Emerging Litigation Podcast

The Hidden Danger of Carbon Monoxide: Proving Exposure, Brain Injury & Liability with Sam Cannon

• Tom Hagy

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Carbon monoxide poisoning is one of the most dangerous—and most overlooked—sources of catastrophic injury. Because it's odorless, colorless, and often mistaken for the flu, victims may not realize they've been exposed until long after the evidence has begun to disappear. That reality creates unique challenges not only for families, but also for the attorneys trying to prove what happened. 

In this episode, I speak with Sam Cannon of Cannon Law about the complexities of carbon monoxide poisoning litigation and why these cases often involve far more than a faulty appliance. We discuss how deferred maintenance, inadequate safety practices, and layered ownership structures can combine to create dangerous living conditions—and why proving liability often requires identifying multiple responsible parties. 

Sam also explains the science behind carbon monoxide exposure, why injuries can be difficult to diagnose, and how advanced imaging, toxicology, atmospheric readings, and expert testimony help establish both exposure and long-term brain injury. We also explore common defense strategies, the critical role of expert witnesses, and why these cases frequently become battles over causation as much as negligence. 

Whether you're a plaintiff attorney, defense lawyer, insurance professional, or simply interested in how invisible hazards become complex litigation, this conversation offers practical insights into one of the most technically challenging areas of personal injury law.

Jump in to hear Sam's perspective on carbon monoxide litigation, proving brain injury, and the litigation strategies that shape these high-stakes cases.

Thanks to Sam Cannon for joining me and sharing his experience and insights into this important—and often overlooked—area of litigation.

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If you like what you hear please give us a rating. You'd be amazed at how much that helps. 

If you have questions for Tom or would like to participate, you can reach him at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.

Ask him about creating this kind of content for your firm -- podcasts, webinars, blogs, articles, papers, and more. 

Carbon Monoxide As A Hidden Threat

Tom Hagy

Hello and welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Hagy. It's odorless, colorless, and deadly. Uh no, I'm not talking about the podcast. Uh I'm talking about carbon monoxide. Um there's really a few similarities there, but I I've digressed already. Um it's deadly, it uh causes thousands of deaths and injuries and illnesses every year in apartment buildings and hotels and vacation rentals and other places where people assume they're safe. You know, you've got your smoke detectors, you got your fire alarms and all this stuff. But a lot of places don't even have smoke detectors, but they're required in in in many locations, like certain apartments, but not everywhere. Not only is the the gas itself hard to detect, it's also the poisoning is hard to diagnose because a lot of people have the symptoms and they feel like the flu or they're just really tired or they have anxiety, and who among us? So, with me to talk about the litigation that arises from this is Sam Cannon of Canon Law in Fort Collins, Colorado, one of my favorite states for a vacation. So he focuses on this area of litigation, this area of law, carbon monoxide poisoning. He also works on brain injury litigation and catastrophic injury cases. So in our conversation, Sam tells me about how carbon monoxide incidents continue to occur, the challenges of proving exposure and long-term injury. He talks about the role of landlords and property owners, property managers, and why these frequ these cases frequently involve multiple layers of negligence rather than a single mistake. I enjoyed talking to Sam. He's a he's a funny guy. And uh, but when you know, when you talk about uh claimants and his plaintiffs, he gets dead serious. And relaying some of my stories to him about experiences uh in my family with like brain damage and trauma is also a very compassionate guy that came through. You know, he started off very um sarcastic with me, which frankly I respected him for, and then uh got serious about the litigation. And uh, but he did, he did find humor in the fact that one of my favorite family vacations took place night near him in uh in Lyons, Colorado. We took my daughters to a dude ranch, and one of my most memorable aspects of that was my younger daughter, who was eight, learned not to wear white jeans when mutton busting. So you can look that up. It's safe for work. So, with that, here is my interview with Sam Cannon of Cannon Law, which I remark is kind of a badass name for a law firm. Sam Cannon, Cannon Law, Fort Collins, Colorado. I hope

Sam Cannon’s Path To This Niche

Tom Hagy

you enjoy it. So, Sam Cannon, welcome to the Emerging Litigation Podcast.

Sam Cannon

Thanks, Tom. Yeah, I know I am in fact very happy and excited to be here.

Tom Hagy

In lead up to this, we were talking a little bit about your your kind of experience at other firms and things like that. But just tell us a little a little bit about your career path, like where you went to where'd you go, where'd you grow up, where'd you go to school, and uh what brought you to be a specialist in carbon monoxide litigation?

