This case presented a complex legal challenge where initial appearances were misleading. Our client, a pedestrian crossing with the "walk" signal, was struck by a turning vehicle. While the police report pointed toward the driver and questioned our client's awareness, our investigation uncovered a deeper, systemic failure. The true obstacle was proving the municipality's negligence. The city and their insurers denied all responsibility, insisting their traffic systems were properly maintained and fully operational.
The core difficulty lay in capturing ephemeral evidence: how do you prove a temporary, intermittent fault in a traffic light existed at the exact moment of the incident? Witness accounts were contradictory, and critical electronic records we needed were at risk of being erased due to short data retention policies, creating a race against time.
We overcame these challenges through a relentless and technical investigation that shifted the entire focus of the case. Our first action was to legally secure all potential evidence, sending immediate preservation demands to the city to prevent the destruction of maintenance logs and system data. Digging deeper, we discovered a pattern the city wished to ignore: internal emails revealed three previous near-misses at the same intersection, reported but not acted upon. The breakthrough came from our traffic engineering expert.
By analyzing the intersection's design and the city's own signal data, the expert demonstrated that the pedestrian "walk" signal had a known sensor fault that caused it to activate while cross-traffic had a green turn arrow a direct and catastrophic conflict. We correlated this technical failure with the precise timing of our client's accident.
