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Galfand Berger Product Liability Attorney Obtains Record Recovery

Wednesday, November 4, 2009 by

At Galfand Berger our Philadelphia injury attorneys have been helping catastrophically injured clients for over 60 years and our firm continues to raise the bar for obtaining verdicts and settlements in Pennsylvania. Recently Galfand Berger Senior Partner, Richard Jurewicz, obtained a $2.2 million settlement, the third highest recovery ever recorded in Berks County, Pennsylvania.

The settlement involved a fifty-one year old factory worker who suffered severe internal injuries which required several surgeries and a nearly three month hospital stay. The worker’s torso was trapped and part of his digestive system was cut when the loading bar on a coil stacker machine pinned him to the machine’s frame.

The foreign manufacturer of the coil stacker involved in the accident had built the machine for the worker’s employer as a replacement for an older machine from the mid 1970s. Mr. Jurewicz claimed the manufacturer was liable for the worker’s injuries because the machine had a flawed design. He argued that the manufacturer should have built the new machine with guards at the entrance where the coils enter the machine. The absence of such entrance guards allowed the machine’s loading bar to create a “pinch point” hazard, which entrapped the worker. Another basic safety issue was that the machine’s control panel did not have an option to move the coils in jog or reverse modes when they got stuck.

The second highest recovery in Berks County, a $2.5 million settlement, was also obtained by Mr. Jurewicz in 2007 when he argued on behalf of a fifty-five year old truck driver. The driver suffered permanently disabling injuries when helping a South Jersey refinery employee guide an asphalt-loading pipe into his tanker the unclogging of a blockage caused the pipe to jump up and knock the truck driver down twelve feet onto the concrete floor below. Mr. Jurewicz argued that the refinery’s lax safety precautions had caused the accident.

Joseph Lurie
Galfand Berger, LLP
1818 Market Street, Suite 2300
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Tel: 1-877-228-1528
Fax: 215-564-226