$1.7M

Case Details

Our clients were a couple returning home from a shopping in Grants Pass Oregon when a vehicle traveling the opposite direction crossed the center line and struck them head on. The wife was killed upon impact and the husband suffered multiple injuries resulting in over a hundred thousand dollars in medical bills. The driver that crossed the center line was killed in the accident. Through diligent investigation we learned that the vehicle he was operating was a rental vehicle. Based on evidence at the scene of the accident, we were quickly able to secure a policy limit offer from his personal car insurance. However, we also discovered that the rental car was rented with a company credit card. We made a claim to the defendant’s employer, a global software development corporation, who subsequently denied that the driver was on the job at the time of the accident. We knew this would be a fight. Our team was determined not to leave any stone unturned. We retrieved the driver’s laptop in the vehicle at the time of the accident, obtained five years of business expense reports that the driver would submit monthly to his employer, and took multiple depositions from coworkers around the country and in other countries. The employer resisted providing many documents and motions to compel were pursued, and orders to compel were obtained. We reviewed thousands of pages of records and hundreds of emails between the deceased driver and his coworkers. We were able to determine from these records that the defendant driver had a routine where he would drive to the Medford Airport from his home, and he would fly to various customers to provide software services. Because he had died, we were not able to depose him. We were sure that he was likely in route to the airport for work purposes, but we were being stoned walled by the corporation and the airlines concerning any scheduled airplane flights that the defendant was driving to at the Medford Airport. After further diligence and motions to compel, we obtained the reservations for the flight that the defendant had scheduled. The timing of his drive would have brought him to the airport at the time of the ticket. We were also able to establish that the defendant driver maintained a substantial part of his employment was performed at his home office, and therefore, we could argue that he was traveling between work office sites. Shortly after receiving and presenting all the patterns of work of the driver, his airline ticket, and his emails, the defendant corporation entered into mediation, where the case was successfully settled for $1.695 million dollars.

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