Defense Verdict for Dairy Farm Clients

I recently completed a two week jury trial in Jefferson County Superior Court located in Port Townsend, Washington obtaining a defense verdict for my clients who have owned and operated their dairy farm in nearby Chimacum since the late 1800s. Plaintiffs' attorney glossed over our trial victory when recently reporting a $2.7 million plaintiffs' verdict to the Seattle Times against another defendant, Sprint Company (who I did not represent). So, here is some of the missing part of the story about my clients' case.

Plaintiffs claimed that my clients negligently allowed a horse named 'Vega' to escape from their farm onto a nearby roadway where it was struck and killed by a one-ton utility bucket truck driven by a Sprint telephone installer, defendant John Burnston. The plaintiff, Nanette Aurdal, subsequently ran over the dead horse in her 1994 Ford Explorer allegedly causing her injuries. The jury later found that Mr. Burnston was culpable for causing plaintiff's subsequent accident by leaving the dead horse in the road for a time (while proceeding to a Sprint work station a distance away) without stopping to secure the scene of the accident.

Plaintiffs spent as much energy trying to prove alleged liability of my clients (as they did in their case against Sprint) contending via testimony by their "equine management" expert that the farm's fencing used to contain the horse was 'substandard', inadequate and too flimsy to withstand storm damage which allowed the animal to escape.

Plaintiffs' expert also complained that once Vega escaped, that my clients did not take appropriate and timely action(s) to capture the horse (e.g., that the perimeter fence and driveway exit should have been blocked and that all personnel on the farm should have been summoned and employed to attempt capture). We countered with our own expert on these issues as well as with other witnesses who were at the scene of the escape.

The expert testimony covered many intricacies of horse care including the types of fencing appropriate in various settings to contain horses (e.g., electrified, wire, ribbon and wood fencing) and accepted or 'best' strategies or tactics to employ to catch a horse once it is on the loose (taking into account behavioral/psychological traits common to horses). In the end, the jury found that we successfully rebutted the statutory inference of negligence (once a farm animal enters a roadway in a Restricted Area) finding my clients completely faultless for the plaintiff's accident and her personal injuries/damages.