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Moore v. City of Harriman
I will also add that we did win the case! The vote was 7-6 in our favor, with the majority opinion written by Chief Judge Boyce F. Martin, Jr. The dissent was very unhappy with the result, stating, in a 29-page dissenting opinion, that the decision had “eviscerated” the existing precedent (a case called Wells v. Brown). The dissent also listed a 12 page “catalog” of decisions that were over-ruled by the majority decision. The defendants were so unhappy with the result that they filed a petition for a writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court, but as it turned out, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. In just three years, the case has been cited in 41 reported cases and treatises including Wright & Miller: Federal Practice & Procedure. (Link to Mr. Vowell’s article on this case published in Dicta, the newsletter of the Knoxville Bar Association.) Womack v. Gettelfinger My task on this appeal was to get a verdict of $1,250,000 in punitive damages reversed. One person had been killed and another permanently and totally disabled in a collision with a tractor-trailer rig operated by my client, a trucking company called Gettelfinger Farms. The challenge was to let the Court see that this was simply a case of ordinary negligence rather than gross negligence. Obviously the key was the statement of facts that we carefully put together in our brief. I thought we had it in the bag when Judge David Nelson, who is still on the bench today, said, in the middle of the other attorney’s argument, “But counsel isn’t this different from the case of the driver who just doesn’t give a damn?” I had the pleasure of working side-by-side with one of the great Knoxville attorneys on this case, the late Joe Yancey. The other side applied for a writ of certiorari to the United States Supreme Court in this case also, but the Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Spangler v. Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, Inc.
Indeed, we can only conclude that Met Life, as Spangler contends, "cherry-picked" her file in hopes of obtaining a favorable report from the vocational consultant as to Spangler's ability to work. When the other attorney took the podium he didn’t have a chance. One of the judges told him this: “I am going to recommend that you go home and settle this case before we can write our opinion, because you aren’t going to like what we are going to write.” The crazy thing is, they didn’t try to settle the case and sure enough they didn’t like the opinion, which was a hands-down victory for our side. Lockheed Martin had to return Ms. Spangler to disability status and they also had to pay our attorney fees. Meighan v. US Sprint Communications Co. Meighan v. US Sprint Communications Co. Buhl v. U.S. Sprint Communications Co. Three decisions by the Tennessee Supreme Court in one case! That is pretty unusual, especially since the case hasn’t been to trial yet. There will be at least one more decision by the Tennessee Supreme Court, provided we get out of the Seventh Circuit alive!! National Gas Distributors, Inc. v. State
However, my client, an independent propane distributor in Knoxville, believed that the State was incorrect and came to me and we decided to challenge the ruling in court. Here is what it came down to: propane was formed in the ground eons ago in petroleum deposits – obviously a liquid. Oil companies pump it out of the ground in liquid form and transport it on trucks to distributors, still in liquid form. Distributors store it in tanks in liquid form and they deliver it to customers in liquid form. The customer stores it in liquid form. Finally, after thousands of years in liquid form, the customer burns it at which time for a fraction of a second it becomes a gas. From the time of the dinosaurs until then it had been a liquid; and, more importantly, it was a liquid when it was sold and distributed. And the State was taxing it as the sale of a gas!! The key exhibit at trial was an ordinary transparent butane lighter. (Butane is like propane except it is a tiny bit heavier.) I simply fished it out of my pocket and showed it to the State’s expert witness, a Vanderbilt professor. You could see the butane sloshing around inside the lighter very plainly. Then I asked him whether, in his professional opinion, the substance that was sloshing around was a gas or a liquid. It did not take brilliant cross-examination to make the point!! We won the case, and the end result was that the State had to refund three years worth of taxes to every propane dealer in the state. |
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What a ride this case was! When the court sits en banc, as it did in this case, that means that all 13 of the judges on the 6 th Circuit convene to hear the case at the same time. They only do this on what they consider to be the most important of all cases. The best commentary that I can make on the case is the article that I wrote for the Knoxville Bar Association in its monthly newsletter Dicta. The article was written before I knew the result. I can’t help but mention that I got an ovation from the Court during the argument! I will have to add that it was not for brilliant argument. It is all explained in the article. 
Our task on this appeal was to get the Sixth Circuit to reverse the trial court’s decision that our client was not disabled. We knew that would not be easy because we would have to satisfy the Sixth Circuit that the trial judge’s decision had been “arbitrary and capricious.” Again, the case was won in the statement of facts. Co-counsel Elizabeth Johnson and I carefully put together a statement of facts that demonstrated beyond dispute what had really happened: After Ms. Spangler’s doctors determined that she was disabled, Met Life, the Plan Administrator, had “cherry-picked” one page from her medical records and sent this one page to a “vocational consultant” in New York. The vocational consultant put the one page in the hands of a “Vocational Consultant II” (whatever that is!) who, based on this one page alone, opined that Ms. Spangler was able to work. Here is what the Sixth Circuit said about this situation: 
Believe it or not, the question in this case was whether propane is a liquid or a gas! There was an old Tennessee statute that taxed the sale or distribution of “gas.” One day the Tennessee Department of Revenue decided to apply this tax to the sale of propane, something that it had not done in all of the 50 years that the statute had been on the books. Every propane dealer in the state was suddenly hit with a new tax. All of the big companies and the propane gas association decided that there wasn’t anything that they could do about it and they just caved in and started paying the tax.