If you or a loved one has sustained an injury due to a defective product, call the product liability lawyers at Booth & Koskoff in Los Angeles by filling out the form below.
Product Liability Attorneys - Los Angeles
Submit your product liability case
In a products liability case, the plaintiff alleges that the defendant designed, manufactured and/or sold a product which was unsafe and caused plaintiff to be injured. Product liability cases are extremely difficult and require that the attorneys develop a detailed understanding of the product in question. Product liability attorneys must prove, through expert testimony, that there are safer (but cost effective) ways to design or manufacture the product. In addition, painstaking efforts must be taken by the product liability lawyers to determine whether there have been prior accidents involving the product and whether the defendant or any of its competitors have developed safer versions of the product. Each of the Los Angeles based attorneys at B & K has developed expertise in handling products liability cases, and the firm has achieved a number of remarkable results in product liability cases, as detailed below.
If you have been injured by a defective product in Los Angeles, contact the product liability lawyers at Booth & Koskoff today!
Case Results
> Hossain vs. Gary Baker Real Estate
> Rodriguez vs. Anderson Hydraulics
> Aguilar case
Hossain vs. Gary Baker Real Estate
RESULT/YEAR:
SETTLEMENT in 1995 for $7,000,000.
KEY FACTS:
The plaintiff in this product liability case in the Los Angeles area lived in a large apartment building rented to low income immigrants, which contained numerous identical, cheap, defective stoves. These stoves had existed long past their useful lives and were clogged with grease and debris, so that the pilot light system was ineffective. This resulted in burners that would not work and then would suddenly burst into flame, which is what caused the plaintiff to be injured.
When product liability lawyers LARRY BOOTH and RICHARD KOSKOFF became involved, the case had almost been settled for $1,000,000, which was believed to be the limits of the applicable insurance coverage. At that time, the testing that had been done on the stove was inadequate, maintenance records had disappeared and the stove had been removed from the apartment building. The facts had to be reconstructed, theories developed and liability established through the use of experts on stoves and flammability. Also, additional insurance coverage was located and pursued.
INJURIES: Extensive burns.
Rodriguez vs. Anderson Hydraulics
RESULT/YEAR:
VERDICT in 1998 for $1,600,000.
KEY FACTS:
This product liability case was on behalf of a man whose hand was crushed in a concrete block making machine. Before trial, B & K settled this product liability case with the manufacturer of the machine. The trial, conducted by Los Angeles product liability attorneys RICHARD KOSKOFF and ROGER BOOTH, was pursued against a company that had refurbished the machine prior to the accident.
Roger Booth, who conducted the liability phase of the case, argued that the refurbishing was done negligently in that the defendant had used the wrong size seal in a hydraulic cylinder, thereby allowing the hydraulics to fail and the machine to come down on the plaintiff's hand. The defense denied that they had refurbished this particular machine at all, and there were no records to establish that they had done so. The defense also contended that the plaintiff was responsible for his own injury because he should have blocked up the machine when he reached in to remove some debris. The jury rejected both defense arguments.
INJURIES:
The plaintiff's injury consisted of a smashed hand, but all of his fingers survived and there were no amputations.
COMMENTS:
This product liability case's verdict set a RECORD for double the amount ever obtained for a hand injury in Orange County. Remarkably, this was ROGER BOOTH's second jury trial ever. The verdict was featured as the >centerfold> in Verdictum Juris.
Aguilar case
RESULT/YEAR:
SETTLEMENT in 1998 for a confidential amount in excess of $1,000,000.
KEY FACTS:
This product liability case was jointly conducted by Los Angeles product liability lawyers LARRY BOOTH and RICHARD KOSKOFF, who, throughout four years of pretrial work and a lengthy trial, obtained settlements for a severely burned three-year-old child from the retailer of a set of Christmas tree lights, the importer of the lights and the company which sanctioned the lights as safe for entry into the U.S. and for sale in California. The case arose out of a fire that started in a Christmas tree. Booth and Koskoff contended that the fire was caused by defective Christmas tree lights, while the defense claimed that the three-year-old (who had previously been found playing with a fireplace lighter and matches) started the fire himself.
The fire destroyed the lights, and, therefore, Booth and Koskoff were faced with the seemingly insurmountable problem of proving that the lights were defective without having the lights. The case was broken by independent investigator MICHAEL SORESI and his assistant GEORGIA BARKS, who were able to find examples of lights manufactured by the same Chinese manufacturer at the same time, enabling B & K to conduct testing. That uncovered certain defects in the lights. In addition, B & K utilized an expert in the sale of Christmas tree lights to establish that the exemplar lights probably came out of the same batch of lights as the lights involved in the fire. The defense claimed that the lights were not defective, but even if they were, any defects could not have caused the fire because of the extremely low voltage of Christmas tree lights.
INJURIES: Severe burns to three-year-old child.
COMMENTS:
The original product liability attorney for the plaintiffs, faced with the problem of not having the lights that allegedly caused the fire, essentially ran out of ideas as to how to successfully represent this severely injured child. He therefore referred the case to B & K because of the firm's reputation for successfully handling extremely complex and difficult product liability cases. This particular product liability case received extensive press coverage and was featured in Verdicts, Settlements & Tactics, a nationwide publication that reports on the most significant personal injury cases in the country.