Top plaintiff's verdict by dollar: Shinedling v. Sunbeam Products Inc., $59.3 Million

Product liability

Central District

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney

Plaintiffs' lawyers: The Homampour Law Firm, Arash Homampour, Corey C. Arzoumanian

Defense lawyers: Arent Fox LLP, Gary A. Wolensky, Anne Marie Ellis; Goldberg Segalla, David J. O'Connell; Gordon & Rees LLP, Manuel Saldana; Dani Helene Rogers

After a Sunbeam Products Inc. radiant quartz space heater fire killed a Pinon Hills woman in 2011, the lawyer for her husband and children knew he had a tough task ahead to establish liability. Still, Arash Homampour of the Homampour Law Firm managed to persuade a federal jury in Santa Ana to award victim Amy Shinedling's survivors $59.3 million.

The heater's auto shut-off mechanism did not trigger when, in the middle of a January night, clothing near the appliance caught fire. Husband Kenneth Shinedling saved himself and three kids. His wife perished.

Homampour had to acknowledge that the heater was sold with a cautionary warning that combustible materials should be kept at least three feet away from the device.

U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney agreed with Sunbeam's legal team that two reports regarding similar heaters catching fire over a decade were too speculative to support a manufacturing defect claim.

But the judge allowed Homampour to present the jury with a negligence claim based on Sunbeam's assurances to consumers that the heater would shut down automatically if it overheated. Shinedling v. Sunbeam Products Inc., 12-CV438 (C.D. Cal., filed March 27, 2012).

Homampour said his winning strategy was to show jurors that Sunbeam's engineers were aware of a key fact consumers could not know: that the shut-off switch was defective and was likely incapable of preventing a fire.

"Using the heater and the heater's box, I cross-examined Sunbeam's head of safety engineering and project engineer and got them both to admit that they knew the safety feature may not stop a fire, but never told consumers, who would expect that it would," Homampour told The Daily Journal.

The lawyer described himself as "the voice for Amy."

"I cried when the verdict was read because I knew [jurors] heard her," he said. "The size of the award reflects the profound loss this family suffered and will suffer for the rest of their lives."

- John Roemer