San Francisco Injury Attorney Blog

A mechanic working on a bus at a maintenance yard in the Bayview district suffered fatal injuries the morning of December 15, 2011, when the bus rolled over him. Fifty-eight year-old Walter Pietilla was working under the bus' hood when it apparently rolled off the support ramp and pinned him underneath, crushing him to death. The reason for the accident remains unknown. The bus and maintenance yard are owned by San Francisco-based Cal Experience LLC, which provides "party bus" services.

Cal-OSHA, California's workplace safety agency, is investigating the incident to try to determine what caused the bus to roll off of its support ramp. It will review the company's safety procedures and will interview employees and managers regarding how safety procedures are carried out and how employees are trained. Cal-OSHA has stated that Cal Experience has no prior history of workplace violations. If Cal-OSHA finds that the company is in violation of state workplace safety rules, the company could face fines ranging from the hundreds to thousands of dollars. The results of this investigation will help determine the legal rights and obligations of both Cal Experience and the worker's estate.

News reports do not indicate if Pietilla was an employee of Cal Experience, if he was employed by a company contracted to Cal Experience, or if he worked in some capacity as an independent contractor. Employees who suffer injuries on the job must ordinarily pursue damages through the workers' compensation system. This allows for employees to claim damages for injuries sustained while performing work duties, but it often limits damages and involves a great deal of administrative work.

Work sites may involve a variety of companies contracted to one another, and it is not always apparent which workers are employed by which company. A claim under the theory of third-party liability may be possible when a worker suffers an injury caused by someone who is not the worker's direct employer, such as a subcontractor, or when the worker is an independent contractor.

An owner or manager of property often has liability to people injured by dangerous conditions on their property, under the legal theory of premises liability. This could include liability for failure to repair a defect or damage on the premises, or failure to reasonably provide for the safety of people working on the premises. A worker injured on the job, in the absence of a workers' compensation claim or a claim under third-party liability, might have a claim under a premises liability theory against the person or business that has control over the premises themselves.

Continue reading "San Francisco Mechanic's Death Prompts Cal-OSHA Investigation" »

I get many calls from people who were injured in San Francisco, Oakland, and the greater Bay Area in falls in stores or restaurants. Often times, the callers think that falling in a store or restaurant automatically means that they can recover damages. And to a very limited extent they are actually right: most businesses here in the San Francisco Bay Area have something called "premises medical payments" insurance coverage. This is a category of insurance that will pay medical bills for someone injured on the insured premises, irrespective of any negligence or fault. Unfortunately, this "medical payments" coverage is usually very limited-$2,000 or $5,000 are common policy limits. To recover anything else, you will have to prove that the property owner did something wrong.

Many of these cases, known to lawyers as premises liability cases, involve a substance or thing on the floor, such as a spilled liquid, or some merchandise, packing, or other items. To recover full compensation from the store or restaurant in this situation, we have to be able to prove one of two things: Either the staff caused the dangerous condition or knew about it, and that they had an opportunity to remedy it, but failed to do so. Often we don't know, and can't prove, how the thing that caused the fall got on the floor. If we can show that an employee caused the condition, there's no need to prove they had notice of it. In other cases, the law assumes that the store or restaurant owner knew about the dangerous condition if there's evidence that it was there for about a half-hour, or if there's evidence that an employee actually saw it or was told about it. Thus, if you slip on something spilled by another customer just a few minutes earlier, you may not have a case. Stores maintain "sweep logs" to use when claims are made, to show they have met their duty to inspect regularly. Sometimes, we find that the store did a better job filling in the log than they did actually inspecting the floors, though. These cases can be tough and hard-fought in California.

Continue reading "Proving Fault In A Bay Area Slip or Trip and Fall Injury" »

A woman burned by hot tea at a Starbucks has sued the chain, alleging negligence. This will no doubt bring back memories of the infamous McDondald's coffee case of years past, where a woman sued after spilling hot coffee into her lap that she had purchased in a drive-through window. In San Francisco, or anywhere in the Bay Area, I cannot go to court and select a jury without hearing about that McDonald's coffee case from many, many prospective jurors. That case really touched a nerve with the public. Since the new case against Starbucks happened in New York, I looked at the reader comments on the NY Daily News website. No surprise: 44 out of 44 comments were negative about the case.

I have no idea whether this Starbucks case has merit or not. In the McDonald's case, the woman who was burned was able to prove to the jury that McDonald's was keeping its coffee about 40-50 degrees hotter than the industry standard, and that McDonald's knew that this had caused severe burns in over 700 people on prior occasions. If the plaintiff in this Starbucks case cannot show that Starbucks was out of line with the industry standards, as McDonald's was, I predict this case will fall flat, as most people seem to think it should. Either way, the publicity from this NY case is likely to cause more people to be skeptical about San Francisco personal injury lawsuits.

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