Legal Limelight: Meghan S. Largent champions landowners in takings cases

Summary

• Leads Lewis Rice‘s Federal Takings & Rails to Trails Practice Group, representing thousands of landowners nationwide.
• Advocates for constitutional property rights, ensuring landowners receive just compensation when the government takes private property.
• Represents landowners in the Rock Island corridor litigation, where 17 property owners are taking their compensation claims to trial in St. Louis.
• Says Rails-to-Trails cases are about fair compensation—not opposition to trails—emphasizing the Fifth Amendment’s protections against uncompensated government takings.

Meghan Largent is a fierce advocate for landowners and is the leader of Lewis Rice’s Federal Takings & Rails to Trails Practice Group.

In her role defending property owners, Largent has represented thousands of individuals nationwide who are fighting for their rights and compensation from government seizure of their land as part of the National Trails System Act.

Most recently she has been involved with several settlements and a case going to trial in St. Louis where 17 landowners declined to take the settlement relating to the government’s seizure of their property to develop a trail along the Rock Island corridor.

How did you get into this area of practice and begin representing landowners?

Well, it happened very organically. Pretty much my first job after clerking at a law firm here in St. Louis, I started working on one case with my now colleague Lindsay Brinton, and it just kind of grew from there. I didn’t set out to do property law, but I really liked the case. I liked working with Lindsay and we just both sort of did more and more of this type of work until eventually one day we looked around and it was what filled our day all day every day.

What motivates you to stay on the landowner side of these cases?

The work for the landowners is not adversarial to any environmental groups or the trail itself. We are simply making sure that landowners get to exercise their rights under the Constitution, which is to be paid when the government takes their land, whether that be $10 worth of land or $10 million worth of land.

I like the legal research and historical research that goes into figuring out how these railroads were created and what the property rights are today, and I like representing real people. I mean, the one thing all of our clients have in common is that their property touches a railroad and that’s about it. So, we meet people from all over the United States, from all walks of life, and I feel like we’re able to help them with a problem. For some of them, it’s a small problem, for some of them, it’s a huge problem. So that’s really gratifying.

RELATED: Legal Limelight features

In your years doing this, have any cases in particular, or stories from clients really stuck out to you?

I’ve been doing this for over 19 years now, so almost 20 years, and so there are lots of stories. Each case is different. I think one that stands out to me a lot is one of the first ones I worked on, which was in the middle of Kansas. It wasn’t a splashy case. I mean, the property was not worth a lot monetarily, but I remember visiting our lead plaintiff and she showed me the painting that she was going to enter into the state fair that she had worked on, and she was in her 80s. This was a home that she raised her family in and lived in for decades and decades, and she’d never been in court before, never hired a lawyer and we were able to get her compensation that she deserved for her property. (…) It really stuck with me how important it was for folks to get, even if it’s a few thousand dollars. It’s really important that they be able to exercise that right. It’s a way to keep a balance between the government and the people. Since then, I’ve had clients that are entitled to tens of millions of dollars, and I feel the same way. I always remember her and being at her house in the middle of Kansas, looking at her entry for the state fair and just thinking these things are equally important and that’s really great.

Can you tell me more about the landowner case that is proceeding to trial in St. Louis?

It’s a huge rail trail conversion in the Rock Island corridor. It’s a 144-mile piece of track that starts in Franklin County and goes all the way to Pettis County on the western side of the state. And we’ve been working on that case for 11 years. The taking started in 2015 and we have been able to reach a result that our clients are hopefully satisfied with, except for 17 landowners who were not satisfied with the government’s offer and have decided to go to trial and that trial will be held in St. Louis. So, one of the most interesting things about this court — where the rails to trails cases are litigated — it’s a federal court in Washington D.C., but it travels to wherever the property is. So, the judge will come here to the federal district courthouse in downtown St. Louis and essentially borrow a courtroom and the landowners will testify here. She’ll go see the property, maybe not all of them, but many of them for herself. We’ll put on evidence of the value of this land that the government took and our expectation is that the court will see our evidence and agree with us as to what these landowners are entitled to for compensation.