Texas Court Affirms $5.3 Million Judgment for Trucker Who Fell From Unsafely Loaded Trailer
After trial: The Amarillo Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full in January 2015, and the Texas Supreme Court denied West Star's petition for review in May 2016. A 2018 Dallas Morning News report said the Robisons had not been paid and that interest had increased the judgment.
Won by The Lanier Law Firm.
Flatbed operator Charles Robison fell about 13 feet head first from an unevenly loaded trailer at his nonsubscribing trucking employer in 2007 and suffered a traumatic brain injury. A Lubbock jury found West Star Transportation negligent in 2012, and the court entered a judgment of $5,298,590.78 for Robison and his wife, Cherie, in January 2013. The Amarillo Court of Appeals affirmed it in full in 2015, and the Texas Supreme Court denied review in 2016.
What happened
On April 23, 2007, Charles Robison, a flatbed operator for West Star Transportation in Lubbock County, climbed onto a loaded trailer in the company's shipping yard to help get a tarp over the cargo. The load was uneven: uncrated cotton gin equipment and pallet crates of different heights, roughly 13 feet off the ground at its highest point. The tarp weighed about 150 pounds. West Star did not own the equipment the job called for, so it borrowed a forklift from a neighboring business and lifted Robison to the top of the load on a pallet.
Standing on the crates and pulling the tarp toward him, with no fall protection and no one assisting, Robison fell head first to the concrete. He suffered a traumatic brain injury. In 2018 his lawyer told The Dallas Morning News that Robison was living in a facility where he gets help with everyday tasks.
West Star was a nonsubscriber under the Texas Workers' Compensation Act, which meant it could be sued for negligence and could not blame the injured worker for his own fall. Charles and his wife, Cherie, sued in January 2009 in the 72nd District Court in Lubbock County, alleging the company failed to provide a reasonably safe place to work. Kevin P. Parker, W. Mark Lanier and Judson Waltman of The Lanier Law Firm, with Lubbock lawyer Christopher Carver, represented the couple.
The case was delayed for years by a fight over whether West Star had accepted a settlement offer in time. The trial court ruled it had not, the Amarillo Court of Appeals granted mandamus relief to the Robisons in 2011, and the Texas Supreme Court denied West Star's petition in August 2012. The case then went to trial in Lubbock, and the jury heard five days of testimony.
The jury found West Star negligent and itemized Charles Robison's damages: $300,000 for past pain and mental anguish, $700,000 for future pain and mental anguish, $168,540 and $243,184 for past and future lost earning capacity, $5,000 for past physical impairment, $378,718 for past medical care and $3,337,857 for future medical care. It awarded Cherie Robison $400,000 for loss of consortium. On January 18, 2013, the trial court signed a judgment of $4,898,590.78 for Charles and $400,000 for Cherie, after crediting benefits West Star's insurer had already paid, plus interest and costs.
West Star appealed, arguing among other things that the jury charge improperly combined separate theories of liability. In January 2015 the Seventh Court of Appeals in Amarillo rejected those arguments and affirmed the judgment in full. The court said West Star created an unreasonable risk of harm by accepting an unusually large load without providing the safety equipment needed to handle it. The Texas Supreme Court ordered full briefing on West Star's petition for review and then denied it on May 27, 2016, which left the judgment in place.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.West Star Transportation, Inc. v. Robison, 457 S.W.3d 178 (Tex. App.-Amarillo, Jan. 2015)
- 2.In re Robison, 335 S.W.3d 776 (Tex. App.-Amarillo 2011)
- 3.Supreme Court of Texas, West Star Transportation, Inc. v. Robison, No. 15-0133, petition for review denied May 27, 2016·Archived copy
- 4.The Dallas Morning News, 'Missing a deadline by 41 minutes may cost one of Jerry Jones' attorneys millions of dollars', May 25, 2018·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from The Lanier Law Firm
All The Lanier Law Firm proven verdicts →A St. Louis jury in July 2018 awarded 22 women and their families $4.69 billion, the largest U.S. verdict of that year, finding that asbestos in Johnson & Johnson's talcum powder products caused ovarian cancer; a Missouri appellate court upheld $2.11 billion in 2020.
After a six-week federal trial, a jury found three of the nation's largest retail pharmacy chains created a public nuisance by flooding Lake and Trumbull Counties, Ohio with opioid pills, and a judge ordered $650 million to fund a 15-year abatement plan.
A Dallas federal jury awarded $1.04 billion to six California patients harmed by Johnson and Johnson's metal-on-metal Pinnacle hip implants, with W. Mark Lanier leading an eight-week trial that produced one of the largest product-liability verdicts of 2016.
Hours before opening arguments in the first federal opioid bellwether trial, W. Mark Lanier and co-counsel secured a $260 million settlement from distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson, plus manufacturer Teva, on behalf of Cuyahoga and Summit counties in Ohio.
Related workplace injury verdicts
On September 7, 2019, Ulysses Cruz, a 48-year-old United Airlines ramp worker serving as a wing walker at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, was struck from behind by an Allied Aviation Fueling Company of Houston van whose driver said the morning sun was in his eyes. Cruz was paralyzed from the chest down and suffered a stroke two days later that cost him the use of his dominant right arm. After a two-week trial before Judge Ravi Sandill, a Harris County jury on October 25, 2021 found Allied 70 percent and driver Reginald Willis 30 percent at fault and awarded Cruz, his wife and their two children $352.7 million in compensatory damages. Judge Sandill conditioned denial of a new trial on a $117.5 million remittitur of noneconomic damages, which the family accepted, and an amended judgment of about $235.3 million was signed February 7, 2022. Allied appealed, the parties reached a confidential mediated settlement, and on July 18, 2023 the First Court of Appeals vacated the judgment and dismissed the case at the parties' joint request.
A Galveston federal jury awarded $100 million to ten contract workers exposed to carbon disulfide at BP's Texas City refinery in April 2007. The judge set aside the punitive damages, seven workers later settled on undisclosed terms, and the Fifth Circuit vacated the verdict for the remaining three in 2011.
After winning a $26.6 million jury verdict for a union mason who fell through defective scaffolding on the Longfellow Bridge, Andrew Abraham of Keches Law Group returned to court and proved that Liberty Mutual's insurers willfully refused to investigate or settle a clear liability case, prompting a judge to double the compensatory judgment to over $91 million under Chapter 93A and 176D.
William Kershaw served as co-lead class counsel in a wage-and-hour class action on behalf of roughly 23,600 California UPS drivers, securing an $87 million settlement for systematic denial of meal and rest breaks, the largest California wage-and-hour class action settlement at the time.