March 30, 2006 : Brian L. Calistri Obtains Federal Court Victory in Fire Loss Claim
Brian L. Calistri, a partner in the Philadelphia office of Weber Gallagher Simpson Stapleton Fires & Newby LLP, obtained a major victory in federal court in Philadelphia defending a $1.25 million fire loss claim. The January 2000 fire, which caused considerable damage to a factory in Philadelphia, was alleged by the factory’s insurer to have been caused by a defective computer monitor manufactured by the Firm’s client.
Over the four-year course of the litigation, it was believed that the computer monitor remnants had been lost and therefore could not be examined for product identification. Since witnesses and documents had identified the monitor at the work station near where the fire began as being manufactured by the Firm’s client, the action proceeded even in absence of the product. However, during a warehouse inspection last year, Mr. Calistri and the client’s engineering expert located the monitor remnants among the other evidence that survived the fire, and the expert expressed his belief that these monitor remnants were not consistent with the components of a monitor made by the Firm’s client. The Firm subsequently filed a motion for summary judgment on the issue, but after the plaintiff responded with expert opinion of its own (asserting that the fire remnants were indeed from a monitor made by the Firm’s client) the trial judge deferred the matter for trial.
Mr. Calistri requested and received a pre-trial evidentiary hearing, at which our client’s chief designer of monitors testified as to the product identification in court. Mr. Calistri had the actual evidence from the fire delivered to the courtroom, and the chief designer pieced through the evidence and explained to the trial court why the surviving monitor parts could not have been from a monitor manufactured by his company. Plaintiff brought its own engineering expert to the hearing – the same one who had stated in his report that the monitor parts had come from our client’s monitor – but counsel’s cross-examination of the chief designer was ineffective.
On March 29, 2006, the Honorable Lawrence F. Stengel of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania issued a Memorandum Opinion and Order granting the Firm’s motion for summary judgment and dismissed the matter. A copy of the Court’s Opinion and Order is available for download in PDF format by clicking the link below.
File Under: Results, General Liability, Product Liability, Brian L. Calistri