The Impossible Case

A riveting and suspenseful true David and Goliath story of a young lawyer, a corporate cover-up, and the trial of a lifetime. Trial attorney John Uustal’s memoir of his experience in a landmark 1998 case against General Motors is both a powerful drama and a personal history of corporate corruption in America. At just twenty-five years old and fresh out of law school, John Uustal was the youngest lawyer at a small, unruly law firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, hired by Robert and Connie McGee to take on their car manufacturer, General Motors. The McGees were on a family trip with their kids when, after a slight fender-bender, their station wagon exploded on impact, leaving two kids dead and the rest of the family scarred for life. What Uustal soon discovered: not only had there been hundreds of such car fires previously, but there were internal documents showing that GM had known about the deadly design flaw that led to the explosion—and had decided it was cheaper to let people burn alive and pay damages than to fix a ten-dollar design defect. In the riveting six-month trial that followed, packed with stunning corporate cover-ups involving huge sums of money, shredded documents and the suspicious deaths of key figures in the case, McGee v. General Motors, would end up exposing a chain of corruption and power that could be traced to the highest levels of government. Uustal and his team won the McGee family an automotive damage award bigger than anything that had ever come before in US history, and led to changing laws that have saved thousands of lives. That outcome was never certain, and the larger institutional effort to protect billion-dollar corporations from litigation, helped along by Starr, Kavanaugh, and their cronies, continues to this day, reaching all the way to the current Supreme Court. At once an intimate coming-of-age story, a heart-wrenching courtroom drama, and an investigation into the hidden machinery of corporate power, The Impossible Case follows a naïve young lawyer as he risks his career, and perhaps his life, to expose the truth.