Brian’s 11 years-old client suffered a traumatic brain injury when he attempted to slide down a handrail and fell backwards over 8 ft to the concrete below. The young boy suffered multiple depressed fractures to his temporal and parietal skull bones, as well as his clavicle. The skull fractures and the force of the impact caused epidural and subdural brain hemorrhages, which required life-saving emergency brain surgery. Brian’s client is expected to make a full recovery and will begin high school this fall, which is a credit to the intense physical and cognitive rehabilitation that the young boy fought through. During litigation, the school blamed Brian’s client for his injuries, arguing that “he should’ve known better.”
The school denied liability even though it did not take attendance and could not account for the young boy for over an hour and half before his injury. The evidence was that the school knew that the boys were sliding down this same handrail for a decade but did absolutely nothing about it. To make matters worse, the school refused to produce tenured faculty and staff for deposition and hid thousands of pages of documents, e-mails, and internal memoranda. Brian filed countless motions to compel, arguing to the court that the school was unlawfully hiding evidence. The court agreed and ordered the school to produce the documents and over 51 faculty and staff to sit for deposition. It was in those documents and during those depositions that Brian uncovered a reckless history of zero accountability, lax supervision, and a complete failure to establish and enforce school policy.
In addition to the $5.46 million-dollar settlement, Brian’s work was instrumental in changing school policy to make it safer for all students for years to come. The school installed a guardrail to prevent sliding, placed signs in the stairwells warning against sliding, instituted a policy of mandatory suspension for any student caught sliding down the handrails, installed security cameras in the stairwells, instituted a mandatory attendance taking policy at the beginning of each class, assigned supervision duties in the stairwells during off hours, and instituted school policy for teachers to follow when a student is not present at the start of class.