Sam Cannon

Yeah, so I grew up in south of England. Uh, my dad was from Denver. Um he moved to England, married my mom. I uh decided to make the reverse trip for college. Uh I went to college on the East Coast, came back to Colorado, where a bunch of my dad's family still is for law school. After law school, I clicked for a district court judge in Denver, state district court, nothing fancy. Uh and then uh after that I moved to Fort Collins, it's about an hour north, sort of a medium-sized town, and uh opened my own firm. I grew that, uh partnered up with a few people for a few years, and then uh realized I wasn't playing especially well with others and left in 2019 and restarted my own firm. And so that's where I am. So yeah, I've been doing started off doing a little more varied stuff, a little criminal, quite a lot of employment law for a while. And now uh just doing PI with a heavy, heavy emphasis on yeah, carbon monoxide, other kind of toxic exposure litigation.

Tom Hagy

Cool. What brought you into the carbon monoxide litigation?

Sam Cannon

Uh kind of through brain injury work. I I started doing more brain injury cases, probably 2018, 2019. Um, found those super exciting and interesting. Kind of the invisible injury thing, the how do you how do you prove something that you can't always see on imaging or can't always prove objectively. So I got into that and through that met uh met an attorney who does a ton of carbon monoxide cases. And uh he sort of brought me into one up in Montana because at the time I had an active Montana license and so did that, got really interested, learned a ton working with him and so yeah, started to started to do more of them. And he and I have worked a couple other cases together and yeah, now I I we probably have half a dozen active in litigation or kind of in investigation phase.

Tom Hagy

Yeah, are you doing are you still doing any brain injury work?

Sam Cannon

Yeah, so we still do kind of brain injury and uh what I kind of call our garden variety PI side. Uh yeah. So like car wrecked falls and stuff. And yeah, we still do a fair amount of just regular brain injury stuff, and then the carbon monoxide is kind of a specific subset of those cases.

Tom Hagy

Okay. Yeah. Well well, maybe brain injury is uh brain injury cases would be uh another podcast, but we'll see how this goes if the two of us can manage to get through it. See if we get along for half an hour.

Sam Cannon

I think I got to do it.

Tom Hagy

I think we should just assume that's not gonna happen. And then let's move on and find a way to work together. So okay. So what you know, I've I've read uh some of the articles, some of the information you've you've shared and and read some other things

Why Poisoning Gets Missed

Tom Hagy

about it. But so carbon monoxide poisoning is often misdiagnosed, I guess, since the symptoms look like the flu. Is that is that right?

Sam Cannon

Yeah. So I think it's two things. One, the symptoms look like the flu, the symptoms could look like a lot of things. And then, you know, it's not like a car crash often where there's an obvious incident leading to it. You know, it colorless, odorless gas isn't the top thing everyone thinks about. So often you'll see people going to the ER or going to their doctor kind of complaining of somewhat nondescript symptoms. And then the other thing is carbon monoxide leaves the body really pretty quickly. So on oxygen, it can be as quick as like an hour when it it's a half-life. So an hour and you get half the measurement of the peak level. Not on oxygen, it's a few hours. So even if there is an incident, you know, someone knows they got exposed, if they, you know, go to a hotel, sleep it off, go to the hospital eight hours later, you very likely could see a normal kind of carboxyhemoglobin blood test result. And so you can get kind of unclear diagnostic patterns. Uh and yeah, I mean, if you don't know you're being poisoned, you're not going to the doctor and saying, hey, I think I'm being exposed. Can you test me? It's, hey, I have a headache, hey, I have nausea, hey, I'm dizzy, really bad anxiety. Yeah, doctors aren't always gonna think, hmm, maybe carbon monoxide exposure. Yeah.

Tom Hagy

So that's gotta make the cases somewhat a challenge, I would think.

Sam Cannon

It can. Yeah, it definitely can. I I mean, I think one of the things that makes a challenge is just kind of the client side. You know, calling a lawyer, it it can be kind of a process of discovery. I think a lot of brain injuries are like this. But like if you're in a car crash, you know, you may be a little more keyed into like what injuries you might be experiencing. Sure. But like when your brain is not, you know, your brain is the thing that tells you how you're doing, right? And so when your brain's injured, it's like driving a car with no fuel gauge. It's like, how how do you know how you're doing because your fuel gauge is broken? So, you know, clients I think have a very kind of disorienting experience early on where they're they're not even quite sure what happened to them. And it can take them a little while to figure out, well, hey, you know, I'm still feeling symptoms, you know, I'm not getting better, and maybe I should call a lawyer. Um, we have one case right now where I mean our guy did go to the hospital, was immediately diagnosed, and it wasn't until his landlord tried to evict him that he called us. You know, he called us because he was being evicted. Uh not for the injury case initially. I mean, he has a really significant injury case, but he didn't put it together that this was a you know an injury case until yeah, they they tried to evict him from this house because he had been out of work for three months and couldn't pay rent.

Tom Hagy

Trevor Burrus, Jr. So it was so the eviction was related. Yeah. I mean he didn't have any money because he couldn't work. Right, right. He couldn't work. And yeah. But it's but you you'd you'd say you said something that I experienced in my family where you said you were that's an interesting way of putting it, you're relying on the brain to tell you what's going on, and your brain is damaged. And uh my father had traumatic brain injury, and uh when he was coming out of it and recovering, he couldn't speak, but he um Well he could speak, but he could only say the word yes. So it was he would repeat the word yes for every syllable. He thought he was speaking sentences, you know.

