CVN screenshot of plaintiff attorney Brandon Corday delivering his closing argument
Los Angeles, CA - A California state court jury has returned a $415,000 verdict in an automotive negligence lawsuit that the plaintiff’s attorney says surpasses a $100,000 policy limit settlement offer, and the full trial was recorded gavel-to-gavel by Courtroom View Network.
The Los Angeles County jury awarded plaintiff Pamela Udeh $415,000 for neck and back injuries she claims she sustained in a 2018 collision with defendant Ani Karapetyan, but they also assigned Udeh 25 percent liability for the accident thus reducing her collectible award to $311,250.
Plaintiff attorney Brandon Corday of Corday Law Corporation told CVN after the trial the case “objectively made sense” but defense attorney Douglas Petkoff of Straus Meyers LLP characterized the verdict as “excessive” and a “windfall.”
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The September 16 verdict capped a retrial after a previous hung jury in the case resulted in a mistrial.
Udeh, 56 at the time, was traveling through an intersection in September 2018 when her van collided with a car driven by Karapetyan, as Karapetyan was in the intersection attempting to make a left-hand turn. Udeh claims Karapetyan was negligent in entering Udeh’s path of travel, and that the crash left her with neck and back injuries and ongoing pain, which the defense attributed to pre-existing degenerative spinal issues.
Corday sought over $2.3 million, however the defense minimized the collision as a low-impact event that didn’t even deploy the airbags in Udeh’s car and argued Udeh actually had a clearer field of vision than Karapetyan.
“The defense put my client at fault entirely for the crash because my client could see the defendant and not vice versa,” Corday told CVN. “The defense wanted a full defense verdict.”
Cordray confirmed the trial took place without a high/low agreement in place, and that the defense never offered more than the $100,000 policy limit amount.
Cordray added that in addition to liability the issue of substantial factor causation also posed a serious challenge for the jury, with Petkoff telling CVN that causation specifically is what caused the previous mistrial. Cordray suggested his aggressive cross-examination of a defense bio-mechanical engineer expert witness on the causation question played a pivotal role in the case's outcome.
“Through rigorous cross examination I demonstrated to the jury that there were no live human studies at all at this delta v or speed change let alone for females aged 50-59 with degenerates spines,” Cordray said. “Further the data points the expert relied upon were completely unrelated to the facts of this case as he relied upon cadaver studies and almost exclusively males for his analysis.”
Petkoff told CVN that despite the large disparity between the requested $2.3 million and actual award he was still surprised by the outcome, specifically the fact over half the verdict amount was for future noneconomic damages, exceeding past noneconomic damages, past economic damages, and future economic damages combined.
CVN screenshot of defense attorney Douglas Petkoff delivering his closing argument
He admitted noneconomic damages are harder to “pin down” than economic damages but floated the potential idea based on a post-trial conversation with the jury’s foreperson that the panel mishandled the issue, and he rejected a description of the verdict award and breakdown as a “win.”
"It is also possible, as I infer from my discussion with the jury foreperson after the jury was polled, that the jury did not really approach the awarding of damages properly according to law – guessing without actually thinking about what reasonable damages actually could have been in this case,” Petkoff said.
Citing the previous mistrial Petkoff explained that he focused heavily on the causation question in his closing argument.
“The majority of demonstratives I used during closing were to support my attack on injury causation, to show the likelihood of alternative causes, and to explain the meaning of substantial factor causation and how the facts show that this element had not been satisfied,” he insisted.
“This underscores that injury causation was, as I said, an issue for which we had strong facts and arguments to attack,” Petkoff said. “So, again, my reaction is surprise - and also congratulations to my adversary Mr. Corday who was able to make it past this issue this time around.”
The trial took place before Judge J. Stephen Czuleger.
E-mail David Siegel at dsiegel@cvn.com
