Why This Weird Injury Case Turned Into a $500K Settlement

Hey, this is Shane McGuire, personal injury lawyer here in Texas. And I thought today I'd take a few minutes and walk you through, man, this is probably a once in a lifetime case for me. Neat nature of the facts, but it's a good lesson on how to build a case from start to finish. And it starts with intake. So this case came in and it was a referral from another lawyer. And that lawyer listened to the client's story and was like, I don't wanna take this case. So he says, call Shane. In this particular case, hey, it was clearly, it was something I was gonna take a look at. This lawyer, he wouldn't send me something I wouldn't wanna take a look at. So client calls, and here's the story. Here's what happened. You gotta listen to these stories because shaky liability, but big damages, I'm always interested in because we can do something with that. So here's the story. Client had been to what has to have been the finest laundromat slash coffee shop in Van Dyke. It's still around, but under new ownership. Well, she goes and she's not doing the coffee shop part, which is just drive-thru anyway. She's doing the laundromat part. She goes into the laundromat, does laundry. She's got kid in tow. She's walking out and she's got a big old basket of laundry in her hands. And I guess she kicked the door open. It's one of these glass doors, like a commercial door, kicks it open and steps out. And this door, it's like spring-loaded, baby. And it flies back towards her as she's walking out. In the bottom of it, next time you're at a retail establishment, one of these glass doors, it's spring-loaded. On the bottom, there's very likely a little rubber something on the corner to prevent stuff from flying out of the door, like dust getting in or whatever, bugs getting in. Also, if the door hits you, it prevents the super sharp corner from slicing you like a guillotine. Okay, this didn't have the rubber thing on it. It flew back fast and her poor foot got sliced by this guillotine door. And then she falls as a result. Hey, she's really hurt. She's seriously injured as a result. I have to get her to a doctor. She gets injections. She's treating up, but we get the case in. What is it a case? Is this a case? So here's what I hear that makes me think, okay, this might be a case. What I hear is serious injury, serious injury, and okay, you're thinking, okay, door came back too fast. But you know what? The door shouldn't come back that fast. I have never in the history of my life gone to a retail establishment and have a door fly back at me so hard that it's sliced open a part of my body. Whatever the rules are on this, the rules can't allow for that. So I'm interested. So I've got big enough damages that I'm willing to explore to see whether there's negligence here. So step one is intake. Step two, let's just figure out if we can establish liability here. Is there something that this coffee shop laundromat did wrong? So I hire an engineer and I meet the engineer out there at the coffee shop slash laundromat in the middle of the country. And as we're out there doing an inspection of this door, literally that's what we're doing. Hey, some neighbor walks up and asks the proprietor, different ownership now, but the proprietor then, hey, can I have your leftover coffee grounds? So anyway, that's the scenario. So we're doing inspection and the engineer who does the inspection for us, he calls me up and says, Shane, listen, there are OSHA standards and ADA standards on a door like this and that door closes too fast. And you gotta have the cover on the bottom. In other words, it shouldn't slice your foot. If the door had come back and reset at a reasonable pace or if the cover had been on the bottom of the door, either one of those would have prevented this injury. Either one, here you had both. It's okay, we've got something to work with here. This is a commercial establishment, it's a business and they're not following the rules on how a business ought to operate. And if you think about it, we get conditioned to how things ought to be. Like you open a thousand doors in your life, go into this or that retail establishment and none of them closes super fast and slices your foot open. Eventually you come to the mistaken belief that doors aren't super duper dangerous. So, but for her, the door was dangerous. Sliced her foot open, very injured. And now I'm like, okay, I've got liability. I've got enough here with my expert to establish liability. Let's talk about damages. So she didn't have health insurance. So I had to get my client connected to a provider who would treat her under a letter of protection, wait to get paid when we settled the case. And he did that. He treated her under a letter of protection. She had to have a number of injections, obviously imaging studies and the medical built up and she ended up with like $100,000 in medical bills real quick. Had the doctor, paid him a couple thousand dollars to examine her at the end of this and write a letter for me saying, this is the treatment that she needs in the future as a result of the injury suffered because of this door. So I packaged that together. I've got my expert report. I've got images of her foot after it's sliced up. And I've got the letter from her provider in addition to all the medical bills saying this is the care and treatment she's going to need in the future as a result of this event. Packaged together and it's a huge damage model. And we don't know how much insurance the business had at that time. So we sent a demand for all the insurance. And sure enough, without even filing a lawsuit, the insurance company tenders the limits of the policy. I think in this case, it was half a million. I don't think it was a million dollar policy if memory serves. I think it was just half a million dollar policy. But so as a result of this, client got significant money in her pocket and you know what? I bet you that door's fixed. I bet you if you go there now, I bet that former owner fixed that door. There's a service for the world that we provided. So now you can go get your laundry done. You can hold the basket as you walk out and you won't have to be worried about the door slicing your foot open if you go to the coffee shop laundromat here in East Texas. So all that to say, when you get a case in, it's very important to listen to the story that your client tells you. And think about, okay, it's not a car wreck. It's a nontraditional case, but is it a serious injury? Do you have a sympathetic client? Do you think that the business did something wrong? And here, I think they did. If you're a laundromat, the people walking out, are their hands empty or are their hands full? If you walk out of a laundromat, you are walking out of a laundromat with your hands full. You know that you are. And I think they have a responsibility to make sure that the premises is safe and it's not gonna slice people up with some guillotine door. So listen to the client when they call you. Listen to the story, all right? Very important. And then if you like the client, you can think, okay, this is a credible story. It's a real injury. At that point, if you as a lawyer sign that up, it is our responsibility to do everything we can to make sure we solidify both liability and damages. So that's why we hire an expert. That's why I'm meeting them out in Bayon, Texas to examine a door of all things. And that's why you get client into medical treatment. And again, for our clients, the goal is always twofold. One, to physically get you back to where you were before the incident or before the injury. And two, financially to put you in a better spot than you were in before the injury occurred. And if we can do those two things, and obviously this is gonna be a non-catastrophic case. If we can get you back to where you were before the injury, and if financially we can put you in a better spot than you were in before the injury, then we've taken something that was a real interruption to your life, and we've taken it from being a curse to a blessing in some way. That's one of our goals here at McGuire Firm. So listen at intake. Establish liability. Gotta be willing to pay that expert $5,000 to go out there and do the tests, do the examination, write a report, do the research on the codes and the rules and the regulations. Then build the damages. Make sure your client treats. Check in with her. Make sure she's getting the treatment she needs, and then get that futures letter from the doctor to establish future care and needs that your client's gonna have as a result of the injury. We did that in that particular case. Had a great result for a client. Why do I get that case? I get the case because the initial lawyer heard the story, probably didn't even get to the lawyer's ears. He heard, it's kinda weird, it's a laundromat, some door, cut foot, and then it gets to me, half a million dollars or more, whatever the settlement was. It was at least half a million dollars. So always listen, build liability, build damages, and never accept anything less than what your client deserves. And for more advice on how to maximize the value of your car rent cases, subscribe to the channel.