Plaintiffs attorney Billy Murphy called yesterday and posted a comment last night to object to my post on the verdict and award in the personal injury trial involving 20 employees in the Pier 5 Ruth's Chris steakhouse. I'm always happy to to highlight responses from principals involved in blog topics.

His main point was that there was substantial medical evidence in the trial showing that the employees were permanently injured by the CO exposure. (Nobody disputes the fact of the exposure.) Murphy:

The evidence of this damage was clearly visible from state-of-the-art high resolution MRIs, functional MRIs and CT scans, which showed irreversible damage to key areas of the brain which caused severe and persistent headaches; severe loss of short-term memory and the ability to focus, concentrate, and multitask; severe personality changes (depression, anxiety, symptoms of post-traumatic stress, disorder, inappropriate anger and the persistent urge to withdraw from friends, loved ones and strangers), all of which persist to this day.

All of this evidence and testimony was supported by the vast weight of current medical literature on this subject.

He also says I misunderstood a quote in the Daily Record, in which plaintiff lawyer Mary V. McNamara-Koch told the jury: “A lot of people [in their families] don’t understand" the plaintiffs' medical problems. Rather than indicating that the family members saw no symptoms, McNamara-Koch was saying that they were baffled by the employees' depression, memory loss and personality change caused by the carbon monoxide, Murphy said.

The fact that many of the employees are still working at Ruth's Chris doesn't necessarily mean they aren't severely disabled, Murphy added.