Sam Cannon

Yeah. Wait, which one is that? Is that Wernica's aphasia? It's vernica's or brokers. I forget which one, but yeah, I've seen this in some folks is that so there's one type of aphasia where people can like fluently speak, but the words make no sense. And the other is where people think, can think the thoughts and can but they can't actually like physically make the words. Right. Yeah. Uh that's interesting. I'm not sure I've ever met someone who had who experienced that in family mother.

Tom Hagy

Well he he had a couple of things, Sam. I just just because I did find it interesting. It was painful, but it was interesting. He uh He would also ask me, uh for example, how my sons were, and I don't have sons, I have daughters. So you could and like on Mother's Day, he sang happy birthday to my mom. And so he was going into the file where, you know, this is what children are called, and these are songs that you sing. And and then he did sing his whole life. He and my mother were like in the church choir and all this. And after a while he would borrow phrases from songs to speak. I mean, I thought that was wild. I'd never seen, you know.

Sam Cannon

Yeah, I mean, that's something like you hear about, but that's kind of like that's it sounds like sort of neuroplasticity, right? Like there is damage, but the brain's kind of forming new connections and like trying it's trying to get it back, and it's just like not quite getting the wiring right. Yeah. Right. That's fascinating. I'm sorry you went through that. I I Yeah, I'm sorry. I don't mean to just say that's fascinating, like it's accidental. No, no, I appreciate that. Distressing. But yeah.

Tom Hagy

Yeah. It it it's both. It was both difficult and and uh interesting. But he made the most of it, and I have to say, so guys born in 1930, they were different. Just like, hey, I got this issue, I'm gonna keep going no matter what. Bring me a milk, bring me a milkshake. That whole generation just like just powder through. Right. No complaint. Yeah. Yeah. It was cool. Yeah.

Landlords Treat Homes Like Assets

Tom Hagy

So you're talking about landlords, so the ownership structure of rental housing has obvious obviously changed a lot and and a lot of apartment buildings are now owned by, you know, institutional investors or distant landlords with a lot of layers uh between the money and the maintenance. So when you're when you're building a CO case against one of those how how does that structure change if it does? How does that change who you're suing and how you prove they knew there was a problem?

Sam Cannon

Yeah. So there's a few I think there's a few things that I look at. Kind of just 10,000 foot view is that most of these cases, one way or another, the dynamic is it's my client's home is being managed by someone who just thinks of it as an asset and revenue versus expenses. And so, you know, where my client, you know, it's where he lives, it's where his family lives, or for the, you know, landlord or the property manager, whoever else it is, they are treating it as just every expense should be delayed or deferred, revenue should be maximized. And and yeah, it's that's kind of ultimately the, I would say the primary dynamic is that's going on. And so every carbon monoxide detector you buy, every preventative maintenance inspection you do is a dollar not in the profit column. And, you know, you it's essentially just gambling, gambling with our clients' lives and safety. And so that's sort of the overall dynamic. I mean, how you prove it, certainly when you have a corporate landlord, you almost always have a property manager as well. And so you have the, you know, financial entity, let's just call it. You know, it's usually a single asset, you know, special purpose vehicle, you know, one entity part of a larger financial company owns it and just delegates everything to a property management company. Property management company runs the day-to-day, but then you get into this sort of relationship where, you know, they do communicate. And what they communicate about is almost always leasing, occupancy, money, why everything costs so much, why, you know, units aren't filled. It's almost never, you know, is the place up to code, is is everything, you know, looking good. And so there's almost a sort of negligence by omission in a lot of cases, that there's we don't care. You know, as long as the money comes in, we just do not care. And so that's kind of the the parent entity. The property management company is often, I would say, the most negligent of the companies. You know, they're the ones who are actively hiring unlicensed contractors, they're the ones who are actively failing to replace carbon dioxide detectors, you know, they're they're the ones who, in one of our cases, they're the ones who are documenting safety checks that are physically impossible. Yeah, like we have these semi-annual inspection logs in one case, and every single apartment, you know, almost a hundred units in this building are marked that they replace the batteries in the smoke detectors. We get, you know, their maintenance guy, he's doing these inspections into deposition. He's like, nah, there's no batteries in any of the smoke detectors. Right. Right. In the whole unit, there's no batteries in any smoke detectors. So I can't, we don't replace them, obviously. I just mark yes. And then we get in the corporate designee under oath, and they're like, well, yeah, the app won't let them finish the inspection if it's not marked yes. And so it's like they're just training all their employees to just like check boxes saying they did all this stuff. You know. And in this case, it's because they got tagged with a $22 million punitive damages verdict years ago. And so they put in place all these things to make it look like they're checking everything, but they're actually not checking a goddamn thing. Aaron Ross Powell Didn't quite learn the lesson. Aaron Powell Yeah. They learned well, they learned the wrong lesson. They learned the lesson that you should check all the boxes. So you know, people like me can't prove cases, not realizing there's going to be the cover-up that gets you in the most trouble.

