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Langston v. Radisson

The Radisson case was a full jury verdict after a 50-day deliberation. It's a case in which I represented a 26-year-old New Zealand air steward. He happened to be a very, very formidable athlete, an accomplished mountain climber, an extreme skier, rafter, adventure tour guide, bungie-cord jumper, and parachutist, and he loved New Zealand because it offered some of these extreme sports and the benefit of a very active lifestyle.

It was New Year's Eve here in Los Angeles and it was undisputed that he had been drinking, and he was at this hotel in the Manhattan Beach area, and ultimately he fell out of a sixth-story window and survived, because he is a very strong man.

He broke almost every bone in his body. He lost almost all the blood in his body. He went through 40 transfusions, had minor brain injury, he became incontinent, he went through an eight-month hospitalization and his bills were almost $1 million. Despite that, he was a special guy and when he came to me, he was a very handsome man. I really couldn't see the injury because he walked into my office. He had only been offered $70,000 and we decided to take the case.

The way the prior firm had been working the case up, they were saying that the hotel was negligent by the manner in which the employees, the security personnel, in the hotel had taken him up to his room and dropped him off. The other firm said that was negligent. We didn’t think that the hotel had any duty to babysit him. We looked at it more like it was a construction defect or a property defect case because the window that he fell out of was about 12 feet long and 8 feet high and only about 18 inches off the ground, so we just saw that window as a big hole in the wall. It’s a dangerous condition on the premises that people can fall out of that window. And we know that, due to our research, children fall out of hotel windows all the time."

We went to trial, and during the course of the trial we put on a very formidable case for him. But I told the jury that as part of my preparation for the case, and I'm afraid of heights to be honest with you, I literally climbed a mountain. And I climbed a mountain because for me to be able to relate to the jury and tell them what my client lost about his previous very active life, I felt that I at least owed him the experience on my part to understand what it was that he did. I literally felt that with each step, each reach of the hand, for my client. We went to a jury verdict, and were waiting 50 days, during which my mother passed away in the middle of deliberations. Now, they had offered during the deliberation $10 million; and we turned it down. The next day, when my client said to take the money, we went back and they only offered a million. So at that point it was obviously very scary as to what was going to happen and, of course, I lost my mother in the interim. By the time that verdict came back and we got $12 million, it was a very lengthy, tiring pursuit. To this day we still have a very, very close relationship, I really think of it as a father-son relationship, with this very special young man, Ed Langston.

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