The Haggard Law Firm’s Kimberly Wald and Michael Haggard have secured a $12.5 Million settlement in a boating negligence case involving a 29-year-old rendered a quadriplegic during an excursion to a sandbar off of Fort Lauderdale.
Due to the terms of the settlement, the name of the parties is confidential.
On May 1, 2021, John Doe (The Haggard Law Firm’s client) and his friends chartered a boat and hired an experienced boat captain to take them around Fort Lauderdale on an afternoon booze cruise. The captain allowed John and his friends to bring alcohol and coolers onto the boat. The group first went to a local beach where they drank alcohol and partied for a while. After that, John passed out on the boat and awoke at the second destination, the Fort Lauderdale sandbar. When he woke up, he noticed his friends were all in the water so he dove head first off the boat. Unfortunately for John, this sandbar was very shallow and John suffered a spinal cord injury which left him, a 29-year-old, a quadriplegic.
Prior to his injury John was a bar manager at a local restaurant and was living completely independently. was dating a woman he thought he would marry one day. The catastrophic injury he suffered led to a breakup between the two. As a result of the catastrophic injuries he sustained, John had to move in with his parents who now are his caretakers and attend to him around the clock.
Defendants in this case claimed that John was at fault for his own injuries because he dove head first into a sandbar which he knew was very shallow and that the captain had warned all of the passengers, including John, of this danger. Defendants deposed many of the passengers on the boat, some of whom testified that they remembered some safety briefings but did not remember the details of those briefings.
Haggard and Wald argued that the safety briefings, even if they existed, were so vague and ambiguous no one knew what to expect or even what locations they were going to. Moreover, they argued the captain had the ultimate responsibility to monitor the alcohol consumption of the guests and had a duty to end the charter if any guest became intoxicated.
