Bill Marler

And I picked it up and said, hi, honey.

And it was the judge.

And he says, he goes, where are you?

I'm like, I'm in the bar with all the insurance guys.

And he goes, Bill, you cannot tell them this.

But he goes, I can't get you $16 million, but I can get you $15.6 million.

Will you take it?

Primarily because she deserved it.

She was going to face lifetime complications.

And a lot of it is you just didn't know what you didn't know.

And I had a fear of waking up 20 years from now with Brianne not having enough money and needing it.

Prior to that, it was completely legal to sell E. coli contaminated hamburger to the consumer.

You could have tested for it, found it, and still sold it.

Back in the mid-90s, late 90s, E. coli outbreaks linked to hamburger and recalls of hamburger were super common occurrences.

They were happening all the time.

And it just took a while for sort of the cost of that to get absorbed into the system to the point where the system finally just said, okay, we'll fix it.

And so they started doing a variety of interventions to make hamburgers safer.

They developed a vaccine that is sometimes used by some cattlemen.

And essentially...

What used to be 90-plus percent of my work became, in the early 2000s, just absolutely disappeared.