$3+ Million Car Accident and Medical Negligence Lawsuit Settlement for Paralysis in Boca Raton

A young single mother recovered more than $3 million after a crash and medical care that followed left her paralyzed from the waist down. Our client was riding home in a taxi, seated in the rear behind the driver, when a teenage driver struck the passenger side of the taxi as it turned left, about a mile from her home. The impact threw her violently across the rear passenger compartment. She struck the interior of the rear passenger door with substantial force and ended up down on the floorboard. She was taken to a local hospital rather than a trauma center. X-rays showed significant spinal damage, and she was transferred for trauma care only after she was found to be paralyzed. Spinal surgery could not restore her movement.

The case was hotly contested from the start. Our client’s documented ethanol level was 309 mg/dL (0.309 g/dL), substantially exceeding the 0.08 threshold in Florida’s statutory alcohol defense under Fla. Stat. § 768.36. The defendants asserted that statutory alcohol defense, along with a seat-belt defense based on her alleged failure to wear a seat belt. These defenses raised significant liability, comparative-fault, and causation issues. Her intoxication also complicated the medical side of the case. The EMS and healthcare-provider defendants contended that her extreme intoxication made it very difficult to reliably assess her neurological condition after the collision. The motor-vehicle, EMS, and healthcare-provider defendants faced different theories of liability and advanced different defenses. However, her intoxication, the alleged seat-belt nonuse, and the timing and cause of her paralysis were recurring and interrelated issues throughout the litigation.

The main dispute was when the paralysis occurred. One of the central defense positions was that the collision itself caused the spinal cord injury and paralysis before EMS or the hospital had any opportunity to cause or contribute to it. An important piece of contemporaneous evidence for our side was the EMS record entry stating that she “moves all extremities.” The EMS defendants disputed the reliability and significance of their own documentation. They argued the entry was essentially an auto-populated default or a documentation error and not the product of an actual neurological assessment. Because of that dispute, the issues surrounding the assessment of a potential spinal injury, spinal precautions and immobilization, how she was handled and moved, where she was transported, and her emergency department care became intertwined with the fundamental question of whether she was paralyzed in the collision or afterward.

To establish liability, we retained experts to analyze the collision and the signal-sequencing and right-of-way issues. We also obtained and analyzed police dash-camera footage of our client’s removal from the taxi. From there, we developed the medical and causation evidence concerning when and how the paralysis occurred and pursued separate claims against the motor-vehicle, EMS, and healthcare-provider defendants. The at-fault driver’s insurer paid its full $2 million policy limit, the taxi’s insurer paid its limits, the EMS provider paid more than $1 million before trial, and the hospital case settled at trial after we examined the emergency physician on the stand.

This result required untangling several distinct but overlapping issues. It involved developing the motor-vehicle liability evidence, confronting substantial statutory and comparative-fault defenses, establishing the significance of the EMS documentation despite the EMS defendant’s challenge to its reliability, and separately proving what happened after the collision and whether later negligence caused or contributed to the client’s injuries. Despite significant statutory, comparative-fault, and medical causation defenses, we were able to obtain substantial recoveries from multiple categories of defendants in this spinal cord injury case.