Carbon monoxide cases are among the most misunderstood in personal injury law, and attorneys regularly decline or undervalue them without realizing what they are holding. Our firm handles carbon monoxide poisoning cases nationwide, and the patterns we see are consistent.
The evidence disappears faster than in any other case type. Carbon monoxide is colorless and odorless, and the proof of what happened can vanish within days. Appliances get repaired or replaced, ventilation gets fixed, homes get aired out, and the poisoning scene effectively cleans itself. The first days after a poisoning matter more than in almost any other case. Before anything else, the appliances, the flue and venting, and the space itself need to be inspected, documented, and preserved by qualified professionals.
The defendant pool is wider than most attorneys assume. A carbon monoxide poisoning is rarely just a landlord case. Depending on the facts, responsible parties can include the manufacturer of a furnace, water heater, or stove; the contractor or technician who installed or serviced it; the company that inspected it; a property manager; and in some cases a utility or fuel supplier. In one of our cases, the poisoning resulted from the combined operation of a wood stove and a gas furnace, a mechanism no one identified until the right experts examined the system as a whole.
The injuries are routinely underdiagnosed. Carbon monoxide causes brain injury, and survivors often present with cognitive impairment, memory loss, and personality changes that emergency rooms attribute to other causes or miss entirely. Proving these injuries requires neuropsychological testing and physicians who understand the medicine of CO exposure, not just a carboxyhemoglobin number from the ER.
Not every exposure is a case. Carbon monoxide claims justify their considerable expense when the harm is serious: deaths, permanent brain injury, or lasting cognitive impairment confirmed by testing. Where the poisoning caused significant harm, though, the cases are consistently worth more than attorneys expect.
These cases support significant recoveries when they are fully worked. Our firm obtained a $30 million settlement in a carbon monoxide poisoning case that claimed multiple lives and left two people severely injured, caused by the combined operation of a wood stove and a gas furnace. Results like that come from treating a CO case as the complex products, premises, and medical case it actually is.
If you are an attorney evaluating a possible carbon monoxide case, we are glad to talk it through with you, whether as a referral, an association, or simply a consultation. Presley & Presley Trial Lawyers is based in Kansas City, Missouri, handling catastrophic injury, wrongful death, and insurance bad faith cases across the country.
