REAL LIFE COURTROOM DRAMAS ARE SOUNDING MORE LIKE
“ARGUMENTS IN A LABORATORY”
Claims noted personal injury lawyer and former High School science teacher
NEW YORK, NY (Nov. 25) -- New York City is awash in dire headlines: “A
Thud, and Then Blood,” “Mean Streets: How much safer are New York Pedestrians,”
“Apartment building blaze in Chelsea kills 7, including 3 children,” “Second Deadly
Crane Accident in 3 Months,” “NYC to inspect 1500 scaffolds after recent deadly
accidents,” “City beaches report record number of drownings,” “Another fatal accident
on Bronx River Parkway,” “Kings County Hospital Let’s Woman with Mental Illness Die
on the Waiting Room Floor,” and on and on.
According to Richard Gurfein, a New York personal injury lawyer, despite the
soaring increase in serious accidents and deaths that devastate the lives of victims and
their families, New York courts and juries have made it harder than ever for accident
victims in the state to recover justifiable compensation for their injuries caused by the
negligence of others.
“Times alone have brought changes in the way cases are presented,” Gurfein said.
“It used to be that auto accident cases relied on the juror’s everyday experience.
Someone goes through a red light or a stop sign and causes an accident. Jurors can
visualize the circumstances and understand how the accident happened. Then came
comparative fault and the defendants started to whittle away at plaintiffs’ recoveries by
convincing juries that the plaintiff bore the greater part of the fault.
“Little by little,” he added, “cases became more complex.”
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As trial lawyers, whose law school diplomas hang on office walls right alongside
degrees in science and engineering, Gurfein, and his partner, Preston Douglas, often rely
on their teaching skills to explain the complex science of the case to the jury.
“When it comes to construction accident cases in New York,” Gurfein explained,
“so many times we find ourselves dealing with either an unwitnessed accident or an
accident that occurs so quickly that the victim can’t adequately describe how it happened.
In those instances, my partner and I are able to reverse engineer the accident to get to the
cause.”
For workers on construction sites, Gurfein said that serious accidents are often a
result of cutting corners. He explained that construction accidents happen primarily
when safety equipment isn’t used properly, or not at all, and the pressure on the
supervisor to get the job done outweighs doing the job right and safe.
“It’s the use of a frayed safety strap,” Gurfein said, “instead of delaying the work
until a new one is bought that led to the death of a New York crane operator recently.
More and more, we are finding it necessary to educate the judge and jury on the technical
details of a case in order to challenge the testimony of the defendant’s expert.
Courtrooms have become science classes.”
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Citing an example of the technical nature of courtroom battles these days, Gurfein
said one of his cases started out as a simple hit and run pedestrian knockdown, but got
tried as a complex roadway engineering case.
“It was case involving an 11-year-old who was playing stickball in the street,”
Gurfein said. “The ball he was playing with fell into a 3 feet round, 2 feet deep pothole
in the middle of the street. Atop the pothole was a wooden sawhorse. The boy was on
his knees trying to retrieve the ball from the bottom of the pothole, which was filled with
water from rain the day before. A car, speeding up the street causing the roadway to
crumble even more, hit the wooden horse and knocked it into the child giving him a
depressed skull fracture. The driver sped off and was never identified.
“We had reason to suspect,” he continued, “that Con Ed’s work on the street 3
months before the accident might have been the cause of the pothole, and the weakened
roadway 3 feet away from a Con Ed manhole. Our firm hired an experienced, former
construction manager to go over the Con Ed work logs. After examining the records of
the manhole construction and the roadway restoration in the area of the accident, we
determined that the cause of the accident was actually the concrete base under the
roadway. Con Ed had opened the street to traffic prematurely, before the newly poured
concrete base had time to adequately harden and cure.”
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Gurfein also points to accidents that happen in apartment buildings, as has been
the case recently involving a number elevator accidents in New York City building
complexes, where, for example, accidents in the Wagner Houses in East Harlem have
increased by 30 percent in the last three months.
“Elevators can fail in predictable and unpredictable ways,” Gurfein explained.
“Elevators are a combination of mechanical and electrical devices that rely on principles
of engineering and science to work properly and safely. In order to effectively represent
a person who has been injured by a defective elevator, a lawyer must be able to
understand the science of the accident for the presentation of the case to the jury.
“It’s a time honored principle of the job going to the lowest bidder,” Gurfein
pointed out. “Whether it’s maintaining an old elevator or retarring a roof, the landlord
wants to do the job as cheaply as possible, often without regard to whether it’s done right.
In almost every situation we encounter, we hear testimony of the landlord finding the
cheapest boiler, or the cheapest plumber, or roofer, or carpenter. No one cares about
quality, and that’s what sets the stage for a disaster.”
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