“It was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever been a part of,” said plaintiffs attorney Robert Rust.
A Florida jury awarded $4 million to a woman who suffered serious back injuries after an exterior staircase collapsed at her Melbourne apartment complex, a verdict her attorneys said followed years of litigation, a low pretrial offer and a hard-fought trial over maintenance and inspection failures.
The plaintiff lived in a second-story unit at the Lake in the Woods Apartments in Melbourne when the front portion of an exterior stairway collapsed in September 2023, according to Miami attorney Robert W. Rust of Rust Injury Law, who tried the case with John P. Fischer of Fischer Redavid in Sunrise.
The fall led to medical treatment and, ultimately, major back surgery.
The jury found the property owner, Lake in the Woods of Melbourne Ltd., and the management company, RAM Partners LLC, largely responsible, assigning 90% fault to the defendants and 10% comparative fault to the plaintiff. The verdict will be reduced to $3.6 million after comparative fault is applied, Fischer said.
Photograph of broken staircase that caused plaintiff’s fall.
Am Law 138th-ranked Cole, Scott & Kissane represented the defendants. Michele D. Morales of Orlando was lead attorney and Karina Quinteiro from its Miami office was second chair for the defense. The attorneys did not return an email seeking comment.
Fischer said the plaintiff’s trial team framed the case as one about a failure to maintain the property and a failure to perform adequate inspections. The same stair had been reported loose about 13 months before the collapse, he said, which the plaintiff’s attorneys argued was evidence that the wood rot process had already begun.
“We had the basic way we looked at the case as kind of a failure to maintain and a failure to perform adequate inspections,” Fischer said. “The stair itself had some issues 13 months before, like the specific stair she fell on. It was loose. And what we argued was this was kind of indication that the wood rot process was already in place over a year before.”
The plaintiff’s team retained wood expert Dr. Ralph Moon, who Fischer said typically performs defense-side work, to explain how wood rot progresses and how the stair lost strength over time.
Fischer said the defendants had inspection protocols and documentation requirements, but the plaintiff’s team argued the lack of documentation left open whether meaningful inspections were being performed.
The defense contested liability, Fischer said, despite the plaintiff’s attempts to resolve the case before trial. The best pretrial offer was $250,000, he said. The plaintiff asked the jury for $6.5 million.
“When they make the decision and they’re not offering you much money, it kind of makes the decision easy to go to trial,” Fischer said. “They never gave us an opportunity or a decision to put us into a place where we had to really appreciate the risk of what we’re turning down.”
Rust, who handled the case from its inception and brought Fischer in about six months before trial, said the verdict was the culmination of nearly two and a half years of work.
“It was justice delayed, but not justice denied,” Rust said. “It was a case that I worked on for nearly two and a half years, and we finally got our day in court.”
Rust said the defense repeatedly sought mistrials during trial, but the plaintiff’s team continued pressing forward. The case reached the jury Monday night, he said, and after roughly three hours of deliberations, jurors returned with the $4 million verdict.
“It was one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever been a part of,” Rust said. “As the clerk started reading the verdict, my client started crying. I started crying, the jury started crying. And it’s really just one of those moments that just makes all the hard work worth it.”
The trial was also physically and emotionally demanding, Rust said. In the month leading up to trial, he said, the parties battled over motions in limine and other pretrial issues. On the first two days of trial alone, he estimated the court spent six or seven hours addressing outstanding motions.
“Being in trial, getting up at 5 in the morning every single day, going to bed at 11 p.m. and just doing it again—it was a constant slugfest with the defense, but it just makes the victory that much sweeter when you can come out with a win,” Rust said.
Fischer said the case also raised arguments involving Florida’s newer tort reform law, which the plaintiff’s team was able to navigate successfully. But the broader lesson, he said, was more practical: Some cases have to be tried when settlement negotiations do not reflect the risk.
“Sometimes you’ve just got to find a case, try it, hopefully get a good jury, and you know that they do the right thing,” Fischer said. “We were fortunate that we were able to do that.”