Articles Posted in Work Injury

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On June 11, 2008, Louis Fortino slipped and fell on wet concrete slurry while doing a village inspection of a construction site in LaGrange Park, Ill. Voightmann Services Inc. was the general contractor for the construction project. 

Mr. Fortino was 64 years old and sustained a severe rotator cuff injury with complete separation of cuff tendons from their connection to the bone, which required surgery to reattach the tendons, using anchors and hardware. The surgery was followed by nine months of physical therapy and work-hardening. Mr. Fortino missed three months as a part-time building inspector and has retired.

At trial, he contended that Voightmann chose not to clean the wet concrete slurry that had been left on the street. The defendant contended that the slurry was left by concrete trucks the day before when it may have been obscured by water.  Voightmann also argued to the jury that Mr. Fortino should have seen the wet concrete area and avoided it. 

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Robert Jones was injured while he was delivering supplies to a Pizza Hut restaurant in South Elgin, Ill. Jones was struck by the pizza delivery car driven by defendant Bibiana Bojorge in the parking lot of the pizza restaurant. Jones injured his knee. The jury’s verdict of $489,364.05, which was reduced by 5% for contributory negligence of Mr. Jones, was appealed by the defendants Bojorge and Pizza Hut.

The issue on appeal was whether the trial judge was in error in admitting into evidence the plaintiff’s prior consistent statement to his wife that he was hit by defendant’s car. The defendant had made  Jones’s credibility the centerpiece of their defense at trial. The plaintiff’s prior consistent statement was admissible to rebut the charge that plaintiff’s prior testimony was a fabrication, especially when the evidence included defendant’s written statement in which she admitted that she “hit the delivery guy.”  The appellate court affirmed the trial judge’s order and the jury verdict stands.

The facts were that the plaintiff  Jones, a delivery truck driver working at a Pizza Hut location, claimed that the defendant Bojorge, a pizza delivery driver, struck him with a car as he was moving boxes of dough on his dolly, injuring his knee. 

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In a lawsuit against ExxonMobil Corp., four individuals claimed injury and death because they were exposed to benzene and other hazardous chemicals when they worked as rubber workers, tire builders and final finish laborers at a tire manufacturing facility.  The cases were brought by the families of these deceased workers for their wrongful deaths and survival claims. In the circuit court, the claims were dismissed on summary judgment being timed-barred. This case was filed in Wisconsin and the plaintiffs appealed to the Wisconsin Court of Appeals.

In the lawsuit that was filed, the four individuals also claimed that they suffered personal injuries and died as a result of their exposure to benzene and benzene-containing materials. 

It was determined by the trial judge that the statute of limitations began to run for all claims at the latest on the decedents’ dates of death and that the complaint, which was filed more than three years (statute of limitations in Wisconsin), after those dates was time-barred because the three years had passed.

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Christopher Sojka was working as a carpenter on Chicago’s Trump Tower as it was under construction in 2008. While standing on the upper floors of the construction project, Sojka attempted to fix a steel cable when the wind knocked him back and a piece of metal struck him in the eye causing serious injuries. Although Sojka was wearing safety glasses, they did not fit his face correctly. A small gap was left at the top of his eyes, allowing the debris to penetrate.

Sojka brought a lawsuit against Bovis Lend Lease in the Circuit Court of Cook County for recovery of his injuries. The case was removed to the federal district court in Chicago because the parties had complete diversity of citizenship in that Sojka was domiciled in Illinois and Bovis was a Florida corporation with its principal place of business in New York. The amount in controversy to make the jurisdictional level exceeded $75,000.

The complaint that Sojka filed contained one count for construction negligence, a cause of action recognized in Illinois law. It was also alleged in the complaint that Bovis had a duty to provide a safe workplace; Sojka listed seven theories about how Bovis had violated that duty. One of the first theories was that Bovis knew or should have known that the weather conditions at the site were unsafe at the time of Sojka’s injury.

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A 53-year-old construction worker was riding down a hotel elevator when it malfunctioned. The elevator dropped more than two floors and came to a hard stop as the emergency brake engaged. The worker was wearing a work belt with heavy carpenter tools on it. He was thrown into a metal instrument panel. The worker suffered herniated disks at C4-5 and L5-S1 and a left shoulder labrum tear that required surgery.

The construction worker continued to suffer pain and limited range of motion in his neck, back and shoulder. His medical bills total $236,000.

