Tops in Stove Tip-Over Litigation

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS, September 13, 1999 -- In 1994, Timothy E. McKenna, a Houston solo practitioner, got two calls, a month apart, from prospective clients who claimed to have been injured by stoves that had tipped over and fallen on them. At the time, McKenna didn’t even know a stove could tip over.

To get up to speed, he says, he searched electronic databases where fellow members of plaintiffs lawyer trade groups exchange information about cases.

Not surprisingly, Dan Sciano’s name popped up. The 44-year-old San Antonio plaintiffs lawyer is one of the nation’s foremost experts on stove tip-over litigation.

"He is the Kojak of stove lawyers," says McKenna, who was so impressed by the stockpile of evidence Sciano had uncovered about stoves, and the propensity of some to tip, that he signed his cases over to Sciano.

Sciano’s steady climb to niche stardom began in 1986 when his boss, Franklin D. Houser, came to the young lawyer five years out of law school with a case involving a young girl, Jennifer Villareal, who had been badly burned by a falling stove.

Like McKenna, Sciano started by networking.

What he found was an atomized plaintiffs bar — a smattering of lawyers across the country with limited experience.

"I learned there was not a lot of data about stove tip-overs," he says.

To prove that the stove that injured Villareal was defectively designed, Sciano would have to establish that there was a technologically and economically feasible alternative design. And to secure punitive damages, he would also need to show that the manufacturer knew about and chose not to implement the alternative design.

That would take engineering evidence and smoking gun memoranda, and, of course, money.

Houser, a partner in Tinsman & Houser where Sciano is now a partner, was prepared for the sizeable expense of mounting such an offensive.

His firm had blazed a trail in products liability litigation involving defective fuel tanks in the mid-1970s and flammable fabrics in the early 1980s.

"The stock-in-trade of a plaintiffs practice is . . . money for major pieces of litigation," he says.

Better than lucre, though, Houser has Sciano.

Says Houser: "He has a nose for facts. He is dogged and he never gives up."

In the Villareal case, which was settled for a confidential amount, Sciano started the arduous process of gathering information about stoves.

"The early stages of the litigation meant going to Underwriter’s Laboratory [a facility that tests products for hazards] and looking through hundreds of thousands of documents for the four to five that showed knowledge of the problem," Sciano says.

It also meant coaxing lawyers who had handled stove cases to pull their old files out of storage, mining electronic databases for damning information and, perhaps most importantly, deposing experts wherever they could be found.

To find former industry stove engineers who were willing to talk, Sciano was not above some amateur sleuthing.

He recounts one instance where he asked a manufacturer for the name of the engineer in charge of designing a particular stove and was told the engineer had died.

Not satisfied, Sciano searched a phone book and found the guy listed, so he called him.

It turned out it was his son, who told Sciano his father was living in a small town in Michigan.

Sciano tracked him down and found out that he was a member of a group of retired engineers from a plant that made stoves.

This sort of leg work was costly — Sciano says he spent at least $100,000-per-case to develop his early cases — but it paid off.

In his early stove cases, for example, Sciano says he acquired documents from stove manufacturers showing that they had known about tipping for years, which the manufacturers have since lost or destroyed.

McKenna marvels at this trove of near-extinct documents, but he is especially impressed by Sciano’s depositions of retired engineers.

"He has depositions of industry engineers who have long since died. These are like a phoenix rising from the ashes which [Sciano] can use as testimony in these cases," says McKenna.

"Once Dan comes on board," he adds, "defendants are more likely to come to the table because he knows where their skeletons are hidden and which witnesses will say what even if they are dead."

Spreading the Gospel
With nearly 15 years of stove litigation and 40-plus cases under his belt, Sciano is a walking encyclopedia on stoves.

He can easily tick off a history of the range, from its early days as a cast iron, securely moored behemoth to its modern, lighter incarnation.

Of greatest concern to Sciano is that some of today’s stoves come with larger doors, and if too much pressure is applied to an opened door, he says, a stove can tip.

The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers agrees. Its Web site posts a notice warning that some ranges can tilt when someone applies too much pressure to an open door.

The industry has taken precautions, he notes. Since 1988, most stoves come with anti-tip devices and warnings about the dangers of tipping.

Sciano likes to spread the gospel of the anti-tip device. If he sees a family at a store ogling a stove or, say, if he sits next to a kid on an airplane, he explains, he will instruct them on the importance of anti-tip devices.

Stoves are a big part of Sciano’s life, but not the only part. In fact, stove litigation makes up only 10 percent of his practice, which consists mainly of high-end personal-injury matters, he says.

Still, he points out, "it is nice people know that I have a specialty in a confined area of practice and that people know they can come to me for information."

And come they do, from near and far.

In 1995, looking for help on a stove case, Blake Beckham, of Dallas’ Beckham & Thomas, took a circuitous path to Sciano. It started, he says, with a query posted to a legal Internet site. This led Beckham to a law student in Tennessee, the student’s professor, a Rhode Island attorney and finally to a Rhode Island stove expert who declared, emphatically, "The only guy in the country to talk to about this is Dan Sciano."

Beckham, who has hired Sciano to assist in two stove cases, agrees.

"The first time [my partner and I] talked to Dan, he talked to us for at least one-and-one-half hours," he says. "We got off the phone and said, we’re idiots if we don’t hire this guy. It would have taken us years to get up to speed."

Copyright 1999, Texas Lawyer. All rights reserved.