defects ought to have carried that day. I felt that this was a case where the jury ignored the evidence just because they did not like Mr. Ronamm.

            Because of the three-pronged breadth of the case, Mr. Albert Fellows, chief local lawyer for GM, deposed me several times. I sat in on a couple of the deposition of the experts offered by GM where he also sat with them. Mr. Fellows, the lawyer for GM was a nice gentleman. I grew to like the man a lot because he was never nasty to Ms. Goodman or to me, unlike most of the GM people. He was an older man from Maine, with a courteous behavior toward everyone. He was just likable, even when questioning our CSI people.

           

            THE REST OF THE STORY

            Our side lost. Mr. Fellows did not gloat. Ms. Goodman did not pay CSI for our week of waiting in and around court, nor did she reimburse our expenses. Normally we would have a beef with the lawyer, the client of record. Because our earlier checks had come from firm that Ronamm owned, we sued him for the payment of $75 grand.

            Wow – Mr. Ronamm counter sued CSI for causing him to lose his case because of our allegedly defective testimony. That was unusual. He wanted us to pay him for what he expected to have collected from General Motors.

            So, now we have a stalemate. And, we find Ms. Goodman caught between both sides. In the end, she was no help to CSI. Months later, we learned that Mr. Ronamm hired a big-town trial lawyer, and they in turn hired another firm of forensic experts. Mr. Ronamm was going to get his millions one way or another – he thought. I do not know what the new experts told the jury, nor any other details of the second trial.

            But, we at CSI were pleased to hear that GM beat Ronamm in that trial, too. That ended his case against CSI, and he finally settled his bill with us, too.