Investigating Ski Accident Claims

00:00 Jack Zinda Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda, and I'll be your host. Welcome to another episode of the Effective Lord. This is Jack Zinda, and today I'm going to be talking to you about ski injury cases. These are cases I didn't know a lot about until a few years ago when a friend approached me about they had been hurt on the slopes and wanted my help. We looked into the case, we represented them, and we have now since then, handled several dozen of these cases. You know, we have offices in Colorado and Arizona, New Mexico. And so we've started getting a lot of looks from those as well as attorneys in Texas whose clients were hurt in Colorado. 00:52 Jack Zinda And so I want to try to save you some of the growing pains I had some of the issues on these cases and talk through what makes a good case, what makes a bad case, what you want to look out for, how to investigate these cases, and who's going to pay the ultimate recovery. Okay, so let's talk about the types of cases that we see. Case number one, something happened with the ski resort or the ski resort equipment. We had a case where a woman was on a ski lift and she was, she went to wait for the chair and the chair behind it. They suddenly hit the brakes on the chair in front of her. It swung forward, swung back and hit her in the knees and pushed inverted her knees other way. Extremely painful injury. Okay. 01:38 Jack Zinda And went after this ski resort for their negligence of the employee. We looked at it, we talked to an expert witness on liability. It was clear they were at fault. Well, the first thing I learned when researching is ski resorts have a lot of immunity, especially in Colorado, but other states as well, because they are such, they have such influence in the legislature. They have a lot of carved out exceptions to negligence. And a lot of times it has to be gross negligence. And there's limits in what you recover. And that was a real dog fight. We felt like were 100% right on liability. But because of the immunity issues, which in fact have even gotten more difficult at the time, we've decided we're not taking cases involving ski resorts. 02:22 Jack Zinda And I think you have to be very careful about those because even if the ski resort did something wrong, such as it wasn't marked appropriately, they put something in the wrong spot. The waivers that they have the client sign are very difficult to avoid. And most things are protected through statute. So I would probably stay away from those unless you have the most extreme cases. And you would be shocked at what some of the case law says on what they are protected from doing. So that's case type number one. Okay. Case type number two, you know, your client is sitting there minding their own business, skiing down the slopes, and someone comes flying in and just nails them. And the injuries in these cases can be pretty grotesque. Like we've seen, you know, fractured femurs, extreme concussions, death cases. 03:09 Jack Zinda And it's usually the pattern is someone is either goofing off one of our cases, the person was skiing backwards when they hit our client. I've had a case where the person was intoxicated that hit them, or they're just reckless. Maybe they're going on a slope that they are not qualified to do. If you'd like a copy of any. 03:31 Speaker 2 Of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. 03:54 Jack Zinda First you've got to figure out what happened. How do you do that? Because your client comes to you usually a month or two after the incident. A lot of our clients in these cases, opposed to other types of cases, get, tend to be affluent. So they come to us pretty far after the fact effort occurred, and they're like, I have no idea how I prove this person was at fault. So the first thing you want to do is see if you can get information from the ski resort. And as long as they know you're not going after them, I've had them cooperate and give us either the incident statements or the statement from any witnesses they talk to in trying to track those down. So that's part one. 04:32 Jack Zinda And then you want to see if your client can remember anyone at the scene, friends, family that may have come by that can substantiate how it occurred. You know, back to my policy on liability. You need to be able to establish liability without your client's testimony. In these cases, it can be extremely challenging. So, number one, get witnesses from your client. Number two, check the ski incident reports. Number three, talk to witnesses on the slope. You can also look for cameras. A lot of times the resorts have cameras everywhere now, and they may have picked something up. If you find a witness file, they had a GoPro. And so those are some examples of where you can get the evidence of what occurred. Also check the ER records or the EMS Records or ski patrol records if they were taken from the scene away. 05:15 Jack Zinda Okay, We've established liability, which is really tough, but important in these cases. So the next question is, okay, who is going to pay out in these types of claims? You're like, hey, I don't have ski insurance. Like, that's not a thing. Who would recover on this behalf? And as I told you before, we typically, I don't think we've ever recovered from an individual. We have a couple cases where we recovered from a company, but we typically don't go after individuals because they're going to be judgment proof and it's going to be very difficult to ever make a recovery on our client's behalf. So typically, homeowners insurance is going to pay for the damage caused by someone while they're skiing. 05:56 Jack Zinda They will typically have some sort of general liability clause in their homeowner's insurance that's going to cover for what they did, which usually means you have a minimum of 300,000. But we've also seen 1 million, 2 million and 5 million coverage. That was for the person. Now, if they are extremely high wage earner, they may have what's called an umbrella policy that covers them. So if you have catastrophic injuries, you want to make sure that you cover that. Okay, so we've talked about, you know, the investigation where you get it. Now let's talk about what sort of experts you need. Well, obviously you need your medical experts, but you're also going to need someone that can talk about skiing in these cases. And typically you want someone who maybe, you know, been former ski patrol. 06:35 Jack Zinda There are expert witnesses that focus on these types of cases. You also may need someone that can talk about the trajectory of the person, where they came from, an engineer of some type that can explain why the dynamics the person would have come this way to contradict the defendant story. And that's really critical. So now you want to get expert witness testimony as well as getting fact witnesses. And then you want to make sure that you subpoena the right things from the resort when you're in litigation. So to recap, a few things you want to keep in mind in these cases. Number one, you want to really avoid going after the resorts. Those are really tough cases and there's a lot of secret immunity in there. 07:15 Jack Zinda Number two, when it is a skier on skier incident, you want to get witnesses, you want to track down the ski patrol report, get the report from the resort, try to get video amp evidence, and then try to get anybody who is wearing a GoPro or anything like that, as well as checking, you know, the ER records. Number three. Remember who's going to pay on this? It's typically going to be homeowners insurance. We've had pretty good luck in getting these resolved pre litigation, although we've litigated quite a few as well. And you want to make sure you maximize damages, of course. Make sure you really spoon feeding the insurance company. They're not used to seeing these cases, so you want to make sure you're really clear on liability, why you're going to win, what you're entitled to, etc. 07:56 Jack Zinda If you have any questions on these cases or would like to work together, please feel free to reach out. At this point, we've handled dozens and they can be a little tricky. You can reach us by email or cell phone or text us and happy to help anytime. Till next time. Thanks. 08:15 Speaker 3 Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.