Louisiana Appellate Court Affirms $4 Million-Plus Jury Verdict Against Energy Company Arising from Workplace Incident Following Hurricane Gustav

In the 2008 clean-up efforts from Hurricane Gustav in Louisiana, an electrical worker from an Oklahoma company that volunteered to help, suffered significant injuries while attempting to repair the damaged portion of a downed power line.  The local company supervising the operation appealed a multimillion dollar jury verdict in favor of the worker on multiple grounds.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal in Louisiana refused to set the verdict aside because the trial judge did not need to instruct the jury on a lack of duty to protect the worker from open and obvious dangers, and an instruction that a duty of “utmost care” existed was not erroneous.  The court also refused to set aside the jury’s award of $4,750,000 in general damages or its allocation of comparative fault among the parties (50% fault to the Louisiana company, 30% to the worker, and 20% to the Oklahoma company), finding those calculations reasonable and not clearly wrong.  The court did find the jury’s assessment of $300,000 for loss of earning capacity erroneous and actually increased that valuation to $1,872,030 based on uncontradicted expert testimony (the supervising company did not present a competing economist or challenge the plaintiff’s expert’s method of calculation).

The appellate court did, however, take issue with the trial judge’s indemnity analysis.  The trial judge originally determined that based on the language of the indemnity contract between the Louisiana company and the Oklahoma company that volunteered assistance, responsibility for any comparative fault of the plaintiff should be borne by the Louisiana company.  The appellate court, finding that the indemnification obligation was not triggered until the imposition of legal responsibility for loss, damage, cost, or expense, concluded that the trial judge erred in allocating the plaintiff’s comparative fault to the Louisiana company because the plaintiff had never been found liable to himself for his own injuries.