Aitken Redesign

Wylie Aitken was recently featured by the National Law Journal as he called upon Veolia Transportation Inc. (a $50 billion French conglomerate) to provide additional damages to Chatsworth Metrolink crash victims. A subsidiary of Veolia operated and employed the train engineer who caused the collision. The company failed to investigate repeated complaints of engineer misconduct and their culture of managerial neglect ultimately caused the collision which ranks as the largest commuter rail disaster in US history. Wylie along with Michael Penn served on the Plaintiff Steering Committee and represented a number of the Plaintiffs.

LA Judge Peter Lichtman recently divided $200 million available to the victims under the Amtrak Accountability Act of 1997. However, Judge Lichtman estimated that victims’ damages exceeded this amount by $150 million. Rather than provide additional damages, like British Petroleum did during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, Veolia has chosen to hide behind this arbitrary federal damage cap.

Hopefully, this tragedy will act as a catalyst to bring down arbitrary caps in this and other areas of the law.

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202503485469&rss=nlj&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1

Wylie A. Aitken, Esq. and Michael A. Penn, Esq.