THE JUDGMENT:  MALIS|LAW recently obtained a final judgment of over $80,000 against a major supermarket chain for a shopper injured on a wet floor, prevailing despite five years of questionable tactics and an attempt to ‘rewrite’ a favorable medical report by a defendant expert witness.

THE FACTS OF THE CASE: In this slip and fall case, the shopper slipped and fell on water coming out from under a green mat placed up against the base of a refrigeration case.  Claiming supermarket negligence, we contended that the store’s employees had placed the mat over the leaking area either to conceal or absorb the leak rather than repairing the refrigerator.   The supermarket chain asserted that there was no negligence and disputed the causation of the plaintiff’s fall and the extent of her injuries.

THE HERNIATED DISK: As a result of the fall my client sustained what was initially believed to be a back sprain. However, an MRI conducted by Shields MRI revealed a lumbar disc herniation which compressed the nerve root which carried signals to her leg, causing radiating leg pain. My client complained of ongoing back pain which has not resolved, aggravated by exertion,  and causing interrupted sleep. She was assigned a permanent loss of function of 10-15% of her whole person by her treating physician.

PROVING THE CASE: During discovery the store’s attorney initially refused to produce an incident report prepared by the defendant’s store manager, which he had  used to prepare the manager for deposition.  We immediately filed a  Motion to Compel Production which also sought sanctions, and the attorney, to avoid a court order, voluntarily produced the report.    The report revealed that the store manager had observed water from an unknown source on the floor where the plaintiff fell at the time of her injury.  Despite this disclosure, the defendant insisted that there was no water on the floor; that if there was water the defendant was not responsible; that any water was not present long enough for the defendant to have notice of it; that the water did not cause the plaintiff’s fall; and that the plaintiff had suffered no real injury.

THE ATTEMPTED REVISION: Shortly before trial the defendant presented as an expert  the owner and supervisor of the facility where the MRI which confirmed Plaintiff’s disk herniation was taken .  The owner was the employer of the  radiologist who read the film and produced the report.  The owner was produced to testify that there was no abnormality which had been caused by the fall shown on the plaintiff’s MRI.  At the same time, the store and its attorney produced a report which was supposedly an ‘addendum’ to the plaintiff’s MRI original results.  This report, allegedly issued by the plaintiff’s radiologist, contradicted his prior findings, indicating no focal disc herniation and indicating that the Plaintiff was suffering only from, essentially,  ‘degenerative changes’.  The store did not call the original examining radiologist to contradict his earlier findings.  Nevertheless, we were ready for this tactic at trial, as it had been deployed by this same Defendant in another previous case. Despite the store having requested mediation at the commencement of litigation, the store only offered $3,000 in settlement and refused to negotiate further, and the matter proceeded to trial.

UNPRESERVED EVIDENCE OF THE EVENT: The case was tried over the course of two years on non-consecutive days due to conflicts in the presiding judge’s trial schedule in the Boston Municipal Court. At trial, Plaintiff produced a witness who verified that she saw the Plaintiff immediately following the fall adjacent to a refrigerator case lying in a large puddle of water coming out from under a green mat. The defendant’s store manager testified that the floor was regularly cleaned every hour, and that the water indicated in his report was in a different location than where the plaintiff fell.  However, on cross examination, the manager admitted that he had absolutely no memory of the event; that the described location was within a few feet of where the Plaintiff alleged falling; that the store has a camera provided to document such situations; and that he had decided not to take a photo of the area where the plaintiff fell.  We argued that the reason that the manager didn’t take the photograph was because he didn’t want to prove that his store was negligent, thus deliberately failing to preserve evidence.

MEDICAL EXPERT TESTIMONY: As to the victim’s injury, her treating neurologist testified over two half days of court time concerning the Plaintiff’s disk herniation, opining that it was causally related to the slip and fall accident, insisting, in the face of many hours of cross examination, that the abnormality was not the result of congenital or degenerative factors.  The neurologist also rejected Defendant’s spurious claims that her back pain was caused by an earlier incident in which the Plaintiff complained of leg pain in an isolated incident lifting luggage years before, or from an earlier accident in which she injured her back, treated for a few months, and was discharged.

THE WRONGFUL REVISION: As to the ‘correction’ to the MRI from Shields, the neurologist rejected the ‘newer’ addendum, noting that he himself had observed the herniation in review of the Plaintiff’s actual MRI films. The neurologist also observed that the ordinary practice in providing such ‘addenda’ is to provide them to the treating doctor within 30-60 days of an initial report.  The ‘addendum’ in question was prepared more than two years after the initial report, and was never provided to him by Shields MRI. This supported our argument’s contention that the amended report was a contrivance that was created after the defendant’s hiring of the radiologist’s employer, the owner of the facility, as an expert in the case.

JUSTICE PREVAILS: The trial judge rejected the Defendant’s expert testimony, and  found for the plaintiff in the amount of $35,000, with significant accumulated interest, for a total judgment of $65,000.  The defendant appealed the finding to the District Court Appellate Division, and the appeal was denied.  Defense counsel then sought a de novo trial before a jury in the Superior Court. One month before the re-trial, the supermarket chain’s in-house attorney directly contacted me and agreed to pay my client the amount of  the judgment, with accumulated interest, which by then was $85,000.