November 1, 2021 – Chicago, Illinois
A record-setting recovery for a hand-injury was recently approved by a Cook County judge in a case where a factory worker’s hand was amputated and then reattached following an industrial accident. The amputation case was prosecuted by Rapoport Weisberg & Sims partners Matthew Sims, Joshua Weisberg, and Melanie VanOverloop.
The worker was cleaning out a piece of industrial food equipment by using an access door that had been added to the machine by the defendants when his hand was sucked into a vacuum tube and amputated by an automated sliding valve gate.
The machine, which had been unsafely modified by the defendants, was modified after the accident to prevent any future injuries from occurring.
The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reported this was the highest reported compensatory recovery for a single hand amputation ever reported in Illinois. The case was also featured on the front page of the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin on November 1, 2021.