Tom Hagy

I wonder how that maintenance guy did after that deposition. Did he uh he's still there.

Sam Cannon

I mean, he's still you weren't kidding me. No, he's still there. I mean, this one is unbelievable. I mean, one of the unlicensed contractors who look worked on this place took a blowtorch and just like blowtorched a pipe so he could bend it because he didn't have the right coupling to just like stick it. Sure. Right. Yeah.

Tom Hagy

All right, right.

Sam Cannon

And and every other contractor who was down there was like, this is ridiculous. There's no way that's legit. And he's just stands by. He's like, it's fine.

Tom Hagy

I fixed the uh arm on my glasses that way.

Sam Cannon

Yeah. With the with a small blowtorch. Uh how did you feel when you were doing that? Did you like I was like, I know this is kind of probably a bad idea, but it's the best I have right now? Aaron Ross Powell That is precisely what was going through my head.

Tom Hagy

I said I there's a good chance that I'm either going to melt my glasses completely, make them unusable, they're gonna drip into the into the stove. I didn't use a blowtorch, I used the stove. And uh you might have guessed that though. And yeah, I went through all that. I think I got burned the place down. I could set off the smoke detectors, and you could tell me what kind of gases I might have been inhaling. Yeah, I uh I have no idea.

Sam Cannon

Pro probably nothing good. Okay. So actually, probably some carbon monoxide, thinking about it.

Tom Hagy

Yeah, and I'm I'm thinking that's where I was headed. I was assuming that's what it would be. Yeah, well, it wasn't probably good. And I haven't been right since, but my glasses fit perfectly. Uh they were oh, also you have to cool them off before you put them back on.

Sam Cannon

Yeah.

Tom Hagy

Uh singed hair smells really bad. I don't know if you know that. That's true. Yeah, I did I learned that when I I was working in a steel mill as a t as a teenager, and they had me do a job that I wasn't qualified to do, which was most of them. But uh I was getting I had to pull some uh red hot, white hot m it was titanium actually, out of an oven. And I kept it too close and my big steel tongs caught fire and my eyebrows cinched, all the hair of my arms cinched. I was just like, if I'd been there much longer, they pulled me away and my helmet would have melted over my face. But um but that's a that's a digression. I I was curious though, back to the guy who was evicted. What happened in that case? Or was getting evicted?

Sam Cannon

We are we are in the middle of litigation. Okay, you're in the middle of that one. Okay. Yeah. I mean, we the eviction was stopped. I mean, we we got in, we said we were gonna file the the injury case as a counter claim to the eviction. Um and you know, we helped him get it with it was not quite during COVID, but there was still some sort of rental assistance programs going on. So we eventually got back currently the guy actually still lives in the same apartment complex. He doesn't he can't afford to like move and come up with first and last month's rent in a security deposit. So he still lives there. Uh which given when we did our inspection almost three years after the incident, we still find a bunch of code violations in the venting. It's a little disconcerting.

Tom Hagy

But yeah, that is disconcerting.

Sam Cannon

Well, some landlords, man, they just unbelievable. I mean, it's like someone going to the hospital with carbon monoxide poisoning isn't enough for you to just go in and be like, you know, we should just repipe the entire thing. Right.

Tom Hagy

Yeah, you wonder where they came from. Okay. Yeah, okay. It's just boggling my mind how I don't know. What's the word? Well, negligent or reckless. Negligent. I was going up with I was going with some other things.

Sam Cannon

Yeah.

Proving Exposure And Brain Injury

Tom Hagy

But so you mentioned too that injuries may not show up, what'd you say, may not show up on imaging and things like that. So talk about how you prove then the the injury and then the negligence. Talk talk about the injury first. How do you prove that?

Sam Cannon

Yeah, so injury, you know, carbon monoxide is a little better than a a regular, certainly a what you know, we call it MTBI, mild TBI, as terrible as that phrasing is. It is a little better than that in terms of showing up on imaging, but you often need to get into kind of advanced imaging, so DTI or volumetric imaging to see it. And so you kind of have a mix, you know, hopefully you have a blood test result showing exposure, or uh an atmospheric reading. So either one you can kind of figure out from how long it took a carbon monoxide detector to alarm, or if the fire departments show up, they'll often just take readings and you'll know exactly what it was. So either an atmospheric reading, the toxicology readings, or and brain scans, advanced imaging, especially. But yeah, the sort of neurodiagnostics is, I would say, developing quickly. One of the doctors who's treating some of my clients, she uses a VNG and then a CNS, a central nervous system test. And those are really pretty good as well.

