Jim Bennett was an integral part of two of the biggest jury trials in St. Louis over a 12-month span ending in November.
In the first case, Bennett co-represented Structural Polymer Systems, Ltd., a British building material manufacturer. After a five-week jury trial in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, his client won a $36 million verdict in its breach of contract case against Zoltek Corp., a St. Louis-based carbon fiber manufacturer.
Thirty-seven lawyers who defeated the Metro public transportation agency’s efforts to hold their clients responsible for light rail construction woes have submitted claims for $27.3 million in fees and expenses against the transit agency.
If St. Louis County Presiding Judge Carolyn C. Whittington approves the bills at a hearing Wednesday, it would bring the liability for taxpayers or transit riders to almost $30.7 million. The figure includes a $2.6 million judgment and almost $770,000 in interest.
But that’s without counting Metro’s own legal expenses in the failed suit against the Cross County Collaborative. Metro attorneys say its costs have not been calculated yet.
On Friday, lawyers for the winning defendants in that lawsuit filed documents in St. Louis County Circuit Court seeking more than $28 million from Metro to cover attorney fees, expert witness costs and other costs. That’s on top of $2.56 million that a jury awarded to the defendants.
After spending millions of dollars on lawyers, accountants and expert witnesses, the Metro public transportation agency got nothing Friday for its investment in its $81 million civil damage suit against four design and construction management companies.
Instead of verdicts in favor of Metro – which alleged negligence, breach of contract and fraud by the four companies in the delays and cost overruns of the eight-mile light-rail extension to Clayton and Shrewsbury – the jury found in favor of the joint venture.
Jurors in St. Louis County Circuit Court awarded $2.56 million to the Cross County Collaborative consisting of Parsons Brinckerhoff, STV Inc., Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. and Kwame Building Group.
A jury began deliberations Monday after lawyers made their closing arguments in the Metro transit agency’s damage suit against four companies over MetroLink construction delays and cost overruns.
Now entering its 15th week, it’s described as the longest civil trial in St. Louis County history.
Metro, known formally as the Bi-State Development Agency, alleges breach of contract and fraud. It seeks almost $82 million in actual damages from the Cross County Collaborative, a joint venture of Parsons Brinckerhoff, STV Inc., Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. and Kwame Building Group Inc.
Jurors began deliberating on Monday in the three-month-long fraud trial against Cross County Collaborative, the builders of the eight-mile MetroLink extension to Shrewsbury. The fraud lawsuit, filed by Metro, the light-rail train’s operator, centered on a cost overrun of more than $125 million and a 15-month delay in the project. During six hours of closing arguments, attorneys for the defendant engineering companies that make up the CCC blamed the delays and cost overrun on changes the agency ordered. But instead of acknowledging the extra costs created by the changes, Metro decided the collaborative would be the perfect scapegoat, the defense attorneys told the jury.
The Missouri Court of Appeals has turned down Deanna Daughhetee Vinson’s appeal to the end of her subprime marriage to fellow mortgage dynamo Ray Vinson.
A three-judge panel of Roy Richter, Glenn Norton and Clifford Ahrens said St. Louis County Circuit Judge Michael Burton got it right the first time.
Mortgage broker Ray Vinson — whose famed ads have annoyed multiple TV viewers — seemed to draw the same reaction Tuesday from a state appeals panel that affirmed Vinson’s divorce from his wife, Deanna. Judge Roy L. Richter, writing for the Missouri Court of Appeals, Eastern District, expressed aggravation with how long the couple’s legal squabbling took to resolve. “This dissolution matter, which had no child custody or support issues and no request for maintenance by either party, consumed eleven days of hearings and over 2,700 pages of transcript,” Richter wrote for the unanimous panel. “The trial court’s detailed judgment is 54 pages long.” Vinson is known for his twangy “ninety-nine, ninety-nine” phone number in ads for American Equity Mortgage, the company founded in 1992 with his then-wife.
Not since Jack Nicholson, as Col. Nathan Jessep, took the stand in “A Few Good Men” has a witness self-destructed the way Larry Salci did this week in a Clayton courtroom.
Mr. Salci, the president of the Metro transit agency, admitted that he had never read the contracts that his agency is suing four construction management companies for violating. He also admitted he’d never bothered to read the periodic evaluations that his staff had done of the management companies’ work.
Further, according to the opening statement by a lawyer for the management companies, Mr. Salci said in a sworn pre-trial statement that “The only people I really care about that have an input with me are my 10 commissioners that hired me, and I care what Wall Street thinks about me, and I care what my headhunters care about in the case I have to go somewhere else. And other than that, I just don’t care.”
Metro President Larry Salci met the CEO of a worldwide engineering company at a hotel coffee shop in Salt Lake City in 2003 to complain about failures in its work on an eight-mile MetroLink extension.
That impromptu meeting, Salci told a jury Monday in St. Louis County Circuit Court, failed to stem a series of events that led him to fire the four companies Metro had hired to design and manage construction of the line from Forest Park to Shrewsbury.
The route opened one year ago, $126 million over budget and 15 months late.