Christopher Hanshaw was barely 21 years old on August 25, 2016, when he and his fiancée were forced to decide whether they wanted his physicians to amputate his left leg at the ankle or below the knee.  He had just started his job as a forklift operator for Valu Merchandisers, when his left leg exited a stand-up forklift and his foot was crushed against a pillar in a warehouse in Fort Scott, Kansas.  The machine he was operating, the Crown RC5500, lacked a rear door and had caused numerous lower left leg injuries over the years.

Mr. Hanshaw subsequently sued Crown Equipment Corp., in the Circuit Court of Jackson County, Missouri, at Independence, claiming the RC5500 had been defectively designed. On June 5, 2023, after two years of litigation and days before the pretrial conference, the trial court granted Crown's motion to exclude Ben Railsback, Mr. Hanshaw's engineering and design expert, ruling him unqualified and his opinions unreliable under Missouri's expert admissibility statute, § 490.065.2, R.S.Mo.  The trial court then granted Crown's accompanying motion for summary judgment on Mr. Hanshaw's negligence and strict liability design defect claims based on the absence of necessary expert support the following day.

Mr. Hanshaw's attorneys at Bautista LeRoy LLC, along with co-counsel from Monsees & Mayer P.C., immediately appealed to the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District.  We argued that the trial court's ruling was incorrect.  While Missouri's expert statute, is modeled after Federal Rule of Evidence 702, R.S.Mo. 490.065.2 is not accompanied with the same procedural safeguards.  Missouri's procedural framework, for example, does not require written reports from retained experts and its trial courts do not normally engage in Daubert-type hearings where such experts are examined.   This leads to situations such as Hanshaw's, where qualified experts are arbitrarily excluded because the trial court is unaware or misunderstands the underpinnings of an expert's background or his opinions.  Had the trial court engaged in more scrutiny of Mr. Railsback, we argued, it would have learned how Mr. Railsback had developed his knowledge, skill, experience, training and education between the promise of his greener days in Newell Rubbermaid, Inc. v. Raymond., No. 5:08CV2632, 2010 WL 2643417 (N.D. Ohio July 1, 2010), and these he masters now on the subject of stand-up forklifts.  We also argued that his opinions were reliable, even under federal cases applying Daubert.

After a year of briefing and oral argument,  the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, en banc, issued a stern rebuke of the trial court's rulings in an opinion written by Judge Alok Ahuja, Hanshaw v. Crown Equipment Corp., WD86389 (Mo. Ct. App. April 1, 2025).  Initially, the Court of Appeals found Mr. Railsback to have been “abundantly” qualified to testify about Crown's forklift, emphasizing his status as a registered professional engineer with degrees in mechanical engineering, certification in forensic engineering and accreditation as an accident reconstruction, his authorship of peer-reviewed articles on the safety, design and operation of stand-up forklifts, his work as a consultant on stand-up forklifts in more than two dozen court cases, and his practical experience and licensure in operating stand-up forklifts.  Id. at *9-11.  According to Judge Ahuja, the trial court insisted on an unrealistic combination of experiences such as actually designing a forklift and having additional certification as a biomechanical engineer for Railsback to be considered “qualified” per § 490.065.2(1).  “It was not necessary for Expert to be the proverbial ‘unicorn' for Hanshaw to be entitled to present his opinions to the jury at trial.”  Id. at 11. 

Next, the Court of Appeals found Mr. Railsback's primary opinion that the Crown RC5500 was defectively designed because of the lack of a rear door to have been reliable.  Hanshaw, WD86389 at *15.  The trial court concluded Mr. Railsback did not have a sufficient basis for the opinion as “[h]e cannot point to any door design or bumper he has developed, prototyped, or tested, or any testing to measure the injury potential to stand-up forklift operators in off-dock and tip-over accidents on forklifts equipped with a door or bumper,” which, again, the Court of Appeals considered to have been too demanding and a misapplication of the law.

Expert was not required to actually design, patent, prototype, and test an alternative design for Crown's forklift in order to be able to testify that the existing design is unreasonably dangerous. Nor was he required to determine the economic feasibility of an alternative design.

Id. at *16.  To the Court of Appeals, Mr. Railsback's studies and investigation of alternative designs in the marketplace – stand-up forklifts with rear doors Crown sold to Ford Motor Co. and similarly equipped forklifts by other manufacturers— was sufficient.  In other words, “while [Railsback] may not have conducted the level of prototype design and testing necessary to bring a new product to market, he has conducted research and testing which supports the opinion that his proposed design is safer than Crown's open-compartment design.”   Id. at *17 (emphasis supplied by the Court).

Accordingly, the Court of Appeals held the trial court abused its discretion in excluding Railsback, reversed summary judgment in favor of Crown, and remanded the case to the trial court.  Id. at *30-31.   In doing so, it reiterated § 490.065.2, R.S.Mo., was not intended as a replacement of the adversarial process and the credibility and weight of expert opinion is a matter for litigants to explore and the jury to determine at trial – “not a question for the circuit court to decide in pre-trial motions practice.”  Id. at *30.

The Hanshaw Court, however, did not address a point of concern raised by co-counsel, Timothy Monsees, during first and second oral argument.  The sequence of the exclusion and near-simultaneous summary judgment meant Crown effectively achieved dispositive relief based on an evidentiary standard.  The correct route, Mr. Monsees forcefully argued, was for the Court of Appeals to apply a de novo standard of review, rather than the more deferential abuse of discretion standard, to the trial court's actions.

Crown may still request transfer of the case to the Supreme Court of Missouri.  For the moment, Mr. Hanshaw is back on track to have his day in court in Jackson County, Missouri.