I was contacted by a lawyer in another state who was looking for a northern Minnesota lawyer to represent a family in a personal injury case.  Several law firms had already turned down the case because they thought it would be too hard to win.

The case involved a man who suffered a paralyzing injury when he dove from a dock at a resort into what turned out to be shallow water.  He and his family did not speak or understand English very well.  They were immigrants to this country, although they had earned citizenship.  The injured man believed that it was safe to dive off the dock;  we later learned that the resort owners knew that it was safe to dive from some parts of the dock, but not in the direction where my client suffered his injury.

The case was difficult.  I located an expert in water and beach safety.  He was a man with advanced degrees in recreational safety who had designed and consulted on swimming pools and beaches for decades.  His opinion was that the resort owners had breached their standard of care by failing to notify guests of the safe ways to dive from the dock, warn them of the unsafe ways to dive, and enforce their own rules about safe use of the dock.  There was evidence my client and his family had seen other guests dive from what they thought was the same area of the dock where he broke his neck.

Minnesota law provides that a property owner is liable for injuries that occur on the property that are caused by a hazardous or dangerous condition, if the owner knows or should know of the dangerous condition and does not eliminate the condition or warn entrants onto the property of the dangerous condition;  further, the property owner is liable only if the plaintiff is not more at fault than the owner for the injury.  The law also states that a property owner is not responsible for dangerous conditions that are open and obvious to a reasonable person.  Several witnesses testified that the depth of the water was plainly visible to someone standing on the dock where my client dove.

Based on the expert’s opinion, we commenced suit in federal court.  The local state court would have been in the vicinity of the resort, and we were concerned that the jury there might have been hostile to the immigrant family suing a local business. 

The defense brought a summary judgment motion, seeking to have our case dismissed.  We successfully briefed and argued our position, and the case was scheduled for trial.  At a court settlement conference before trial, we were able to agree to a significant settlement, taking into account the very real possibility of a negative jury verdict on the issue of my client’s own fault in causing his injury.