Justia Lawyer Rating for Robert D. Kreisman

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On June 8, 2009, the defendant, Andrew Frank, was making a right turn from southbound Campbell Avenue in Chicago turning onto westbound Roosevelt Road when he hit the plaintiff bicyclist, Tyrone Butler. Butler was riding eastbound in the westbound lanes. Butler, a 51-year-old janitor, said he rolled over the hood of the defendant’s car after being hit. 

Butler said that he sustained a blunt head injury, an avulsion fracture of the left orbital rim, headaches, blurred vision, multiple facial lacerations and abrasions that required 22 stitches and strains to his cervical and lumbar spine.

Butler’s medical bills totaled $21,734. The plaintiff’s injuries and medical treatments were stipulated to and offered to the jury as facts consider in deliberations. 

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The estate of the decedent, Kamonie Slade, and his parents, brought a lawsuit against the administrators of the public school he was attending at the time of his death from drowning in a class outing. The case was brought under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court judge granted summary judgment for the defendants, the Board of School Directors, which also relinquished jurisdiction over the plaintiff’s supplemental state court tort claim and dismissed the lawsuit.

The appeal brought to the Seventh Circuit in Chicago challenged the dismissal of the federal case. In addition to the board of school directors, the plaintiffs named the principal and assistant principal of the school. The court pointed out that the Wisconsin law caps the tort liability of a public employee at $50,000 per victim. That would make the maximum recovery under state law for wrongful death and loss of consortium $150,000, which the court of appeals pointed out was meager under the circumstances.

This case arises out of a planned field trip to a lake for graduating 7th graders on the last day of their school year. The public school district forbids recreational swimming on field trips unless a lifeguard is present. There was no lifeguard present when Kamonie drowned. There were 92 children participating in the outing.

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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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In 2003, a three-story porch in Chicago’s Lincoln Park collapsed during a party. Thirteen people were killed and another 29 were injured. Insurance coverage was an issue taken up in a declaratory judgment action in the chancery division of Cook County’s Circuit Court. It was determined that the collapse of the porch constituted a single occurrence under First Specialty Insurance Corp.’s insurance coverage.The circuit court’s decision was that there was $1 million of coverage for the occurrence, not $2 million in the aggregate.

The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the lower court’s decision after examining the policy language. It was concluded that there was nothing in the insurance policy that would support the plaintiffs’ argument that the porch collapse was a multiple occurrence.

Forty-two people, including the families of the deceased victims and 29 others who suffered injuries in the collapse, filed a lawsuit against First Specialty in 2010. They argued that First Specialty should pay the aggregate amount $2 million rather than $1 million.

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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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David Solis, 19, was sitting on the hood of his car, which was stopped on the shoulder of eastbound Peterson Avenue at the off ramp of Interstate 94 (Eden’s Expressway) when the defendant, a 66-year-old doctor, rear-ended his car. Solis suffered multiple injuries to his back that were all treated conservatively with physical therapy and injections. He lost 13 weeks of work as a Federal Express shipping laborer.

The defendant admitted liability. However, the defendant argued that the plaintiff’s medical treatment was connected only to a degenerative disc disease and not this incident. The defendant also contended that there was proof that Solis had a pre-existing degenerative disc disease because it showed up on an earlier MRI. Any of the recent medical care that plaintiff received, the defendant alleged, was not related to this crash because there was a 3-year gap in medical treatment.

The jury, however, agreed with the plaintiff that he was injured to the extent he claimed and returned a verdict for $204,814, which included $41,993 for medical expenses and $3,031 of lost time from 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 a February 2010 lawsuit filed by the plaintiff, Sandra Relf, it was alleged that Joseph Pre Jr. was negligent when their vehicles crashed in February 2008. The Cook County Sheriff’s Office could not serve Pre with a lawsuit, so Relf filed a motion to appoint a special process server to deliver a service of summons to Pre. However, he died in April 2008. When Relf learned of Pre’s death, she filed a motion for leave to appoint a special administrator for Pre’s estate.

The trial judge approved the motion to name the special administrator of Pre’s estate. However, at the same time, Pre’s family opened a probate estate for him in August 2008, four months after the appointment of the special administrator. Because the estate already existed at the time Relf filed her lawsuit, the estate asked the judge to rule that the lawsuit was void. The estate argued that the appointment of a special administrator was improper because Pre’s family received no notice of it.

The response by plaintiff Relf was that she didn’t know that Pre had passed away when her lawsuit was filed. However, the trial judge granted the estate’s motion to dismiss and an appeal was taken.

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