About four years ago, or so, I was driving to work, and I got a call from one of our referring attorneys, and he said, “Hey, Norm, I’ve got a case that I want you to look at. Car struck a dumpster, and the young lady that was in the passenger seat was very seriously injured. And I said to myself, “Dumpster and car, how the heck does that happen? How was a dumpster on the road?”
Took a ride out to the location where the accident happened, and, of course, the dumpster was on the front yard of a residential home that had been restoring a built-in pool. And the contractor left that dumpster too close to the road and it was just slightly, slightly into the shoulder. And, of course, the dumpster was gone by the time I got there, but there were tracks, tire marks from the dumpster, from the trucks that brought it in and out in the grass.
So, of course, we photographed it. And again, those photographs led to our determining precisely where that dumpster was positioned with the help of other experts. But that case was very important to a family, because we had a very beautiful girl, 18 years old, about to graduate from high school, and on her way to a prestigious college, where she was gonna study medicine. She was bright, but now she was severely brain impaired. And life as she knew it, and as her family hoped, was over. And now it was our job to do the best that we could do to have her live the best life possible.
And it took a while. It took two and a half, three years to build that case, with numerous experts, both medical experts, doctors, surgeons, plastic surgeons, who had to rebuild her skull, really, neurologists, all kinds of doctors. And, of course, then on the liability side, men and women that would come in and help us recreate the accident and show how it happened. We actually made a video to show how the car struck the dumpster, how our client was severely injured. But it led to an eight-figure settlement. One of the biggest settlements, I think, in New York State, at least that year. I’m sure there have been bigger. But that money was important to providing for our client’s well-being and medical treatment for the rest of her life. Without it, she would never be able to live her best possible life. And hopefully, now, although it’s clearly not the same, she’s able to get the care that she needs and live the best life possible. That was a good result that we had.
