Calcanas v. Schier: A $1.03 Million Jury Verdict Tried by The Dominguez Firm

Calcanas v. Schier began as a motor-vehicle injury claim and finished in front of a jury. Rather than close with a private settlement, the plaintiff, named in the court record as Calcanas, pressed the case against the defendant, Schier, all the way to verdict in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The trial concluded in 2019.

The plaintiff was represented by Olivier A. Taillieu and Maura Taillieu, who tried the case for The Dominguez Firm, a Los Angeles personal-injury practice. A claim like this one reaches a jury for a narrow set of reasons. Usually the two sides cannot agree on who was at fault for the collision, on how badly the plaintiff was hurt, or on what those injuries are worth. A defendant who chooses to try a case admits neither figure, so both fault and damages have to be proven in court. When a case settles, the number stays private. When it goes to verdict, the number becomes part of the public record.

Here, the jury found for the plaintiff and set damages at $1,025,000. The venue was Los Angeles County Superior Court, where civil injury claims are decided by a jury rather than a single judge. That seven-figure award is the amount recorded in the county's 2019 verdict rankings, with no reduction noted alongside it.

The result registered in two separate categories. It placed 31st among the top 50 personal-injury verdicts returned in Los Angeles County during 2019, and 22nd among the county's top 50 motor-vehicle accident verdicts for the same year. Both lists credit the same trial team: Olivier A. Taillieu and Maura Taillieu of The Dominguez Firm.

Those rankings come from TopVerdict, a service that compiles and orders reported jury results by jurisdiction and category each year. Appearing on both of its top 50 lists for the county means the award ranked among the fifty largest injury verdicts, and the fifty largest motor-vehicle verdicts, tried in Los Angeles that year.

A single-plaintiff auto case does not often clear the million-dollar mark at trial. Most claims of this kind settle for less, and many that reach a jury return smaller numbers, or nothing at all. The Calcanas verdict did neither. Across both the personal-injury and the motor-vehicle rankings for 2019, the figure listed for the case is the same: $1,025,000.