Garo
Mardirossian

Evidence and Trial Practice

Product, roadway, and civil-rights litigation built on physical and documentary evidence

A mechanic’s son from Aleppo built a trial practice around physical evidence: the geometry of a dangerous intersection, the force path through a vehicle, the distance between an officer and the person he confronted.

Roadway Geometry at Trial

Before the first witness testified in Ekbatani v. State of California, Garo Mardirossian led the jury into an adjoining room. A scale model of the Pacific Coast Highway and Diamond Street intersection waited on a table: lanes, vehicles, the skew of the crossing, and the crest in the roadway that governed what a turning driver could see.

Mardirossian lowered himself until his eyes met the miniature pavement. The jurors followed. From that height, the case changed. The roadway rose into the line of sight and concealed northbound traffic. A motorcycle headlight disappeared behind the crest. Geometry became immediate, physical, and difficult to explain away.

Amir “Nick” Ekbatani, a former UCLA offensive lineman, had been riding north when a taxi turned across his path. The collision caused catastrophic injuries and led to the amputation of his leg below the knee. The defense placed responsibility on the taxi driver. Mardirossian widened the frame. Caltrans had maintained an intersection with a sharp angle, restricted visibility, and a history of complaints. Repeated paving had increased the rise in the road. The danger had accumulated in inches.

The jury awarded $35 million and assigned 70 percent of the fault to Caltrans. The resulting payout reached $27.5 million. A painted median later appeared at the intersection, channeling traffic away from the early left turn that had placed Ekbatani in the taxi’s path.

Mardirossian brings disputed systems down to eye level. A roadway becomes a sightline. A vehicle defect becomes a path of force. An official account becomes a sequence of movements, records, and physical facts. Jurors receive the dispute in a form they can inspect.

That instinct grew from a life spent learning how things work, how they fail, and what failure leaves behind.

Mechanical Background and Plaintiff Practice

Mardirossian was born in Aleppo into an Armenian family whose history carried the instability of displacement. His family moved through Beirut and Cleveland before settling in Los Angeles. The city offered a place to build, and the automobile became part of that foundation.

His father operated a service station on Fairfax Boulevard. Mardirossian worked there through high school and college, moving from routine maintenance into substantial mechanical work and body repair. He became a certified California smog inspector and learned the practical language of engines, frames, tolerances, wear, and force.

The garage taught him to distrust vague explanations. Mechanical failure has a source. The source can be found through inspection.

He studied economics at UCLA and earned his Juris Doctor from Whittier College School of Law. In 1981, he opened the Law Offices of Garo Mardirossian. The young office handled the matters that sustain a new practice: immigration, family law, bankruptcy, criminal defense, and injury cases. The injury work grew more complex as clients brought him collisions, defective products, and defendants with deep resources.

The garage followed him into law. A crushed roof carried information about structural weakness. A restraint system revealed the assumptions built into its design. A rollover raised questions about track width, center of gravity, suspension, and roof strength. Mardirossian could move between the client’s injury and the machine that produced it without surrendering the technical ground to the defense.

Mardirossian built his plaintiff-side practice around the physical object at the center of the case. Against corporate engineers, testing programs, and internal studies, he used the vehicle itself as evidence.

The office grew into Mardirossian Akaragian LLP, a litigation boutique on Wilshire Boulevard. Armen Akaragian began at the firm as a legal assistant in 1999, attended law school at night, joined the bar, and became named partner. His path reflects the office Mardirossian built: close apprenticeship, long preparation, and advancement through demonstrated ability.

The firm developed the depth required for years of discovery, expert work, trial preparation, and appeal against manufacturers, public agencies, transportation companies, and police departments. It also remained connected to the Armenian community that shaped Mardirossian’s earliest sense of belonging. His civic work has included bar leadership and mentorship.

Inside the office, the same commitment took a practical form. Younger lawyers learned cases from the ground up, alongside the records, experts, physical objects, and clients whose lives gave the litigation its urgency.

Across more than four decades, the firm’s cases have produced hundreds of millions of dollars in recoveries and changes to products, roadways, police practices, and California law.

Product-Liability Evidence

Vehicle design fixes the width, center of gravity, roof strength, door-latch response, and interaction between braking and acceleration before the product reaches the road. Mardirossian’s product cases trace those choices into the collision and the injuries that follow.

