Andrew P. Mcdevitt

SAN FRANCISCO - One reason Andrew P. McDevitt has been able to secure a number of multimillion-dollar settlements over his decade-plus as a tort plaintiffs' lawyer is his engineering background. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering with high honors in 2006 and worked in the field for a while before heading off to law school.

That training and experience set him apart from many of his colleagues and peers.

He has no trouble digging into cases involving scientific analysis and product reconstruction, he said. "I think the engineering background helps in knowing the fundamental principles of design and feeling comfortable wading through material related to the design" of a product to identify what might be problematic or missing, he said.

For instance, this spring, he obtained a settlement for the parents of a 19-year-old driver who died from severe head trauma when the passenger side airbags in his car did not deploy in a multivehicle accident. The carmaker said there were no sensors available that could have detected the impact, which was toward the front of the car adjacent to the passenger door.

McDevitt went digging through old journals from the Society of Automotive Engineers and discovered an article describing a pressure sensor that would have worked. The article and others were written by component suppliers the carmaker used and were published before the car in question was manufactured.

"I felt like we were able to get good leverage" with that, he said. Within his firm, McDevitt said, he is "known for being relentless in turning over rocks to get to an answer or chasing a thread until I get to the bottom of it." An example of that is the $4 million settlement he obtained early this year for the family of a 26-year-old software engineer who was killed when he rear-ended a slow-moving construction truck while exiting a confusing lane closure at night-- even though evidence showed he had been speeding and using his phone at some point before the accident.

By wading through civil engineering manuals from CalTrans, McDevitt discovered that what he described as the "quasi-slalom"- like lane closure was laid out improperly, with insufficient space and inaccurate signs. "It's certainly not easy reading," he said about the manuals. Winton v Sposesto, 20-CIV-03694 (San Mateo Super. Ct., filed Aug. 31, 2020).

In March, McDevitt negotiated a $5.5 million settlement with the city of Rocklin over a poorly designed four-way stop that contributed to a crash that left his client with severe brain injuries. Through depositions and discovery about shrubs, road slopes and more, he figured out that "the intersection was designed in pieces" without anyone seeing it as a whole. He also found out about many previous accidents at the intersection. Faulkner v. Brazil, SCV0042659 (Placer Super. Ct., filed April 2, 2019).

"That one took a lot of digging," he said. What also helps him in traffic cases is that he has developed a method to pull raw data on collisions from the California Highway Patrol portal. "It's like 10 or 15 steps," he said. "I don't think anybody else does it besides me because it's not intuitive."