Jury Awards $1.6 Million Verdict After $37 Million Demand

May 16, 2024

After a 17 day trial, a Los Angeles County jury reached a verdict in a case involving a self-employed compound pharmacist who was injured during a yoga class when a stretch band detached from the wall and some metal pieces of the band struck the base of her skull. Scott L. Hengesbach of Murchison & Cumming represented the yoga studio.

The yoga studio admitted it was negligent and, that its negligence was a cause of the plaintiff's injuries and damages. The studio contended that the yoga band was defectively manufactured, defectively designed and, that the manufacturer failed to provide adequate warnings and instructions to the studio and users about the prospect of the bands coming apart.

This incident caused the band to act like a slingshot, leading to a seizure lasting about 30 seconds. The plaintiff experienced three more seizures, with the last one observed by EMTs who labeled the events as tonic-clonic seizures. The plaintiff spent two days at Northridge Hospital where she experienced a couple more seizures, one of which was observed by the attending neurologist.

Five months after the incident, the plaintiff returned to the neurologist at Cedars Sinai, still experiencing seizures, headaches, neck pain, post-concussive symptoms, anxiety, depression, irritability, and insomnia. Approximately six months post-accident, the plaintiff returned to work and suffered a seizure captured by a security camera in her pharmacy, leading to her taking another few months off work.

In March 2018, she was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury, post-concussive syndrome, post-traumatic headaches, and likely non-epileptic, psychogenic seizures. Brain MRIs in 2018 and 2020 again revealed two small infarcts in the plaintiff's right frontal lobe, which her experts later described as gliosis (scarring) due to the subject head trauma. The plaintiff next saw a neurologist at UCLA, who diagnosed her with a frontal lobe seizure disorder, also known as partial seizures, which he correlated with the abnormal MRI findings.

After two days of deliberations, the jury entered a verdict of 65% responsibility for the yoga studio in the amount of $1.6 million, a positive result after the plaintiff's closing demand of $37 million.