Tom Hagy

Okay, so you said VNG. What is VNG?

Sam Cannon

Yeah, so VNG is a test, they use sort of visual stimuli to see whether or not that can detect central nervous system issues, so brain damage type issues, like, you know, if you move your eyes back and forth or up and down, is that going to induce dizziness, uh which is yeah, a sign of kind of central nervous system dysfunction or brain damage. So there's a lot of diagnostics that can really help, even if you can't see it on a kind of traditional brain scan. But yeah, it's it's kind of a complicated picture. And the defense will often dispute bits of it. You know, they'll often dispute the advanced imaging, they'll often dispute the measurement of carboxyhemoglobin based on, you know, if it's kind of in the normal range or close to the normal range, they'll say, well, look, it's normal without going back and extrapolating to what it would have been at the time of last exposure. So yeah, there's a lot of causation fights on damages. One thing that's nice about the cases, though, is they really do go, I say nice. You know, we live in this topsy-turvy world, right, where everything that's good is bad. Right. So one of the things that make these cases good is that the negligence that has to happen for someone to be exposed to carbon monoxide in any significant quantity is so bad that it's pretty tough for the defense just to take a clean run at a causation defense. Right. So, like rear-end car accident, they can they can do the, hey, look, we're responsible, but this this injury wasn't caused by this incident. You know, when you've you know, when you fail to maintain boilers, when you've had, you know, unpermitted work done, unlicensed contractors in there, you failed to make sure the detectors work, you've falsified records during the detectors work, that causation defense hits differently. You know, it just looks like asshole corporation making excuses, not someone who's trying to take responsibility but only wants to pay what's fair, right? Like and so you know, the the just posture of the cases makes it a little harder for them just to do that kind of admitted liability rear end of causation defense.

Tom Hagy

Yeah.

Sam Cannon

But yeah, I mean you you definitely have to be up on it. I mean, you have to be up on the science, the toxicology, the imaging. Otherwise you can you can pretty easily lose track of the causation piece, even if you have a kind of known exposure.

Tom Hagy

Aaron Powell I did want to ask you what the defenses typically were. So you and now you you hit on a couple of those. Are there any others that you see that you face?

Sam Cannon

Aaron Powell You know, it's I would say it's kind of different every case. You know, they do s they kind of rhyme the cases, but the defenses are never quite identical. I mean, certainly even if there was negligence, there was no exposure can be one. You know, maybe there was an exposure, but there's no long term damages, definitely can happen. You do you get this weird sort of will they won't they finger pointing as well. So, you know, the landlord or the owner entity will often point the finger at the manager, but they can't always completely do. That because they're the agreement always says they indemnify the manager anyway. And so, you know, they're kind of like kind of trying to say, well, look, we don't even know we don't know what the hell's going on there. It's all the manager's fault, but they're sort of aware that doesn't get them off the hook. So they don't lean into that too hard often. And so you get what I really find is like there's often three or four horses they're trying to ride simultaneously, which in one sense is great because they never really commit to one point. But it's also it can be a little bit of a moving target. Like you know, we've got relatively close to trial in these cases. You still don't entirely know what they're gonna do when they walk into court. You know, you don't know if they're gonna come in and fight negligence primarily, or they're gonna come in and fight damages, or they're gonna try to do everything. It you know, it's a it's yeah, it's a bit of a schmoggers board of defenses, I find.

Tom Hagy

Aaron Ross Powell So do you but do you have different So when you go to when you sue, who who all are you suing? So you got are you suing all at once, like the the property manager, the landlord, the insurance company? I don't know. Who who are you suing?

Sam Cannon

Aaron Ross Powell Yeah. So Colorado at least can't sue insurance companies directly. No. You mean just for this kind of case? No case.

Tom Hagy

Just for this kind of case.

Sam Cannon

No, no kidding. We can't there's no direct right of action against the insurance company here. Wait a minute. Okay.

Tom Hagy

You can't. Oh, right. I guess that's a good idea.

Sam Cannon

Instant mistrial if you mention the word insurance.

Tom Hagy

Wow. Yeah. That's a clever tactic. Let's get the plaintiff lawyer to say insurance. That's how I think.

Sam Cannon

It's a little bit of a standoff. They say we don't want them to mention health insurance and they don't want us to mention liability insurance. And we all just sort of do this dance pretending insurance doesn't matter at all. Behind everything. Trevor Burrus, Jr. And the jury figures it. I mean, the jury's aren't stupid, right? They've got insurance. Right. But they know they've got insurance. They know we our client probably has health insurance somewhere, and you know, they're confused why no one is admitting any of that stuff. It's kind of weird.

Tom Hagy

So when you how do you do uh do you get try to find uh jurors that have shitty landlords? Pardon my language. Do you get try to get jurors who have landlords that they don't like?

Sam Cannon

Aaron Ross Powell I mean that right now, at least in Colorado, I don't know where you're based, but at least in Colorado I'm in Philly. Metro area.

