Los Angeles Injury Lawyer Blog

Our client suffered a hip fracture injury when she was struck by a garage door that suddenly swung open at her apartment complex in Oakland, California in Alameda County. She was an elderly lady, and a broken hip is a serious type of personal injury for an elderly person as only one in four patients typically recovers completely. In the United States, hip fractures are the most common broken bone that requires hospitalization; about 300,000 Americans are hospitalized for a hip fracture every year. Many hip fractures are sustained by the elderly in slip and fall accidents, however our client broke her hip as a result of negligence, product liability and premises liability. She had been standing on the sidewalk in front of her apartment house for her friend to pick her up. Suddenly a metal garage door swung open, and before she could move, the gate struck her causing a broken hip. We sued both the owner of the apartment as well as the gate installer, and we successfully settled the case for substantial six figures.

Personal injury attorneys can often have a challenging time proving liability when the evidence is no longer present. By the time we were retained on the case, the opening mechanism on the gate had been replaced and the old one had been discarded. We hired experts to reconstruct the accident and to try and figure out why the gate opened when there was no car in the vicinity. We also retained an expert on the design of the gate. Our experts concluded that the installer and premises owner were negligent for installing a gate that swung up instead of sliding to the left or right and for swinging out toward the sidewalk instead of inward toward the inside of the garage. They also concluded that this was a product defect case as the mechanism to open the gate should not have been a beeper that could go off from afar, instead of a card system that the car exiting the garage would insert in a post to open the gate. The defense alleged that our client was negligent for standing too close to the gate when she knew from having lived there many years that the gate opened out toward the sidewalk and that it opened from a beeper in a car that could be some distance from the gate. Despite this being a difficult accident case, we settled on behalf of our client for substantial six figures.

If you or a loved one has been the victim of an accident or slip and fall and have sustained a hip fracture, please call us at the Law Offices of Greenberg & Rudman 1-800-ALAWPRO for a free consultation in California.

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Posted In: OTHER COMMON INJURIES , PREMISES LIABILITY , PRODUCT LIABILITY

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We recently won a $7 million trial verdict in a wrongful death auto accident case involving the negligence of a big rig tractor-tractor truck.

Our client’s husband was a passenger in a pick up truck being driven by a co-worker, on the westbound 118 Freeway in Simi Valley, California, when this motor vehicle accident occurred. The pick up truck veered off the freeway and onto the shoulder where it collided with a big rig truck which had been parked on the shoulder for several hours because its driver was negligent in choosing to pull over and sleep, despite the posted “EMERGENCY PARKING ONLY” signs. When the pick up truck collided with the big rig tractor-trailer, the front of the pick up truck underrode the rear of the tractor-trailer, causing the trailer to intrude into the occupant space of the pick up truck. This instantly caused the death of our client’s husband.

The driver of our client’s husband’s pick up truck testified that he veered off the freeway as a reaction to a silver vehicle in the lane to his left which he felt was beginning to cut into his lane of travel, and that he had no time to avoid the big rig truck parked on the shoulder. He also testified that he applied the brakes of the pick up truck just before the accident occurred, but that they did not function properly.

Another witness traveling behind the pick up truck testified that he observed the pick up truck drift to the right.

We hired an expert who testified at trial that for whatever reason the pick up truck left the road, if the tractor-trailer was not parked on the shoulder of the freeway, the pick up truck would likely have continued to travel along the shoulder of the freeway without crashing into anything, and no death would have occurred because the driver would have had the opportunity to either come to a stop, or reenter the freeway. Click the image to the left to see the animations we used at trial to show how the accident occurred.

We conceded that the driver of the pick up truck overreacted to what he believed to be a vehicle beginning to cut him off, but that it was the presence of the illegally parked big rig tractor-trailer on the shoulder of the freeway, that caused the death of our client’s husband.

The defense argued that driver of the pick up veered off the freeway either because he had fallen asleep, or was sleepy due to having a cold. They also argued that the pick up driver was the sole cause of the accident and death because the big rig tractor trailer did not cause the pick up truck to veer off the freeway.

The jury ultimately found that the driver of the big rig tractor- trailer was 80% at fault for causing the death of our client’s husband, and that the driver of the pick up truck was 20% at fault.

In California, a person who loses a spouse due to wrongful death is entitled to be compensated for the spouse’s love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, and moral support. Even though our client had only been married to her husband for 11 months prior to the accident, we were able to show the jury how significant the loss was to our client.

The jury awarded $7 million.

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Posted In: MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENT , TRUCKING ACCIDENT , WRONGFUL DEATH

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In a wrongful death motorcycle accident negligence case last year, we obtained a $2 million verdict for our client whose 29 year old son was killed while operating a motorcycle because a 17 year old SUV driver made a bad left turn in front of him at an intersection, in Pasadena, Los Angeles County, California.

On the night of the accident, our client's son, a motorcycle operator, was traveling through a traffic controlled intersection, when an SUV driver coming from the opposite direction negligently made a bad left turn on a yellow light, causing the accident and our client's son's death.

The SUV driver was insured by Allstate Insurance Company, and had a $100,000 insurance policy. However, Allstate refused to pay the $100,000 to settle the case because it felt the police report was in the SUV driver's favor.

The police report, based on a few statements of claimed eye witnesses, said that our client’s son caused the accident by entering the intersection on a red light, and that the defendant SUV driver legally made his turn from the middle of the intersection, having waited for the light to turn red.

We hired an expert who analyzed the scene of the accident, the photographs taken by the police, and the vehicles involved in the accident. He testified at trial that the physical evidence such as the skid marks, the debris left by the vehicles in the roadway at the time of the accident, the damage pattern on the vehicles themselves, and the position of rest of the motorcycle, proved that the Defendant SUV driver was speeding, started his turn before he reached the intersection by cutting across the double yellow lines, and made his turn when he should have seen that the motorcycle was too close. Our expert also testified that the light was yellow both at the time that the motorcycle entered the intersection and at the time of the accident.

We worked with an animator to re-create the accident so that we could show the jury how the accident occurred. Click the image to see the animations.

The defense hired multiple experts which testified that the SUV driver began his left turn in the middle of the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, and that he did not see the motorcycle approaching before the accident. The defense experts testified that the motorcycle entered the intersection on a red light, speeding 5-10 mph over the posted speed limit and accelerating into the intersection. Lastly, the defense experts testified that the SUV driver couldn’t see the motorcycle because it was night time, and the motorcycle’s lights were masked by the lights of the cars traveling behind it.

Defendants called the witnesses listed in the police report to testify at trial. But we were able to show that the witnesses either did not have a good vantage point to see the whole accident, or that what they saw actually supported our theory of the case.

The jury found the 17 year old driver of the SUV to be negligent and the sole cause of the motorcycle driver’s death. The jury awarded $2 million to his mother in wrongful death damages (i.e. compensation for the loss of her son’s love, companionship, comfort, care, assistance, protection, affection, society, and moral support).

The defense appealed the verdict all the way up to the California Supreme Court, but we successfully fought the appeals, and the decision was allowed to stand. Also, our client was awarded interest for the amount of time delayed by the appeals.

Because Allstate had unreasonably refused to settle this very serious wrongful death case for the $100,000 policy limits before trial, and because it faced a potential insurance bad faith lawsuit from the SUV driver for failing to protect him by paying his policy limits and thereby exposing him to the $2 million verdict, Allstate was forced to pay the full judgment.

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Posted In: MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENT , MOTORCYCLE ACCIDENT , WRONGFUL DEATH

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