In Pannu v. Land Rover, Sukhsagar Pannu suffered catastrophic spinal injuries when a 1998 Land Rover Discovery rolled during a freeway crash. Mardirossian and Akaragian pursued the design history through more than fifty depositions and testimony from company personnel in England. The case focused on rollover resistance and roof integrity. A wider track, a lower center of gravity, and stronger roof construction offered practical ways to reduce the danger.

A retired judge found Land Rover strictly liable and awarded more than $25 million, with $21.654 million apportioned to Pannu. The Court of Appeal affirmed. Its published opinion preserved the consumer-expectation theory and the risk-benefit framework against a broad defense challenge. The next generation Discovery incorporated structural changes aligned with safety measures developed in the litigation.

Gozukara v. Ford Motor Co. placed a Ford Explorer’s rollover behavior under similar scrutiny. Agop and Catherine Gozukara were traveling toward Las Vegas when evasive movement sent their Explorer into a concrete barrier and then into a rollover. Catherine suffered paralysis and lost her unborn child. Before the crash, the vehicle had exhibited severe front-end vibration, a condition previously reported to the dealership.

Mardirossian first pursued Caltrans over the barrier placement and secured $5.5 million. The jury later found that the Explorer had a design defect but also found that the defect did not cause this crash; it placed most responsibility on the dealership’s failure to repair the vehicle’s severe vibration problem. The dealership settled for $9.4 million, bringing the family’s total recovery to $14.9 million.

The family rejected confidentiality, leaving the result available to the public.

In a separate rollover case, Duan v. General Motors, Mardirossian obtained an order releasing thousands of pages of GM roof-crush testing records from confidentiality. The case later settled while the jury was deliberating.

Other matters extended the body of work. Saakyan v. Modern Auto concerned oversized wheels and tires installed on a Honda Accord, a rollover, and a young driver left paraplegic. After a first trial ended in a mistrial because of juror misconduct, a second jury found Modern Auto negligent and awarded approximately $12.8 million to Saakyan and his passenger. With fees and interest, the firm reports a total payout of $21.35 million. Thiemanee v. Nissan produced a $3.15 million verdict involving a defective restraint system and door latch.

His mechanical background informs the use of models, components, and reconstruction evidence to show how an engineering decision caused an injury.

Civil-Rights Litigation

Mardirossian entered civil-rights litigation through Dole v. County of Los Angeles. A Samoan family gathered for a bridal shower in Cerritos in 1989. More than one hundred sheriff’s deputies descended on the home after a report of fighting. Deputies forced entry, beat family members, made arrests, and later claimed that partygoers had attacked them. A neighbor’s video captured the event.

Mardirossian first defended the family against criminal charges and secured acquittals. He then brought the civil case. The litigation stretched across years, more than fifty deputy depositions, testimony from Sheriff Sherman Block, and a civil trial lasting twenty-nine weeks. The jury found a coordinated violation of constitutional rights and awarded $15.9 million. The affirmed judgment, interest, and final payment reached $24.85 million.

The Dole litigation also expanded Mardirossian’s practice into civil-rights cases. Vehicle manufacturers and police agencies exercise different forms of power, yet both control technical materials, internal procedures, and the first official version of events. Both can convert a human injury into a dispute over systems the plaintiff cannot access alone. Mardirossian approached police cases with the same physical and documentary rigor he brought to automotive defects.

The death of Kelly Thomas placed that rigor before a city already under national scrutiny. Fullerton officers confronted Thomas, an unhoused man living with schizophrenia, and subjected him to a prolonged beating and repeated Taser use. He died days later. Criminal prosecutions ended in acquittals. Mardirossian continued with the civil action, using surveillance footage, internal practices, prior reports, and evidence about how officers reviewed video before preparing their accounts.

The city had offered Thomas’s father $900,000. On the eve of trial, Fullerton agreed to pay $4.9 million.

Mendoza v. County of Los Angeles involved a grandfather killed at his own home during a sheriff’s operation. An armed parolee had entered the residence during a manhunt. Frank Mendoza Sr. emerged onto his porch, and a deputy shot him after identifying a silhouette as the suspect. Mardirossian presented evidence about identification, tactics, training, and command. Mardirossian also fought for disclosure of the deputy’s identity against resistance from law-enforcement interests. Los Angeles County paid $14.35 million to the family.

