That Time When A Law Firm Convinced A Corporation To Do The Right Thing

David Enrich joins the program to tell the story of the East Ohio Gas Explosion and how a law firm convinced the gas company at fault to reimburse those who lost their homes.

Watch the Majority Report live Monday–Friday at 12 p.m. EST on YouTube OR listen via daily podcast at http://www.Majority.FM

https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

#SamSeder #EmmaVigeland #MajorityReport #politics #news #progressive #leftist #democrats #liberal

SUPPORT the show by becoming a member: http://www.jointhemajorityreport.com/

Download TMR's FREE app: http://www.majorityapp.com

TMR MERCH: http://www.shop.majorityreportradio.com

CHECK OUT MORE from the MR crew:
Matt Binder DOOMED https://www.youtube.com/MattBinder
Brandon Sutton DISCOURSE https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse
Emma Vigeland ESVN https://www.youtube.com/ESVNShow
Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING https://www.youtube.com/LeftReckoning

OTHER LINKS:
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/themajorityreport
Facebook: http://facebook.com/MajorityReport
Twitter: http://twitter.com/MajorityFM
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/majorityreport.fm/

Check out more from the MR crew:
Matt Binder DOOMED https://www.youtube.com/MattBinder
Brandon Sutton THE DISCOURSE https://www.patreon.com/ExpandTheDiscourse
Emma Vigeland ESVN https://www.youtube.com/ESVNShow
Matt Lech LEFT RECKONING https://www.youtube.com/LeftReckoning

Image Credit, Tim Evanson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_East_Ohio_Gas_explosion#/media/File:East_Ohio_Natural_Gas_Explosion_sign.jpg
https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/
Image has been cropped and color has been altered.

As I started working on this book several years ago and people kept telling me kind of skeptically, nobody's going to be surprised that big law firms do nasty things to their clients. of course, that's what they're going to do. and of course, you know they're going to win at all costs. that's almost their duty to clients. and I kind of had that in the back of my mind as I started researching the history of Jones day. and one of the examples I came across I thought was a really strong kind of rebuttal to that point. and basically what happened is that in 1944 in Cleveland a big gas company had built a set of Tanks to hold liquid natural gas. and two of those things exploded. They basically leveled an entire neighborhood. in Cleveland, a lot of people died. many more were injured. There's a ton of property that was destroyed. and so the gas company the day of the explosion, it was a Friday, went to their lawyers at Jones Day and said look this just happened you need to provide us very quickly with some legal advice on how to handle this. because we're obviously going to be flooded with litigation. and it doesn't say spent the weekend basically researching the case law and coming up with some options to propose to the gas company. and the obvious option was what companies I think normally would do in a situation like this. certainly today they would normally do. and that's basically fighting tooth and nail to avoid paying damages to any of the people whose property was harmed or who were injured themselves. you know you can do that by kind of protracted legal strategies to kind of Kick the Can down the road. You can place blame on other people like the steel company that had helped build these gas tanks. things like that. you can kind of discount the number of Damages that people suffered and things like that John basically said that that's one option. Here's another option which is what we recommend. If you want to remain in Cleveland as a good corporate citizen you should just admit that you're responsible for this huge tragedy that just occurred. and you should accept responsibility and offer to pay people. And so this explosion took place on a Friday. That Monday the gas company ran an ad in the local newspaper that said come to our offices to present evidence that you were harmed or your property was harmed and we will pay you on the spot.