On a routine shopping trip in Crystal City, Missouri, our client's foot caught on an unguarded pallet sitting on the sales floor. The fall fractured his femur and ended the retirement he had built for himself.
Our client spent his career as a fourth-grade teacher. After retiring, he kept busy working part-time and spending his summers farming and tending a garden he was proud of. He was the kind of person who stayed in motion.
On May 17, 2020, that changed in the aisle of an Aldi grocery store. The store had a wooden pallet sitting out on the sales floor, being used for a product display, unguarded and without the protective safeguards the manufacturer's own instructions called for. As our client walked through, his foot caught on it. He went down hard, and the fall fractured his femur.
Surgery and rehabilitation followed. What didn't fully follow was his old life. He was left dependent on a walker, unable to keep up with the farming and gardening that had defined his retirement. The garden he had cultivated for years went untended.
By the time our client came to us, another law firm had already looked at the case and declined to take it. Premises liability cases against large corporate defendants are not simple, and a pallet on a store floor can look, at first glance, like a hard case to prove.
We didn't see it that way. Working with a co-counsel and referral partner, we took on Aldi, a multi-billion dollar retailer, over its failure to use basic, inexpensive safety measures, like pallet protectors, that could have prevented the fall entirely.
Aldi's opening move was an offer of $125,000. For a man facing permanent mobility limitations after a femur fracture, that number wasn't close to reflecting what he had lost. We rejected it and filed suit.
We spent the next several months building the case the way we build every case, with a trial-tested and proven team. We documented the hazard, the store's own safety obligations, and the full extent of what the injury had taken from our client's daily life.
Two and a half weeks before trial was set to begin, the case resolved for $2,500,000, twenty times Aldi's original offer.
Premises liability cases involving large retailers come with a built-in disadvantage: the defendant has resources, in-house risk management teams, and lawyers who defend these claims routinely. A pallet on a sales floor doesn't sound, on its face, like a case that will move a jury.
That is exactly why another firm passed on it. But the facts told a different story once we dug in: a retailer that had ignored basic, low-cost safety measures its own supplier recommended, and a client whose injury was serious, permanent, and well documented.
Aldi's $125,000 opening offer reflected an assumption, that a declined case, an older client, and a pallet injury add up to a case that settles cheap and fast. That assumption didn't survive contact with a firm prepared to file suit and take the case to trial.
Cases get passed on for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with merit, caseload, resources, or risk tolerance among them. Before accepting that a case isn't worth pursuing, it's worth getting a second opinion from a firm built to try cases, not just settle them.
Aldi is a multi-billion dollar company. The safety measure it skipped, a pallet protector, is inexpensive and standard. Scale doesn't excuse a business from the same duty of care owed by any property owner. Holding a large company accountable for a small, preventable failure is exactly the kind of case that requires a firm willing to file suit.
Twenty times the opening offer didn't come from negotiating harder over the same facts. It came from building the case, documenting the hazard, the company's own safety standards, and the real impact on our client's life, to the point where going to trial was a real threat, not a bluff.
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