Valenzuela v. City of Anaheim arose from the death of Fermin Valenzuela Jr. after officers used chokeholds and a Taser during an encounter at a laundromat. Mardirossian and civil-rights lawyer Dale Galipo obtained a $13.2 million federal jury verdict. The Ninth Circuit later held that California’s restriction on posthumous hedonic damages conflicted with the compensatory and deterrent purposes of federal civil-rights law.

The work continued through Zerby v. City of Long Beach, where officers killed Douglas Zerby after mistaking a garden-hose nozzle for a firearm, producing a $6.5 million verdict. In Doe v. County of Los Angeles, a sheriff’s cruiser traveling at high speed struck pedestrians after attempting to pass a yielding vehicle on the right. Los Angeles County paid $42.2 million to resolve the case.

Each matter required a confrontation with an official account. Video, physical positioning, training rules, internal review, timing, and prior conduct became the means of testing it.

Models, Video, and Reconstruction

Visual proof in Mardirossian’s cases carries the burden of reconstruction. Models, video, physical components, and spatial demonstrations turn technical testimony into shared observation.

The Ekbatani model allowed jurors to test the sightline themselves. In Smith v. MV Transportation, the firm built a model large enough to occupy much of the courtroom. Thirteen-year-old Ciara Smith had been riding her bicycle when a commercial bus struck and killed her. The lawyers used the model to show the driver’s available reaction time, the faded and misaligned crosswalk, Smith’s position near the curb, and the company’s training. After a nine-day jury trial, jurors awarded $21.6 million and assigned 75 percent of the responsibility to MV Transportation.

A judge brings legal training and daily exposure to expert testimony, yet the physical world remains decisive. In Pannu, Smith, and other catastrophic-injury cases, Mardirossian’s demonstrations reduced difficult disputes to observable relationships: distance, visibility, timing, geometry, and force.

Mardirossian’s teams build scale models from blueprints and use animation to reconstruct movement, giving judges and juries a physical reference for testing expert testimony.

Because the models must conform to measurements, sightlines, timing, and force, they also test the plaintiff’s reconstruction before trial and expose weaknesses that would not withstand cross-examination.

Published Appellate Decisions

Mardirossian’s cases have also shaped California doctrine through published appellate decisions.

Tansavatdi v. City of Rancho Palos Verdes reached the California Supreme Court after Jonathan Tansavatdi was killed while bicycling through an intersection where a bike lane disappeared. The city relied on design immunity, arguing that an approved roadway plan shielded it from liability. The Supreme Court held that design immunity leaves failure-to-warn claims available when a public entity knows that an approved feature presents a danger. A city may possess immunity for the design and still have a duty to warn the public about hazards that design creates.

Approval of a plan does not create permanent silence around the danger the plan produces. A city that knows of the hazard must confront the warning question directly.

Purton v. Marriott International extended employer responsibility where an employee became intoxicated at a company party, reached home, later drove again, and caused a fatal collision. Because the intoxication arose within the scope of employment, the Court of Appeal held that its causal force could continue beyond the employee’s safe arrival home.

Lewis v. Ukran addressed the present-value reduction of future damages. After a $1.65 million bench verdict, the Court of Appeal placed the burden of proving the appropriate discount on the party seeking it. An unsupported discount rate can reduce an award intended to finance years of future care. The party seeking that reduction must supply the supporting evidence.

Srithong v. Total Investment Co. concerned hot roofing tar that penetrated a restaurant ceiling and injured a patron. The Court of Appeal held that Proposition 51 left vicarious liability grounded in a nondelegable duty fully enforceable. A property owner remained responsible for maintaining a safe roof even after assigning the work to a contractor.

Pannu preserved central product-liability principles against a manufacturer’s appellate challenge. The published opinions extend the work into rules governing access to juries, verdict preservation, and recovery of proven loss.

A verdict resolves one dispute. Precedent changes the ground on which later disputes will be fought.

Practice and Leadership

Mardirossian served as president of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles.

His clients have included athletes, families at home, children in crosswalks, drivers trapped inside machines, and people confronted by officers who controlled both the scene and the first report. The firm has opened corporate testing records, proved defect theories against global automakers, and challenged police agencies after official accounts had hardened.

The hidden sightline was reconstructed in a scale model that brought the hazard into the courtroom. After the jury assigned responsibility, the roadway was changed.