Our client was trimming trees in South Miami-Dade County when he made contact with an energized power line, causing him to be electrocuted and fall to the ground. The impact left him with catastrophic, life-altering injuries spanning his spine, lower extremities, and brain. He was transported to the emergency department and then transferred to a Level 1 trauma center where he was admitted for weeks, undergoing surgery after surgery in a fight to save his leg and restore any degree of function.Mausner Group filed suit against two defendants: the major Florida utility company responsible for maintaining and marking the power lines, and the tree trimming company operating at the location. Both bore responsibility for what happened. The utility company failed to properly maintain and warn of the hazard posed by the energized lines. The tree trimming company placed our client in a position of unreasonable danger without adequate precautions. Together, their failures turned a routine workday into a catastrophe.The case was litigated over several years and resolved through settlement for $1,495,000. Given the complexity of the injuries and the multiple defendants involved, this outcome required sustained litigation, expert testimony, and a prosecution-style approach to building the damages case from the ground up.
Florida law imposes a duty on utility companies to maintain power lines in a reasonably safe condition and to provide adequate warning of hazards to workers and members of the public who may foreseeably come into contact with energized lines. The failure to meet that standard, combined with the tree trimming company's failure to identify and control the hazard at the worksite, established clear joint liability. Mausner Group pursued both defendants simultaneously, ensuring that neither could shift full blame to the other to reduce the recovery.We retained an electrical engineering expert to reconstruct the incident, establish the cause of electrocution, and document the failures in line maintenance and worksite safety that made the accident inevitable. With two defendants, multiple surgeries, ongoing neurological damage, and significant whole-body impairment documented by our client's treating physicians, the damages case was built to reflect the full and permanent impact on his life. Our client also faced significant challenges beyond his injuries, and Mausner Group supported him through those as well. The settlement of $1,495,000 was achieved without a trial.
