Plaintiff in this case was a 45-year-old attorney who suffered a mild traumatic brain injury when he was loading scaffolding on a cart with rollers. He was loading the scaffolding with two other men when they lost control of the cart and the improperly tied down scaffolding fell on plaintiff’s head.
The law offices of Winer, Burritt & Scott, LLP, alleged that the cart was defectively manufactured because it did not have any locks on the wheels and lacked sufficient ties to tie down the scaffolding and that the staging company was negligent in the handling of the scaffolding. The law firm further alleged that plaintiff received a traumatic brain injury as a result of the scaffolding falling on his head.
The defense claimed that the cart was properly manufactured and that it was plaintiff’s own fault that the scaffolding fell on his head while it was being loaded. Further, the defense claimed that plaintiff did not, in fact, suffer from a traumatic brain injury and that any problems that he had were psychological and predated the accident. Defendant also claimed that before the accident, plaintiff had lost interest in practicing law and that he was using this accident as an excuse to stop working and that his psychological problems stemmed from learning that his wife had cheated on him, not the accident. The defense relied on the public’s distrust of attorneys, particularly an attorney who did not “look injured.”
The law offices of Winer, Burritt & Scott, LLP, was able to overcome these defenses by retaining a mechanical engineer to testify that the cart was improperly manufactured; by retaining a biomechanical engineer and performing experiments which indicated that the scaffolding falling on the plaintiff’s head had sufficient force to cause a traumatic brain injury; by retaining a physiatrist and a neuropsychologist to confirm the existence of the traumatic brain injury and a vocational specialist to testify to what plaintiff’s earning capacity would have been despite the fact that he had only earned approximately $20,000 in year before the accident.
RESULT: $950,000 settlement on behalf of the plaintiff