Personal Injury Attorneys in Cleveland

The Becker Law Firm is a small firm of five attorneys who focus on representing clients during what may be the most difficult points in their lives: after they have suffered life-altering injuries. These injuries may result from the careless negligence of another person, business, or organization, and may have even resulted in the wrongful death of a loved one. The Becker Law Firm isn’t a lawsuit factory. Because we’re focused on just one area of law, we’re selective about the types of catastrophic injury and medical malpractice cases we accept. Our focus is on providing legal services in cases that involve catastrophic harm—permanent, life-altering injuries or fatalities. We fight for full justice on the behalf of clients who will not get better, and who may never be able to return to the same life they had prior to being injured. Many of the cases we take on are ones that other firms have passed on because they were too difficult. The Becker Law Firm has won more than $100 million in awards and settlements on cases that other firms chose not to take.

Our Ohio personal injury attorneys have considerable experience working with people who suffered a serious personal injury. The Becker Law Firm has experience in cases that involve:

Injuries from Property Negligence and Work-Related Accidents

• Property-related negligence, including injuries or fatalities caused by a property owner’s failure to adequately maintain the property;
• Work-related accidents, including catastrophic injuries and fatalities caused by falls from heights, scaffolding accidents, crane accidents, electrical injuries, amputations, and other on-the-job injuries.

Litigating these kinds of cases can often be challenging and require real tenacity, something our attorneys pride themselves on having.

Getting to the Bottom of Property-Related Negligence Cases

One of our firm’s clients, represented by Romney Cullers, was an 80-year old woman who stopped to buy cigarettes at the store of a gas station chain. As she approached the store’s door, she fell. Her face hit the pavement awkwardly, which broke her neck. Tragically, she died 11 months after her accident.

At first, it didn’t seem like we would be able to make a case on behalf of her and her family. In Ohio, you have to be able to say in your complaint why you were injured—how the neglected property caused your injury—or the judge would issue a Summary judgment to throw out the case. Our client couldn’t say why she fell because she couldn’t remember falling; her injury wiped out her memory of the accident.

We decided we weren’t going to just give up. The gas station where our client was injured was across the street from a car dealership and they were kind enough to allow our attorney to sit in their showroom and watch the gas station for hours on end. Our attorney noticed that people kept stumbling on a raised step as they tried to enter the door where my client had been injured.

The step that was tripping people was really a half-step. It was hard to notice and people would catch their toes on it. Sometimes they stumbled; other times they went sprawling. It happened pretty regularly. It stood to reason that this step might have caused my client’s fall and injury. It also stood to reason that someone else might have been injured by a similar fall. Finding that person, though, would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

One of the things we noticed while watching the gas station was that the members of the congregation of a large nearby church would often stop at the station’s store before and after services. Our client’s family couldn’t afford to advertise to the entire city to look for someone who might have been hurt on this store’s raised step, but they could afford to place an ad in the bulletin of that nearby church. That ad paid off. A person contacted us and we got an affidavit saying he had been injured because he tripped on the store’s raised step.

After some additional research, we realized that the half-step that likely caused our client’s injury wasn’t a fluke of construction with this one store. It was part of the standard design for the all of the gas station stores in the chain. Every station in this chain throughout Ohio had this same slightly raised step—all of them, except for two. At those two stations, their local owners had had the step removed because it had been causing people to trip. The removal of the step at those two stores was a tacit acknowledgment that the company knew about this design problem with their stores.

Armed with these two pieces of information, the affidavit from the person who had been injured from falling on the raised step at the store where our client was injured, and information showing that the company was aware of the design flaw that was causing people to trip, we were able to get around my client’s memory loss and persuade the judge not to throw out the case in Summary judgment. And, while we couldn’t undo my client’s injury, we were able to win our negligence claim against the gas station chain for her children and grandchildren.