Los Angeles Jury Returns $6.06 Million Verdict for Sidewalk Injury in Heravi v. City of Los Angeles

On December 27, 2019, Payman Heravi was walking along Ventura Boulevard in Woodland Hills when his foot caught a raised lip of concrete. A tree root growing under the sidewalk had pushed one panel up against the next, leaving an edge roughly two and a half inches high. Heravi, then 59, was looking at his phone. He went down hard on his left side.

The fall broke his left upper arm and tore the rotator cuff in his left shoulder. Three surgeries and years of physical therapy followed, and his doctors testified that a fourth operation was still likely. The injury ended his career photographing weddings, work that depended on lifting and holding a camera for hours. "Right now, the pain is a lot," Heravi said. "Right now, I can't use my shoulder."

The Dominguez Firm, with Analicia Avila handling the case alongside co-counsel Max Lee of The Simon Law Group, sued the City of Los Angeles in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The central question was notice. Avila showed that the uplift had sat there for more than two years and that the city had records of the defect yet never sent a crew to grind or replace the panel. A city that controls its walkways, she argued, owes pedestrians a reasonable repair.

The city pointed to the phone in Heravi's hand. Its lawyers argued he would have seen the raised concrete had he been watching the ground, and they asked the jury to put the blame on him. Before trial the city had offered $300,000. Heravi's side had asked for $1 million.

After a ten-day trial before Judge Frederick Shaller, the jury deliberated about two hours. On August 6, 2025, it returned a gross verdict of $6,056,052. It then divided responsibility evenly, assigning 50 percent of the fault to Heravi for looking at his phone and 50 percent to the city for the sidewalk, which cut his recovery to roughly $3,028,026.

The award landed inside a much larger bill. Over the prior five years, Los Angeles had paid more than $86 million to resolve sidewalk injury claims, and the panel that hurt Heravi was still in place when the verdict came in.