Published Cases

PRECEDENTS

Judges of state appellate courts and federal courts authorize official publication of their decisions if they believe the case has public importance and will help judges correctly decide similar cases in the future. These "precedents" are "law" that judges rely on, in their effort to assure that the same legal principles are applied in all similar cases. This helps assure that legal decisions will be rational, equally applied, and (somewhat) predictable. Here are summaries of some precedents that Silvern Law helped to establish.

James v. Coors, 73 Fed. Supp. 2d 1250 (U.S. Dist.Ct. Colo. 1999).

This is a published federal court decision deciding the defendants' motion to set aside a jury verdict for our client. It took us twelve days of trial to prove our case, and the jury found that the defendants should pay $660,000 for compensatory damages and additional $775,000 for punitive damages. (For more information on this case, click NEWS CLIPPINGS.) Preserving the trial verdict was most important to our client, but the case is more often cited as precedent regarding the interpretation of Colorado's "tort reform" laws limiting damages. The Judge agreed with us that under the Colorado law limiting punitive damages to the amount of compensatory damages, the interest on the compensatory damages would be included in the punitive damages. However, the Colorado law limiting "non-economic" damages to a total of $250,000 was applied to the jury's award for loss of reputation, which reduced our judgment by $50,000. The ultimate result was that a total judgment of $1,380,302 plus interest and costs was entered in our client's favor.

Nasca v. State Farm Mutual Auto Insurance Co., 12 P.3d 346 (Colo.App. 2000).

This case was one of our most difficult challenges. We set a nationally recognized precedent prohibiting insurance companies from concealing significant business relationships with the arbitrators who decide cases against them. Many kinds of contracts, including many insurance policies, require that claims be decided by arbitration instead of regular court trials. The parties to these contracts lose their right to a jury trial. Instead, they must present their legal case to an arbitration panel, which is usually three lawyers. The arbitrators have more power than a judge and jury combined. Unlike judges, arbitrators' legal rulings cannot be appealed to a higher court.

It turned out State Farm was repeatedly using the same lawyers from the same small law firm, to decide numerous cases as arbitrators, and also to testify as paid "expert witnesses" for State Farm in bad faith cases. Mr. Nasca tried his underinsured motorist case to an arbitral panel including one of these lawyers. State Farm had paid several hundreds thousand dollars to her law firm over many years. The arbitrators denied Mr. Nasca's UM claim.

Years after his arbitration, we decided to try to help Mr. Nasca finally obtain justice. The Denver District Court agreed that State Farm violated Colorado's arbitration law, but State Farm appealed. In a published decision, the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that the failure to disclose State Farm's business relationship with its arbitrator constituted "undue means" under the Uniform Arbitration Act.

The Nasca case was very important in reforming arbitrations in Colorado. It also had a national impact. The National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws cited Nasca in the Official Comments to the 2000 Revision of the Uniform Arbitration Act. The Commissioners cited our case to support their recommendation that the legislation include an explicit, statutory requirement that any arbitrator-party relationship that might indicate bias must be disclosed to the other party. Colorado, and many other states, has since passed this disclosure requirement into law.

These days, more cases are decided in "alternative dispute resolution" than by trials in courts of law. We are proud to have helped restore basic fairness to arbitrations in Colorado and throughout the U.S.

Rosales v. City & County of Denver, 89 P. 3d 507 (Colo.App. 2004).

At a city park, a rotten branch fell from a tree near a picnic table, injuring our client. The City contended our client had no claim because of Colorado's Governmental Immunity Law. In Colorado, our politicians have chosen to immunize government employees from being sued for many types of wrongdoing that the rest of us may be sued for. However, in this case, the Court of Appeals agreed with us that governments could be held liable for failing to maintain trees in picnic areas to keep them reasonably safe. Hopefully this precedent will lead to greater attention to the safety of people who enjoy a picnic.

Gabriel v. City and County of Denver, 524 P.2d 36 (Colo.App. 1991).

This is an appeal we lost, but at least we drew attention to a ridiculous law. We argued that Colorado's Governmental Immunity Act violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution because it authorized adult prison inmates to sue for negligence in the operation of jails, but precluded innocent children from suing for the negligence of their care taking institutions (group homes, etc.) The Colorado Court of Appeals deferred jurisdiction of the constitutional issue to the Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court declined to review the case. Thirteen years later, Steve is still upset about it.