Motorcyclist settles lawsuit against driver for $975,000.

Byline: Bill Cresenzo

A motorcyclist who lost his right leg after a crash with a car threw him 125 feet has settled a lawsuit against the car's driver for $975,000, his attorneys report.

In August 2017, the motorcyclist was hit after the car made an illegal U-turn off the shoulder of the road, said Bob Whitely of the Whitley Law Firm in Raleigh, who represented the plaintiff with Ann Ochsner, also of the Whitley Law Firm.

The man reached the confidential settlement after he underwent a below-the-knee amputation and now uses a prosthetic leg.

"Some otherwise simple life tasks have become more difficult, such as standing on one leg in the shower, resulting in a few falls," Whitley said. "Getting up in the night has become an ordeal, (with him) having to put on and remove the prostheses, making it more difficult to sleep. He does not and will not operate a bike again, but misses it."

The defense argued contributory negligence, citing a serum test that showed that plaintiff had a small amount of alcohol in his system at the time of the incident. Even though the amount was below the legal threshold for driving, Whitley called the test a "potentially case-defeating issue."

His firm hired an expert in toxicology to analyze the method under which the plaintiff's blood had been tested, Whitley said. The expert was able to show that the methodology used in testing plaintiff's blood rendered the serum test results unreliable.

"We hired an expert who gave us the opinion that the serum blood reading was not accurate because of the trauma that his body was going through," Whitley said. "The liver acts differently when the body is in trauma and there was no way to assess his actual blood alcohol level."

The health care provider had asserted a $200,000 lien on the settlement, but plaintiff's counsel scoured its records and was able to locate one instance of the health care...