MENLO PARK - It looks like modern art, but the whimsically mangled chunk of steel in front of corporate headquarters is actually a monument to failure.

"It's a piece of a 2,000-foot high television tower that collapsed in Oklahoma," says Michael Gaulke. "And that's exactly how we found it. Twisted like a pretzel."

Failure - other people's failure - has been very, very good to company president Gaulke and his employees. Their firm, Failure Analysis Associates, owes its very existence to Murphy's Law - the one that says that if something can go wrong, it will.

When buildings topple, bridges buckle, rockets blow up, ships sink, nuclear reactors fizzle, oil refineries erupt, jumbo jets crash and pickup trucks explode, Failure Analysis is often called in to figure out why.

The firm's employees are forensic engineers, conducting their technical autopsies amid twisted, charred metal and smoldering rubble - often with millions of dollars in liability suits hanging in the balance.

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Murphy's Law being what it is, there's a steady supply of business. The world's various misfortunes brought Failure Analysis nearly $60 million in revenue last fiscal year.

If a disaster makes the evening news, Failure Analysis teams are almost certainly en route. Among their investigations: the 1981 aerial walkway collapse that killed 133 people at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Kansas City, the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and the recent Kobe earthquake.

Often the grim sequence of events leading to the tragedy is far from obvious. In Kansas City, for example, authorities initially believed that "harmonic vibrations" from dancers led to the walkway collapse. But Failure Analysis's investigation determined that a contractor had misused a crucial bolt, causing a support rod to pull through a walkway beam.

Failure's success has bred a certain amount of cockiness. What else would prompt a company to deliberately choose as its stock market ticker symbol the abbreviation FAIL? Or design a corporate logo with a prominent crack in it? Or publish a 1995 "Disaster of the Month" calendar (February features the World Trade Center bombing, March the Exxon Valdez oil spill).

Then there's the gift Bernard Ross, the firm's chairman emeritus, gave his daughter for her 16th birthday: A Chevrolet Corvair, the car vilified in Ralph Nader's 1965 book, "Unsafe at Any Speed." (Nader's book notwithstanding, Ross said, the car is quite safe.)

Founded over lunch at Menlo Park's Oasis beer hall in 1967 by five Stanford engineering faculty members, Failure Analysis specializes in providing expert testimony in increasingly complex product liability lawsuits.

Its Menlo Park headquarters houses experts in everything from metallurgy and civil engineering to toxicology and biomechanics. Eighty of the firm's 400 employees have Ph.D.s, giving it the brainpower of many small colleges.

At their disposal is what Failure Analysis says is the world's largest database of accident data, more than 300 million records in all. Among them are every single death certificate issued in the United States since 1974.

The firm's scientists also have use of Failure Analysis' testing complex in the Arizona desert near Phoenix, a virtual Disneyland of destruction.

Staffed by 40 engineers and technicians, it boasts a drop tower, a ballistics test range, a 90 mph crash rail and a two-mile banked oval track with customized potholes, railroad crossings, dips and water-filled ditches.

None of this comes cheaply. Until switching to fixed pricing last year, the firm's top scientists billed clients up to $600 an hour for their expertise.

That expertise is often priced out of the range of smaller litigants. Eighty percent of the time Failure Analysis works for Fortune 500 firms and other major corporate defendants in liability lawsuits. Among them: General Motors, Exxon and Northwest Airlines.

Those who go up against them don't hesitate to use the term

"hired guns."

"They're available to everyone, but they're outrageously expensive," said Dick Alexander, a San Jose personal injury attorney who has faced their experts in court on several occasions. "I would never hire them because I don't have a wallet the size of General Motors."

Alexander added: "Within the factual range, they will give their client all the spin toward their side of the court. They'll add a lot of razzle-dazzle and use manipulative computer animation. Unsophisticated lawyers could be overwhelmed by it."

Gaulke said the personal injury lawyers who litigate against big business are hardly defenseless "little guys."

"This is not a David and Goliath situation," he said.

"The other side in this country is well-funded. There are some excellent plaintiff firms that have done extremely well over the years."

And while he doesn't blink at the phrase "hired gun," Gaulke takes strong exception to any suggestion that Failure Analysis cooks its research for the benefit of clients.

"We're absolutely not for hire for an opinion," Gaulke said. "We will investigate and tell our client what we think happened. In some cases the facts are not good - the product does have a real problem. If you're the manufacturer, you know that ultimately the facts will come out. You'd rather know now than find out in trial."

On the other hand, Failure Analysis has helped automakers fend off recall campaigns by consumer groups.

Suzuki turned to Failure Analysis in 1988 after Consumers Union and the Center for Auto Safety called for a ban on the Suzuki Samarai, saying the jeep-like vehicle had a dangerous tendency to roll over while cornering.

Failure engineers pored over the consumer groups' research and concluded that 300-pound safety outrigger bars mounted on the Samari during the tests actually caused the car to tip over. Based in part on their research, the federal government declined to order a recall.

Four years later, after the "Dateline NBC" newsmagazine aired spectacular footage of a General Motors pickup truck bursting into flames in a side-impact crash, GM hired Failure Analysis to investigate. The automaker suspected NBC's crash test had been rigged.

"So many things weren't right," Gaulke said. "What was shown on Dateline didn't jive with any experience we or GM had seen. It was a real detective story."

Acting on a tip from someone involved in the crash test, Failure Analysis teams searched through 22 junkyards in Indiana before finding the charred wreckage of the GM pickup.

It didn't take long to discover a non-standard piece of equipment: a toy rocket motor attached to the truck body. Investigators suspected the motor was used to spark the eruption.

Confirmation came when they located a video of the crash that had been taped by the local fire department. Shot from a different angle than the footage aired by NBC, it clearly showed puffs of smoke coming from the rocket motor moments before the impact.

Facing a lawsuit by GM, NBC issued an on-air apology. Newsdivision president Michael Gartner resigned and three producers were fired.

One result of Failure Analysis' investigations and the lawsuits that prompt them is that the world is steadily becoming a safer place.

This shows up clearly in his firm's huge disaster database, according to Gaulke. Accident rates in most cases - planes, motorcycles, boats - are definitely trending downward.

That might seem like bad news for a company built on failure. But Gaulke said there's little reason to worry.

"The world is getting more technologically complex and public intolerance for failure is increasing as fast as accidents are decreasing," he said.

"This society is great at wanting to pin the blame on one party when there are a lot of dollars at stake," Gaulke said.

Then, of course, there's Failure Analysis' patron saint - Murphy.

"Murphy's Law," Gaulke said, "is alive and well."

motorboat mishap, help investigators at Failure Analysis find the root causes of accidents and disaster<