As a master carpenter, the worker was not able to return to the same level of carpentry that he did in the past. He now does part-time carpentry work.

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A lawsuit was brought on behalf of the plaintiff, Gerardo Solis, alleging negligence and strict liability because his lungs were injured by a synthetic chemical that he used while working in a flavoring company. At the trial court level, the judge entered a directed verdict in favor of Solis on the defendant distributor’s claim that the action was barred by the statute of limitations.

The Solis claim was that his lungs were injured while he worked with diacetyl, a synthetic chemical used in artificial butter flavoring. Solis’s claim was that the defendant BASF Corp. (BASF) and one of the distributors failed to warn of the dangerous product and was negligent in allowing its use by its employees.

After a jury heard this case at trial, it returned a verdict for $32 million in favor of Solis, and BASF appealed. At the core of the appeal was that BASF claimed that the trial court erred by directing a verdict in favor of Solis on BASF’s statute of limitations defense. BASF had argued that there was evidence that Solis was aware of his lung injury and its wrongful cause more than two years before this suit was filed.

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The Illinois Appellate Court has affirmed a decision by a Cook County circuit court judge that allowed an injured worker to file a claim for a different injury to her right leg from the same conduct. The two workers’ compensation claims were consolidated prior to the arbitration in the Industrial Commission of Illinois. The petitioner/worker, Bessie Carnes, who was injured while in the scope of her employment, underwent surgery and physical therapy in April 1998 and was off work until May of that year.

Her employer, Modern Drop Forge, paid for her surgery and physical therapy through its group health plan covering nonoccupational disabilities.

In October 1999, Carnes first filed an application for adjustment of claim in the Illinois Industrial Commission alleging that the injury dating from September 1998, which she amended in August 2002, to have the current accident date of May 1996. At arbitration, Carnes’s employer moved to dismiss the claim as being untimely filed arguing that she had 3 years in which to file a claim from the date of injury.

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After the collapse of a bridge deck on Route 154 near Sparta, Ill., the general contractor, Keeley & Sons, used a jackhammer to break up the concrete I-beam that allegedly caused the accident.

Three workers were on the bridge deck when it collapsed. The issue in this case was whether there was a duty of the defendant, Keeley & Sons, to preserve evidence. The Illinois Supreme Court held there were insufficient facts to establish a duty on Keeley & Sons based on a voluntary undertaking.

The trial court in St. Clair County, Ill., entered an order granting summary judgment for Keeley & Sons finding that it had no duty to preserve the I-beam after this occurrence. The appellate court had reversed the summary judgment order, but the Supreme Court has now reversed the appellate court and affirmed the trial court’s decision.

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In 2002, the Illinois Central Railroad was sued in the State of Mississippi where plaintiff Walter Fennell lived. The lawsuit alleged that he and others were exposed to asbestos when working for the railroad. After discovery was completed in 2006, the trial court in Mississippi dismissed the case without prejudice. The plaintiff, instead of re-filing in Mississippi, filed the lawsuit in the Circuit Court of St. Clair County, Ill., in 2009.

Again after discovery had been conducted, the defendant, Illinois Central Railroad, moved the court to dismiss the case under the interstate doctrine of forum non conveniens. The St. Clair County circuit court judge denied that motion and the case was appealed to the Illinois Appellate Court, which also affirmed the trial judge’s decision. This occurred in 2010. The case was then appealed to the Illinois Supreme Court.

The Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the citizens of St. Clair County should not be asked to bear the burden of this lawsuit because the vast majority of the identified witnesses, treating physicians and some of the plaintiffs were residing in Mississippi and not in Illinois.

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Peggy LeGrande, who worked as a flight attendant for Southwest Airlines, was injured when the plane she working in encountered severe turbulence. She brought a lawsuit against the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), 28 U.S.C. §2674, claiming that the air traffic controllers employed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) were negligent when they chose not to warn the flight’s captain that turbulence had been forecasted for the plane’s flight path.

At the federal district court level, the judge ruled that FAA employees did not breach any duty owed to Ms. LeGrande and granted summary judgment to the United States. On appeal to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the plaintiff sought reversal of the district court’s judgment.

On appeal and for the first time, Ms. LeGrande raised the issue that her injuries came from the negligence of a National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist. Because the FAA breached no duty owed to Ms. LeGrande and because she failed to give NWS the written notice that the FTCA statute requires, the Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment of the district court.

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