Tom Hagy

Pennsylvania.

Sam Cannon

Yeah, I mean, the the amount of news coverage or discourse around the kind of housing crisis is kind of wild. And so yeah, I mean, that's the elephant I would say in in the courtroom in Voidir is like there's this bubbling fury. Right. Especially among younger folks at corporate landlords about how much landlords charge in rent, preventing people ever to save up enough for a damn payment on their own place. You know, and so yeah, I mean, that's the dynamic that, you know, that's the dynamic that I think right now is driving verdicts and settlements. And this is, you know, I think if you're a financial entity who has just testified that, you know, the way you refer to properties is as assets, not as properties or anything else. Right. I think you should be a little bit terrified of the prospect of taking this in front of a a jury, right? Or d dwellings for humans.

Tom Hagy

Right.

Sam Cannon

Look at it that way. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, I mean that that's certainly the the kind of as well as the normal, you know, invisible injury. And the and the sort of latent kind of tort reform stuff, I think that's less acute than it used to be. The sort of McDonald's hot coffee reference coming up in every jury selection, that's you know that's faded a little bit. Uh but that stuff's still there. You kind of have to sniff

Defense Tactics And Expert Battles

Sam Cannon

that out.

Tom Hagy

So I have to think this is pretty expert intensive. Yeah. So how many like what what are your typical experts then?

Sam Cannon

Toxicologists and Yeah, often toxicology, neurology, life care planning, property management. Oh, sure, right. Kind of an engineering HVAC. So we'll often use a mechanical engineer to look at the the whole system. Or uh an HVAC specialist. So yeah, I mean, we're often four, five retained experts deep by the time we get to expert disclosure. So and and that's before you get to maybe a radiologist or or someone else. So yeah, they're they are expensive cases to litigate properly. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've we've can multiple times hit six figures in expert costs in these cases.

Tom Hagy

Wow. Wow. That's an investment.

Sam Cannon

Yeah.

Tom Hagy

And people think being a plaintiff lawyer is easy.

Sam Cannon

Yeah. I don't go to Vegas. I mean, if I want to get the thrill of gambling, I'll just open up QuickBooks and look at my advanced client costs account.

Tom Hagy

I just got that little uh Yeah, you just need somebody bring somebody bringing you cocktails all day, and it's like, hey, it's Vegas. Um so what about the but you you did mention that I mean I'm assuming I have to look at my apartment. Do I have carbon monoxide? But you said uh you've got the you know you have to have these detectors in in apartments, but is that is that enforceable? Well, you said maintenance guys will say, Yeah, I change the batteries. Or no, I never change them, but I said I did.

Sam Cannon

Yeah, so it's kind of interesting. I mean, there's I would say the most common dynamic, again, it gets back to the kind of asset versus house dynamic, is I think the reason these things happen in vacation rentals, hotels, and rental units most commonly is you know, if it's your own house, you can test them, you're replacing them, you're getting your boiler service because it's looking it's your house, you know, it's your stuff.

Tom Hagy

Right. You can you can go up and melt your glasses near the uh detector and see if uh see if it's working.

Sam Cannon

You know, you when you burn popcorn, your detector your smoke detector goes off, right? Like Right. And because it's your family at risk, you know, you're a little more careful of that. And I mean, I guess if I'm being more charitable than I I probably should be. Yeah, there's also just a physical presence thing is you know, if it's your house, you're there all the time. Whereas if it's if it's a vacation rental and yet you're there for two days and the carbon monoxide alarm is chirping because it's expiring, you might well throw that out and then who knows when the next time the owner of that place is going to be there. Like Sure. You know, so yes, detectors are required in most states in some places. Not every state. They're not required everywhere. You know, Colorado doesn't require them in hotels, for example. And most states don't require them in hotels. Yeah.

Tom Hagy

Oh, okay.

Sam Cannon

And so yeah, I mean we've seen them where there will be some.

Tom Hagy

Wait a minute, wait a minute. Hotels? Why not? Wonder w what's the reasoning there, I wonder. I ask legislators in twenty states.

Sam Cannon

There's only ten states that require them. Okay. It's money. Again. Yeah, I mean it's an asset. It's lobbying, it's all the rest of it. You know, if you're again, if you want to be kind of steel man at a not great argument, it's well, if there's only one fuel-fired appliance, you don't need one in every single

Detector Laws And A Travel Tip

Speaker

room, maybe. Okay. But I mean, that's where people are at the most risk is when they're asleep. So I would say you do. But yeah, I mean, this isn't a practice tip. This is just a life tip. Buy a portable carbon monoxide detector and travel with them. Seriously. Travel with them.

Tom Hagy

I was gonna I was gonna joke that you should do that, but you there's in fact portable carbon monoxide detectors. You hang hang one around your neck.

