Philadelphia Physician Wins $11.4 Million Verdict Over Toyota Dealer's Faulty Inspection

On March 8, 2008, Dr. Noreen Lewis, a Philadelphia family physician, was driving west on New York's Route 17 toward Vestal, New York, in a Toyota Sienna minivan she had rented from PhillyCarShare. Her mother, her son and three of her sisters were riding with her. She heard what the trial court described as a jerk, and the steering wheel locked and became immovable. She tried to turn it and could not, and the rear of the van began to drift left. When she hit the brake, that failed too. The van went off the road to the left, rolled over several times down a ravine and came to rest on its roof.

Emergency crews pulled the occupants out. Lewis was taken to Johnson City Memorial Hospital, where she stayed three weeks, then transferred to Binghamton Memorial Hospital for another three. The trial court's summary of her injuries runs long: a concussion, a fractured temporal bone, lacerations to her face, ear and scalp, compression fractures with a bulging disc in her neck, four broken ribs, a lung contusion, a heart contusion, a fractured lower back vertebra, multiple ripped thigh muscles, and a stretch traction injury to the brachial plexus, the nerve bundle that serves her left arm, which left her in severe pain. Trade press covering the trial reported that she was left permanently disabled and unable to keep practicing medicine, and the Pennsylvania Record reported her claim that the crash cost her close to all use of her left arm.

Lewis sued in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas in March 2010. She was represented by Thomas J. Duffy and Kenneth F. Fulginiti of the Philadelphia firm then known as Duffy & Partners. Her complaint named Toyota's manufacturing and sales entities, PhillyCarShare, McMahon Leasing, and the dealership defendants: M & B Paul, Inc., doing business as Ardmore Toyota and Central City Toyota, which the courts referred to together as CCT. The five passengers filed their own action the same day, and the two cases were consolidated in October 2011.

The case shifted from a product case into a maintenance case. The plaintiffs' experts, an accident reconstructionist, a mechanic and a metallurgist, concluded that the minivan's right front ball joint had separated before the crash and locked the steering. Their theory was that CCT had inspected the van 97 days before Lewis rented it without following the service method set out in the 2006 Toyota Sienna maintenance manual. Toyota won summary judgment in December 2012 and dropped out, leaving the dealership to answer for the inspection.

Trial before Judge George Overton ran about five weeks from February 26, 2013. CCT argued that Lewis had been driving too fast for wet conditions. On March 19, 2013, the jury rejected that and returned a verdict in her favor against CCT alone, for $11,369,500. The jury returned a separate verdict for the five passengers in the companion case, which is why press accounts of this trial report a larger combined number.

CCT moved for post-trial relief, arguing that the court had wrongly limited its mechanic expert, barred part of its accident reconstructionist's testimony, excluded portions of a New York state trooper's deposition and refused it more time for discovery. The trial court denied those motions on April 19, 2013, and judgment was entered on May 15, 2013.

The Pennsylvania Superior Court took up all six of the dealership's claims of error and affirmed in a memorandum by Judge Anne E. Lazarus filed October 2, 2014, finding no abuse of discretion in any of the trial court's rulings. CCT then asked the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to hear the case. On June 17, 2015, the court denied the petition in a one-line per curiam order, and the verdict was final.