Randi McGinn
Plaintiffs’ Trial Practice · Product Safety · Medical Harm
When Design Becomes Evidence
Randi McGinn’s plaintiff-side trial practice includes trucking-safety, product-liability, and medical-negligence cases built around engineering and medical evidence. Her work isolates the design or operational choice at issue and connects it to the physical mechanism of injury.
McGinn worked as a journalist before entering law and has practiced for more than forty years. Her firm reports that she has tried more than 130 cases. That experience informs a method centered on documents, component design, medical chronology, witness preparation, and demonstrative evidence that allows the opposing theory to be tested in the courtroom.
The recurring task is translation without oversimplification: a jury must understand how a trailer interacts with a passenger car, how two implant metals behave inside the body, or how a medical decision moved through a clinical and corporate system.
Side-Underride Evidence
Riley Hein’s Honda became trapped beneath the side of a Utility semi-trailer and burned. McGinn’s firm presented engineering evidence concerning the open span between the trailer’s wheels and whether a side-underride guard would have preserved the car’s occupied space.
The jury found Utility Trailer negligent and allocated 45 percent of the responsibility to the manufacturer, producing an $18.9 million recovery against Utility.
Product Design and Appellate Review
In Michael McDonald’s case against Zimmer, the evidence concerned a cobalt-chromium femoral head on a titanium trunnion and the metal debris released at that junction. McDonald developed metallosis and tissue damage and required revision procedures.
After a bench trial, the district court found a strict-liability design defect. McGinn and Katie Curry appeared for McDonald on appeal, and the New Mexico Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment. The alternative-design evidence centered on a ceramic head that met the manufacturer’s requirements while avoiding the mixed-metal junction.
From Journalism to the Trial Record
McGinn earned her undergraduate and law degrees from the University of New Mexico and built her practice in Albuquerque. Her earlier work in journalism remains visible in the way her trial records distinguish observation from inference and connect individual testimony to technical proof.
In trucking cases, the evidence can include vehicle geometry, speed, visibility, crash reconstruction, industry standards, and a proposed alternative design. In product cases, it can include material composition, corrosion, component interaction, medical imaging, revision surgery, and the manufacturer’s own design requirements.
McGinn remains a partner at McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers. Her practice focuses on trucking collisions, product liability, medical harm, and other serious-injury cases in which a physical object or medical record provides the starting point for the liability analysis.