Sam Cannon

Uh actually mine's a magnet, or uh if I'm in a VRBO or a thing, I'll just stick it on a fridge or just leave it in the room.

Tom Hagy

Wow.

Sam Cannon

Yeah, that's smart. That's why Yeah. The number of people have died in hotels is pretty shocking.

Tom Hagy

Aaron Powell Well, this is uplifting. The um yeah, we're we're back to magnets because uh but this is a lot of things.

Sam Cannon

Yeah, you'll be scroll umpo we talked about before we started.

Tom Hagy

All right. I'll explain that in the intro. So and maybe I'll wear that shirt and demonstrate um because everybody wants everybody wants to see that. Let's see. I had another another question. Well you mentioned popcorn. It was just I've been I've been writing about toxic substances on and off my whole life, and I remember we we had a litigation reporter on toxic uh torts and popcorn lung driven with that one. What was that?

Sam Cannon

What was the asbestos causes popcorn lung?

Tom Hagy

Or is it covered a lot of I thought it was something that was uh that was in the popcorn when you I'll look it up later, but this isn't a oh, I meant I was gonna say pop quiz.

Sam Cannon

I never knew much about popcorn lung. I've heard the term. I didn't think it was related to popcorn. I thought it was like it made us like when you were breathing, it made a sound that sounded like that. But maybe I'm completely right. Let's just you know what? We have tools here, Sam. Oh, but it's so much fun just guessing and Oh, I love being ignorant.

Tom Hagy

A friend of mine said it is so much more fun being ignorant. All right, let's just find out. In real time, look at us. Caitlin's, I can tell she's impressed if she hasn't fallen asleep. Let's see. Popcorn lung bronchiolitis obliterans. Geez, rare but serious lung disease that damages the scars and smallest airways in the lungs. Generally irreversible. It developed the disease from inhaling disetyl, diacetyl? The butter flavoring chemical used to give popcorn its buttery smell. I prefer to have asbestos in mine. You're right.

Sam Cannon

God, that's dreadful. Yeah, that is actually popcorn. Yeah. I'm pretty old. Yeah, I'm I'm sort of glad that you know the number of toxic substances we're just routinely exposed to these days is a lot less.

Tom Hagy

Yeah, it is. I I grew up in the Ohio Valley, and not only did we have the pollution from the steel mills and everything else, I came to find later from my doctor that I had like nodes on my lungs or something. And they said, Well, why don't you make an appointment and come in and have it uh in a couple of weeks? I'm like, How about in a couple minutes? Don't tell me I have nodes on my lungs. And then then I get into the doctor and he takes a sweet time. He's getting ready to retire. He doesn't care anymore. Maybe he's a landlord, but he Oh God, I didn't mean to disparage landlords just now. But or doctors, but he just he was chatting away. I'm like, Yeah, can we get to the lungs? Yeah, no kidding. And he said he doesn't know where I'm from or where I grew up. And he said, You by any chance that you you know, there you know, there's a fungus from the Ohio Valley that's unique to the Ohio Valley. Oh, interesting. So I was very proud that our people in Appalachia and Ohio and West Virginia and on down had this special lung lung fungus that would get into your lungs and give you scars. And maybe I don't know if you said you feel like you have the flu or something, but a bad flu can leave scars like that. I didn't know any of that stuff, but there you go. There you go.

Sam Cannon

That's wild. I'll tell you the the other one I read the other day, and I have not bothered to try to verify this, is like population wide, you can measure the difference in sort of academic performance of kids who grew up before leaded gasoline was just like really? It's just like the amount of leaded gasoline in the ad just had a population-wide effect on educational achievements.

Tom Hagy

Let's go back to my childhood. Let's go for a ride in the car with my mom with the windows up and the cigarette blazing. Let's just go back to that. Oh, by the way, no seat belts. So yeah, so that explains some of my why I didn't go to law. Yeah. Okay. We digressed a little bit, but I but you know, life's short, right?

Sam Cannon

Especially if that happens to you.

Tom Hagy

Yeah. Well the smoking. It's amazing. Okay. Sam, anything else? I I had a question at the end, you know, like what's so great about Colorado anyway? But it's terrible. You'd hate it, don't move. Yeah, that's a smart thing to say. Smart thing. Keep the population down. I see what you're doing.

Sam Cannon

No, it's great. I mean, it's a nice place, friendly people. Best vacation every economy. Yeah, it's sort of a most places you kind of have to make a choice. You know, do you want good recreational opportunities or do you want the economy to be in a place where you can have a good business? And Colorado's one of about five places I know of where you don't really have to make that trade. You can just do both. So I love it. I love it.

Tom Hagy

Well, what was the best vacation with my daughters when when they were eight and ten, a dude ranch in Ly Lyon?

Sam Cannon

Oh, yeah, Lyons is real close to me. It's about half an hour down the road.

