The parents of a motorcyclist who died after colliding with a pickup truck were awarded $36.25 million by a Los Angeles Superior Court jury.
David Andrade died in 2018 at the age of 26 and his parents, Hortencia and Salvador Andrade, were each awarded $18,125,000 in a case that rested on questions of negligence and reasonable care.
“It’s always a surprise to see how theories of negligence get worked out in practice,” said Nicole Clark, CEO of the legal analytics firm Trellis Law. “In California, for example, the law defines negligence as the failure to use reasonable care to prevent harm to oneself or to others, which is a really interesting definition because it can’t stand on its own.”
The jury deliberated for two days before returning their verdict on Sept. 16 and the jury’s award surpassed the insurer’s final settlement offer of $2 million, according to media reports. The initial settlement offer was $4 million, even though the policy limit allowed a $10 million payout.
“The Hartford Insurance Company thought they had a really strong case,” Clark told the Southern California Record. “We can see this in the way they lowered their settlement offer over the course of litigation, reducing it from $4 million to $2 million. The defense team had everything they thought they needed to dispute liability. They expected a jury would find comparative liability on the part of the decedent, citing evidence that he was speeding and driving with methamphetamine in his system.”
Most juries will say that the defendant is 70% at-fault and the decedent is 30% at-fault, according to Trellis verdict data, however, in Andrade et al. v. Norman S. Wright Climatec Mechanical et al, the defendant was found exclusively responsible despite traces of methamphetamine in David Andrade’s remains.
“The plaintiffs’ legal team successfully deconstructed the four elements required to establish a claim of negligence, all in a way that shifted attention away from negligence and towards causation,” Clark added. “This rendered the defense’s counterclaims moot. The plaintiffs could concede to the decedent’s negligence while simultaneously proposing that these negligent acts did not directly cause the accident.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyers were adept at placing uncertainty in all the right places, according to Clark.
"A cursory analysis of the jury’s questions can provide some insights into their deliberation process," she said. "When we review this material, we see a lot of questions about the sound of the motorcycle. Did the defendant hear three elongated revs from the motorcycle before the crash? Does the defendant know what a motorcycle sounds like when it’s changing gears? How does the volume of the revving compare with an ambulance siren? Can this sound compete with a radio?"