Episode Details

This week, your hosts Steve Lowry and Yvonne Godfrey interview Christine Spagnoli of Greene Broillet & Wheeler LLP (https://www.gbw.law/).

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Episode Details:

Santa Monica, California attorney Christine Spagnoli of Greene Broillet & Wheeler LLP shares how she advocated for injured church members and their grieving families after a Ford E350 15-passenger van overturned following a tire tread separation. In April 2004, four members of Fair Oaks Presbyterian Church traveled on Sacramento's I-5 in a van equipped with Goodyear Load Range E tires. Due to known tread separation problems, Goodyear conducted a voluntary replacement program on these tires, but Ford failed to notify its dealers. The tread on the church van's factory-mounted Goodyear tires separated, causing the van to flip four times, killing the driver William Brownell and front-seat passenger Tony Mauro and injuring passengers Marlene Shirley and Alexander Bessonov. Ford knew the E350 15-passenger van was susceptible to overturning, given professional driver tests that indicated oversteering and handling issues, but the company allowed the vehicle to go to market without modifying the design. In 2011, a Sacramento jury found Ford Motor Company negligent and returned a $73 million verdict, including $50 million in punitive damages against Ford in favor of the plaintiffs.

Click Here to Read/Download the Complete Trial Documents

Guest Bios:

Christine D. Spagnoli:

Christine D. Spagnoli is a partner of Greene, Broillet & Wheeler in Santa Monica, specializing in representing plaintiffs in product liability, personal injury and legal malpractice actions. She has obtained many multimillion-dollar verdicts, including the 1999 General Motors case in which a defective fuel tank was found responsible for the burn injuries of two adults and four children. The jury returned with a landmark $4.9 billion verdict. She was co-counsel in the largest personal injury verdict in California, which resulted in a $58 million verdict for a man severely burned by a defective O-ring.

She has also spear-headed litigation to protect consumers from injuries and deaths involving 15 passenger vans including:

• A March 2018 jury verdict of $25.9 million awarded to the family of a church volunteer in New Port Richey, Florida who died in a rollover of a Ford 15 passenger van after the left rear tire tread separated. (Named by National Law Journal as one of the Top 100 Verdicts of 2018)
• A November 2011 jury verdict of $73 million (including $50 million in punitive damages) awarded to the family of a church volunteer in Sacramento who died in a rollover crash of a Ford 15 passenger van following a tire tread separation. In that case, the jury found that the van’s defective design led to the loss of control and that Ford knew about the dangers of tread separations but failed to warn consumers to remove recalled tires that were prone to separation.
• A July 2010 jury verdict of $5 million for a man injured when the roof of his Ford 15 passenger van crushed in a rollover causing permanent spinal cord injuries.

Her achievements cover the full range of personal injury and product liability cases. Recently, Chris served as the Plaintiffs’ Co-Lead Counsel in the Federal Express Vehicle Collision Cases resulting from the May 2015 crash involving a FedEx tractor-trailer that crossed a median in Orland, California colliding with a charter bus full of high school students, killing 10 and injuring dozens. The cases settled in October of 2017 on the eve of trial after Chris and her team successfully fought ef