Tom Hagy

Pleasant Valley Ranch. Yeah. They assigned you a horse. My horse's name was Jefferson. I still remember him. He was in charge. And uh and then we went to a rodeo, there was mutton busting. My younger eight-year-old's great. Yeah, my eight-year-old did mutton busting. She learned not to wear white pants when you go mutton busting. She was covered.

Sam Cannon

Oh, God, yeah. She didn't like that. I went to a Denver Broncos game this year, and one of the halftime shows was mutton busting. Yeah. That's a good halftime show. It's good.

Tom Hagy

Good American fun. I don't know if they do that anywhere else, but that's that's that's fun. Okay. Well, Santa, is there anything else you wanted to say? I I I I've covered everything I wanted to cover. Is there anything you'd like to add?

Who To Sue And Timing Traps

Sam Cannon

Yeah. I mean, I just think uh, you know, the biggest takeaway about these cases to me is like that. Actually was one thing I wanted to mention about kind of you asked who we sued, and we got off off topic. Because I think one of the things I've learned that is maybe the biggest practice pointer is you very often do not know everyone you should sue before you file. And so I think in most of my carbon monoxide cases, we've sued the landlord who you can find just on you know property records. And then we've had to add defendants after we find out, you know, who was maintaining this thing, who installed this thing. Right. And so that's I guess probably the biggest practice point. Because if you wait till three weeks before the statute to file these cases, you can get in a really tough situation where you find out the most negligent person. You don't know who they were until after the statute. So that's probably the biggest thing I would mention.

Tom Hagy

Uh really focus on who might be culpable.

Sam Cannon

Yeah. So really just plan ahead and think you're probably going to have to add a defendant. If it does get to that situation where you're post-statute and you need to add them, you can kind of backdoor it by talking, talking defense counsel for the property owner into adding the H5 company is a third-party defendant, because the insurance company probably doesn't care too much who they pay. But it's much easier if you just give yourself enough time to add people if you need them later. And we've done that in most of our cases.

Tom Hagy

Yeah. But I guess it if if if that happens, then suddenly you're scrambling what to put the case together against them. And then is there a lot you said there was finger pointing. Is there a lot of cross-litigation ever?

Sam Cannon

Yeah. Yeah. So suddenly the HVAC company and the landlords, the HVAC company will be like, hey, they told me just to fix what was broke immediately and not to spend the money doing a full full fix. And the HVAC company said, well, they never told me to do a full fix. And so yeah, they they end up finger pointing in a way that the kind of owners and managers can't really finger point. Uh but yeah, it's uh you know what I kind of like to say is that you don't really get a carbon monoxide case without at least two discrete acts of negligence. There's gotta be something wrong with the boiler or the the fuel fired appliance, and there's gotta be something wrong with the detectors. Okay. Because one or the other usually is enough to prevent a poison. Not always, but usually. And so normally you need two discrete, negligent acts or just one colossal negligent act. So, you know, you've normally got a really strong liability case as well as, you know, if if worked up right, which can be a challenge, uh a strong causation argument as well. So and damages. Yeah.

Closing Thoughts And Next Conversation

Tom Hagy

Uh we did mention traumatic brain injury cases. You're still doing those. Um if you're up for it, I'd love to talk to you about those too.

Sam Cannon

Yeah, totally.

Tom Hagy

And you could bring an expert too if you like.

Sam Cannon

I will I will nerd out on traumatic brain injury cases all day long. Uh Did you say nerd out or no doubt? Yeah, it's one of it nerd out. It's okay. It's I'll warn you if we do that, which I'd I'd like to do that. It's one of the topics I will get on my soapbox about is just how dreadful the entire field of neuropsychology is, especially the ones who worked for insurance companies. And uh yeah, I think that's stopping me.

Tom Hagy

No, I definitely want to do it. Well, Sam Cannon. Uh that's a very badass name for a lawyer in a law firm. I think you probably I think you probably made it up. It's not your real name, but uh it's good.

Sam Cannon

I I wish I was that clever, but I'm not I'm not that creative. I just, yeah, Cannon Law was not. It took me ten years. It took me ten years to come up with the Firepower When You Need It tagline. Which it was that it was that or bringing out the big guns, which that was just a little too that English side of my brain just like rebelled at the bringing out the big guns. I couldn't do it. Yeah, no, that's right. The firepower when you need it was uh I guess. Well I don't know.

Tom Hagy

But I came up with uh Coco uh for you.

Sam Cannon

Coco?

Tom Hagy

Well, CO in Colorado. So I saw that.

Sam Cannon

That's good, yeah. Well, it's also Fort Collins where I live, so it's Coco. Oh my god. Co Foco.

Tom Hagy

Yeah. You're welcome for the branding. Okay, Sam, we'll nerd out on uh brain injury. It's horrible and uh but it's important. So good to talk.

Sam Cannon

Well, it was a pleasure meeting you and uh yeah, I look forward to next time.

Tom Hagy

Sounds good, man.