My client, an elderly man with a history of respiratory illness, died while a patient at Roseland Community hospital. The incident occurred when a patient located in a room down the hall from my client who had been placed in his hospital room in restraints was able to get his hands loose from his restraints and grab a lighter and start a fire in his room. The smoke spread through the halls of the hospital and into the room of my client. The defense claimed my client died of preexisting conditions and the hospital was not careless and could not have foreseen what this patient could have done. The Defense representing the hospital refused to offer any money during the discovery phase of the case. After I took numerous depositions and after deposing the hospital’s experts, the hospital finally agreed to settle the case weeks before trial was set to begin for $650,000.00.
I was called in to assist in the trial phase of a case where an employee at the U.S. Postal Service was injured when a chair he was seated in collapsed. We claimed the chair was improperly made because it could not withstand the weight of our client. The Defense claimed that the Plaintiff was obese and was the cause of the chair collapse. The attorney representing the manufacture refused to pay any money until weeks before the trial. After we won a Motion to Dismiss the case, the attorney representing the manufacture capitulated after we won a Motion to Dismiss the case based upon a theory of products liability. We then settled the case after intense negotiations with a retired Judge for two million four hundred thousand dollars (2,400,000.00).
In 2020, we secured an offer of settlement of one million dollars for a case that had been litigated since 2014. I filed the case along with another lawyer, Joseph Terc. We were bombarded with Motions to Dismiss the case, an Appeal, and a Motion for Summary Judgment claiming the case should be dismissed because the government was immune from the lawsuit based upon the immunity of weather, discretion and carelessness that the government and its employees share. The suit arose when a tree limb that was overhanging a bike trail came down while my client was riding her bicycle on a bike trail in Northfield, Illinois in Erickson Woods. The bike trail was owned by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County which is a governmental entity. The Forest Preserve claimed that the tree limb came down due to high winds and a wind gust of close to 70 mph that came through the area along with a heavy thunderstorm. After an investigation at the scene, we noticed the tree from which the limb came down was marked at the base with an orange “X”. It was one tree amongst many with an orange “X”.
The Forest Preserve claimed the tree was marked with an “X” because of its species and architectural growth. It denied the tree and limb were a hazard. After combing through more than twenty thousand documents, taking over thirty depositions including Forest Preserve District employees, treating doctors and experts and winning a Motion to Dismiss, an Appeal, and a Motion for Summary Judgment, the Defense finally offered One Million Dollars to resolve the case just weeks before the Trial was set to begin.