Los Angeles Injury Lawyer Blog

Negligence and defective products can cause students to sustain serious injuries in the school yard. We recently settled a product liability case involving a premises liability for $125,000 against William S. Hart School District in Canyon Country, California when an old gate fell on a student, age 12, and broke his ankle. A public school is a governmental entity, and an injury lawyer must prove that the school (a) caused the negligent condition or (b) that they had sufficient time to discover and fix the defective condition in order for there to be premises liability or product liability.

In this case the gate had been installed over twenty years ago when the school was built, and separated the school yard from the parking lot. The Canyon Country school district, located in Los Angeles County, claimed they never had a problem with the gate in the past and that there were no prior complaints. Our client, a twelve year old boy, was playing with other students near the gate and claimed that the gate was closed. They wanted to go to the playground on the other side of the parking area, so he and his two friends pulled the sliding gate to open it, and it fell off its tracks and landed on top of the student. It was a heavy iron gate that required four people to lift it off the student. The student suffered damages, including a broken ankle, as a result of the incident. A school yard monitor who was also a teacher said she saw what happened. She claimed that she saw the three boys playing on the fence, and told them to get away from the gate. Two of the boys agreed that they had been playing on the gate before, but not when, it fell on their friend. Although our client suffered an injury from the defective gate, he fully recovered, and is now able to play and do everything he was able to do before the accident.

Slip and fall accidents (also known as trip and fall accidents) sustained on public city sidewalks can cause serious injuries. Our client was walking on a sidewalk in Huntington Park in Los Angeles County and slipped and fell, thereby tearing her rotator cuff. Similar to premises liability, governments can also be liable for injuries sustained on public property due to negligence. The city government tried to deny liability by raising a defense that cities often claim; that they did not have knowledge of the defective condition with enough time to fix it. Slip and fall cases against a city for defective condition of public property can be difficult for accident lawyers to prove, but we were able to settle this case for $175,000 against Huntington Park.

Although trip and fall cases with government liability are tough cases, they are definitely winnable for slip and fall lawyers. Our client was walking on a section of sidewalk where there was a parking lot to her left. She was not looking down at where she was walking as she was concerned about her safety from the cars entering and exiting the parking lot. She tripped over a 2 inch rise in the sidewalk and fell down. She was a middle age woman who had prior medical problems, but tore her rotator cuff during this fall. She had one surgery to repair her rotator cuff. She did not suffer any loss of earnings as she was already retired at the time of the accident. So how did we collect compensation from the city for her?

We obtained discovery to show that city employees work in that area every week doing landscaping, which thereby gave the city notice of the defective condition. We then hired an expert who testified that this was sufficient notice in which the city could have repaired the sidewalk. And we also hired medical experts who testified that the client’s injuries were directly related to the fall. Even though these types of cases are difficult to prove, we have been very successful in getting just compensation for our clients.

A Riverside County family was killed in a car accident due to the negligence of CALTRANS (California Department of Transportation) in not erecting a median barrier on the 60 freeway in Southern California. The wrongful death of this family was caused by defective road design by the State of California, and we took on this case, despite the fact that these types of cases are very difficult for accident lawyers to prove. The fatal car accident killed a mother, father and two children, and our clients were the surviving three children who lost the rest of their family in the tragedy. We settled the case against CALTRANS for more than $6,000,000, and there was enough money for the remaining siblings buy a house, as well as provide for their education and welfare as their parents would have wanted them to do.

The State of California believes there should be a median barrier separating the freeway lanes of traffic coming on opposite directions. Most people think of a median barrier as the cement structures that run down the center of the freeway that separate the opposing lanes of traffic. But the State of California also believes that in some instances it is okay to have the opposing lanes of traffic separated by just a distance and not a structure. At the location of the accident, there was sixty feet of open space between opposing lanes of traffic. The accident occurred in Southern California on the 60 freeway in Riverside County. A family was taking a trip in two cars: in one car rode a mother, father and two children, and in another car following behind were two additional children with their aunt and uncle. A woman coming down the freeway in the opposing lane of traffic lost control of her car and veered all the way across the sixty feet of open space in the median. Because there was no physical median barrier, this car hit the family’s car head on killing the mother, father and one child in the car. Another child in that car was severely injured, and the two remaining children in the other car saw their mother, father and sibling die in this terrible head on car crash.

The driver of the car that came across the freeway had minimum insurance coverage, and certainly not enough to begin to compensate the family for their horrendous lose. But there is a cause of action in California for negligent infliction of emotional distress when a close family member sees a loved one injured which is caused by a third parity's negligence. The surviving children also had a claim for wrongful death of their parents and sibling, and the injured child had his own claim of negligence. We sued the State of California Transportation System CALTRANS for their negligence in not having elected a cement barrier in the median at that location.

These are very difficult cases for accident attorneys to win. First, in order to sue a governmental agency, you have to file a claim with the appropriate agency and this has a very short statute of limitations period. When they deny the claim, or after the statutory time has expired, you have a short period of time to file your law suit. There are very few experts in California that are familiar with these types of claims against CALTRANS. You have to obtain reports of prior accidents in that area of the freeway, determine if they are sufficient to put the state on notice of a dangerous condition in that area, make sure the State had sufficient time and funds to alleviate the problem and that there was a substantial change in the conditions since the state built that road. In these types of cases we usually spend in excess of $100,000 out of our pocket to hire the best experts to prove negligence and damages. If we do not collect any money for our clients, we do not get our money back and we do not get paid for our time. We take every case on a contingent fee basis, so if our clients don't receive compensation, we don't get paid. We settled this case for more than $6,000,000 which gave the surviving siblings enough money to live out their lives in financial comfort.