Infant car seat case
Spinella & Associates not only made a paralyzed little girl's life better, they also helped clean up the legal profession in the Mary Webster (name changed to preserve confidentiality) case.
Mary Webster was a year-old infant when her father was driving her home on Interstate 91 North toward Hartford. Her father fell asleep while she was in the back seat of the car in an infant seat. The car smashed into the back of a parked tractor-trailer in the emergency lane. The father died almost instantly and Mary was thrown out of the car seat and ended up being paralyzed from the waist down.
The family went to see the Smith & Jones (name changed to preserve confidentiality) law firm, which settled for the policy limit against the father's minimal automobile liability insurance and closed the case. They never told the Websters not to throw out the car seat, which was probably defective.
Years later, Spinella & Associates sued Smith & Jones for legal malpractice on behalf of Mary Webster.
It was easy to prove the breach of duty of care owed to the client by that law firm. The more difficult case was to show that the underlying legal claim should have been brought and would have been won by the plaintiff. There were no witnesses to establish how the baby was thrown from the car seat. Because the seat was thrown away, it could not be examined to show the defects.
Based on the limited evidence that remained, Spinella & Associates arrived at a theory with the help of their accident reconstructionist: the tractor-trailer should have had padding on the rear of it to cushion any impact by cars, which often do crash when such vehicles are parked in an emergency lane of the highway.
In this particular case, the experts theorized that with such padding the car would not have thrust under the vehicle, as it actually did, and therefore Mary Webster probably would not have been thrown out of the car seat, even if it were defective.
After hard-fought litigation, the case resolved for a significant amount proportionate to the enormity of the injury suffered and long endured.