$2 Million for a Wisconsin Farmer Who Lost a Leg to a Grinding Machine

In 1981, a farmer was pulled into a grinding machine during ordinary farm work. The accident cost him a leg. He survived, but the amputation changed how he could move, earn a living, and provide for his family.

The farmer and his wife brought the matter to Ted Warshafsky, the Milwaukee trial lawyer who had built his firm on product liability and serious injury claims. The fact of the injury was never in question. What the case turned on was whether the machine that caused it should have stopped sooner.

Warshafsky put the machine's emergency shutoff at the center of the suit. He argued that the manufacturer had designed the shutoff system poorly, so it failed at the one task an emergency control exists for: cutting power fast enough to keep an injury from becoming catastrophic. The claim named the maker of the grinding machine and rested on the design of that single safety feature, which framed the dispute as product liability rather than ordinary carelessness on the farm.

Proving a defective design meant showing the shutoff was unreasonably dangerous as built, not that the farmer had simply made a mistake. It was the kind of case Warshafsky was known for, holding manufacturers responsible for equipment that hurt the people using it. He had graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1952 and gone on to win some of the largest injury recoveries in the state's history, including a roughly $3 million resolution against General Motors over a defective car part.

The grinding machine case never reached a jury. The manufacturer settled and paid the family $2 million. Because the case ended in a negotiated settlement rather than a verdict, there was no award subject to remittitur or reduction on appeal.

The money supported the family long after the file closed. Nearly twenty-five years later, the farmer's wife told Warshafsky what it had made possible. "Because of you we were able to send our kids to college," she said. Her husband, she added, had learned to walk with a prosthesis.