In oral arguments before a three-judge Commonwealth Court panel, Kline & Specter's Thomas Kline positioned his fight for plaintiff Hayley Freilich as a step toward victory in a decades-long struggle to challenge Pennsylvania's caps on state liability.

Monday's arguments, he acknowledged, were a pit stop on the road toward all but inevitable consideration from the state Supreme Court. He said the case, captioned Freilich v. SEPTA, was tailored specifically to answer the high court's call for an as-applied challenge to the liability caps.