Background
On September 13, 2017, Signify North America Corporation (formerly Philips Lighting) shipped an approximately 1,300-pound load of lights on a pallet from its Pennsylvania warehouse to Rexel USA’s Hartford warehouse. Under the parties’ contractual terms, Signify was required to palletize and stretch-wrap all shipments—but the lights were not stretch-wrapped to the pallet. Rexel accepted delivery on September 14 and, despite its own written policies against placing unsafe or unsecured loads on storage racks, stored the unsecured pallet on the top shelf of a warehouse storage rack.
Five days later, on September 19, 2017, Juan Cruz was working in the aisle where the rack was located. JeanPaul Paez, a temporary worker assigned to Rexel through staffing agency Spec Personnel, was operating a reach truck in an adjacent aisle. Paez made contact with the lights, which slid off the unsecured pallet and fell onto Cruz, rendering him a paraplegic.
After a three-week jury trial in 2022, the jury found Signify negligent, assessed total damages at $100 million, and apportioned 90% fault to Signify and 10% to Paez—yielding a $90 million verdict against Signify. The trial court granted partial remittitur, reducing the award to $41,859,072.98, which the plaintiffs accepted. The court denied Signify’s motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict. Signify appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Connecticut Appellate Court reversed the trial court and directed judgment for Signify, holding that as a matter of law, Cruz’s warehouse injuries were not a reasonably foreseeable consequence of Signify’s failure to stretch-wrap the lights. Because foreseeability was lacking, Signify owed no duty of care to Cruz, and the JNOV should have been granted.
The court applied Connecticut’s two-part duty test—(1) whether an ordinary person in the defendant’s position would anticipate harm of the general nature that occurred, and (2) whether public policy supports imposing liability—and resolved the case entirely on foreseeability without reaching public policy. Although foreseeability is ordinarily a jury question, it becomes a question of law “when no reasonable fact finder could conclude that the injury was within the foreseeable scope of the risk.”
Relying heavily on the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision in Lodge v. Arett Sales Corp., 246 Conn. 563 (1998), the court identified two critical intervening events that placed Cruz’s injury outside the foreseeable zone of risk: Rexel accepted the unsecured delivery and—despite having a stretch-wrap machine on-site and policies against racking unsafe loads—placed the unsecured pallet on the top shelf of a storage rack. Five days later, Paez negligently operated a reach truck and dislodged the load. The court found that “a person of ordinary sagacity and experience” could not have anticipated this chain of events. The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that expert testimony about packaging industry standards could establish foreseeability, finding that such evidence goes to breach, not to “the scope of foreseeability.”
Key Takeaways
- A product shipper’s duty of care does not automatically follow goods through a customer’s entire warehouse operations once delivery has been accepted—particularly when the direct cause of harm is a chain of intervening decisions by the recipient and a third-party worker.
- Expert testimony on industry shipping standards goes to breach of duty, not to the scope of foreseeability that defines the duty itself; a shipper cannot be held to a duty of care on the basis of packaging standards alone when the causal chain is attenuated.
- The court distinguished its analysis from the abrogated superseding-cause doctrine, clarifying that foreseeability in the duty context is conceptually distinct from superseding cause in the proximate-cause context, even after Connecticut eliminated superseding cause for negligence cases in Barry v. Quality Steel Products, 263 Conn. 424 (2003).
Why It Matters
This decision draws a firm boundary around product shippers’ exposure in the supply chain. Even where a shipper contractually agreed to secure goods and concededly failed to do so, liability does not reach downstream when the customer’s own warehouse management failures and a third party’s negligent equipment operation are the direct causes of the harm. For Connecticut personal injury practitioners, the case reinforces that Lodge v. Arett Sales remains the governing framework when foreseeability is challenged at the duty stage. It also signals that the Appellate Court will not allow expert testimony about industry standards to substitute for the independently required showing that the plaintiff’s injuries fell within the foreseeable scope of risk created by the defendant’s conduct.
For supply chain and logistics counsel, the practical lesson is significant: once goods are delivered and accepted, the receiving party’s own handling decisions can break the chain of foreseeability. This protects upstream shippers from liability for downstream warehouse management failures over which they have no control, even when the shipper’s own packaging was deficient.