Cannon & Dunphy, S.C. has won more $10 million and higher awards than any other personal injury law firm in Wisconsin.

Automatic doors are everywhere; at airports, shopping malls, grocery stores, hospitals, and medical offices, just to name a few places. Automatic doors come in various forms, including automatic sliding doors, automatic swinging doors, and automatic revolving doors. Most people take automatic doors for granted. They assume that, when they approach these doors, the doors will open up automatically for them, and will not close on them until they have walked safely through. Unfortunately, all too often, these doors malfunction, and close suddenly and without warning. When this happens, the doors can knock a person down to the ground, or crush them. Those most vulnerable to injury from malfunctioning automatic doors are the elderly and young children. According to the American Association of Automatic Door Manufacturers, properly installed, inspected and maintained automatic doors should never close on a person. Unfortunately, we have found that routine inspection and maintenance of automatic doors is often neglected by those who own the premises where such doors are installed. In order to ensure that automatic doors function properly, they must be inspected at least annually by a qualified automatic door service technician. In addition, daily inspections must be done by the owner of the premises. When automatic doors are not properly maintained and inspected, the sensors may not function properly, and tragedy can occur.

Cannon & Dunphy, S.C. has handled several serious injury and death cases involving malfunctioning automatic doors. If you or a loved one has been injured or killed as a result of a malfunctioning automatic door, contact us. We have the experience and knowledge necessary to thoroughly investigate the circumstances surrounding the malfunction and determine the cause of the malfunction.

A sample of Cannon & Dunphy's previous results involving malfunctioning automatic doors:

• $215,000 settlement obtained on behalf of an elderly woman who was knocked down by a malfunctioning automatic sliding door at a shopping mall and sustained multiple leg fractures. In this case, we established that the owners of the mall failed to perform the daily safety inspections of the doors required by the door manufacturer. It is imperative that safety inspections are done every day to ensure that the doors function properly, and, specifically, to make sure that the doors will not suddenly close on a person attempting to walk through them. Unfortunately for our client, the mall employees were never told nor trained to perform these safety inspections

       Location:  Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, WI


• Confidential settlement obtained for the widow of a elderly man who was knocked down by an automatic swinging door while exiting a medical clinic. The man had just left his doctor’s office located inside the medical clinic. The particular doors were equipped with handicapped push button controls, but were not equipped with any presence sensors. As the man approached the doors, they were open, so he started to walk through when they suddenly closed on him, knocking him to the ground. He sustained a skull fracture as a result of striking his head on the ground, and died approximately one month later after slipping into a coma. We successfully argued that the absence of presence sensors installed on the doors rendered them unsafe. Presence sensors, when installed on such doors, will sense whether a person is still in the vicinity of the doors, and keep the doors from closing until such time as the person is out of the range of the swing path of the doors. Because the subject doors were not equipped with presence sensors, the doors were unsafe, in that the doors when activated by the push plate would open and then close at the end of a predetermined timing sequence, regardless of whether a person was still trying to walk through the doors.
   
       Location: Brookfield, Wisconsin