On February 13, 2019, the Honorable Fred C. Eady, Judge of the State Court of Fulton County, denied Schindler Elevator Corporation’s Motion for Summary Judgment, which attempted to dismiss the case filed by Plaintiffs Yvonne and George Cooper. Ms. Cooper, who was an employee of AT&T, was leaving her desk for her evening break on February 12, 2015. She got on an elevator that was supposedly serviced and maintained by Schindler Elevator Corporation. After she got on and the doors closed, the elevator dropped and came to an incredibly hard stop. It was later determined that the elevator had failed catastrophically because worn bearings on the elevator governor activated the steel safety jaws which wedge into the elevator rails and are designed to stop an elevator in a freefall.

Mr. and Mrs. Cooper alleged that Schindler had been negligent in its maintenance of the elevator and failed to notice the worn bearings. According to the Coopers and their attorneys the bearings would have shown telltale signs of wear, like noise and vibrations, before they failed for as much as six months before Mrs. Cooper was injured.

Schindler attempted to have the case dismissed, arguing it had no notice that the elevator was in danger of catastrophic failure and that elevators sometimes just break on their own. Judge Eady rejected these arguments and denied the Corporation’s Motion. The matter will now proceed to trial, likely in the Spring.

Attorneys for the Coopers were Laddey, Clark & Ryan’s Andrew Fraser and Timothy Dinan, who have had several cases against the Morristown, New Jersey-based Schindler Elevator Corporation. In July, Fraser and Dinan obtained a $2 million-dollar verdict against Schindler in Reno, Nevada. That verdict followed an $8 million and a $4 million-dollar verdicts the pair received in Morristown against Schindler.