Bruce A. Broillet

Broillet was in his first day of torts class in 1971 at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law when a professor told him, “The interesting thing about torts is no two cases are the same.”

Broillet said that maxim has largely held true. “Every single case is different from the one before and the one that is going to come after it.”

Broillet recently handled a $3.3 billion settlement against tobacco companies on behalf of Los Angeles County. And in an upcoming trial he is representing the Keck family in a wrongful death suit against the Bel-Air Bay Club over the death of William M. Keck III. The suit alleges he suffered from heat exposure and club employees interacted with him for three hours in the locker room without providing or calling for medical aid, according to a report by KFI AM 640. “9-1-1 should have been called much earlier than they actually did,” Broillet said.

Broillet secured a $10 million settlement in a case he handled last year involving a 16-year-old high school football player who was involved in a car accident with a truck owned by a farm in Northern California. “It was beyond bad driving, it was also the way the company was maintaining the brakes, and it never should have been on the road,” Broillet said. Holler v. Usegi Farms, 18CV322569 (Santa Clara County Super. Ct., filed Jan. 30, 2018).

A long-term concern Broillet has tried to address in several cases is ensuring skylights on the top of buildings are made safer for workers.

Through his work on cases related to workers’ deaths and catastrophic injuries from crashing through skylights, Broillet said he’s seen a clear line of progress from pressuring companies through litigation to improve their safety practices. “It’s been such a prevalent problem in America that the government began keeping statistics on workers falling through skylights,” Broillet said. “That’s how bad it’s been.”

“What we’re hoping to see happen because of lawsuits like the ones we have brought, we’re hoping to see all across the country these very dangerous skylights that have no guarding over them to gradually become guarded,” Broillet said. “There’s something about making either a building owner or an architect ... pay money damages for the lack of safety that moves us in the direction ultimately of safety.”

— Carter Stoddard