Damaged L.A. Sidewalk Left Film Producer with Lifelong Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

The City of Los Angeles received a complaint about tree roots that had uplifted two sidewalk slabs. Workers visited the site, poured asphalt over it, and called it a day, knowing it was a temporary solution. Seven years later, the asphalt had long since deteriorated, and the pavement uplifts returned, creating a dangerous obstacle course for pedestrians. A film producer in her early forties named Jennifer was walking home with a friend after a workout. She was two houses down from where she lived when her foot caught on the uplift. Her ankle rolled with a sickening snap. She stumbled to the ground in agony. Unable to walk, she relied on her friend to carry her home.

At the ER, Jennifer went into anaphylactic shock after physicians gave her ketamine for the pain. Once she was successfully sedated, surgeons cut open her ankle and performed an open reduction internal fixation, installing hardware to repair the damage. However, Jennifer had also sustained a hairline fracture of her other foot, making it impossible for her to navigate stairs. This proved problematic as she lived alone in an upstairs bungalow-style home. For nearly 4 months, she couldn’t walk down the steps to leave her apartment. The timing could not have been worse for Jennifer, who had been working to reboot a television show. The sudden injury forced her to cancel meetings with Jimmy Fallon and Keke Palmer. To make matters worse, Jennifer required additional surgeries to remove the hardware, and her tendon was severed in the process. Eventually, she developed complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) with constant lower leg pain. She couldn’t wear a shoe, sleep comfortably, or walk down her home’s steps. She was forced to scoot up and down the stairs with a pillow. Considering the absence of a cure for CRPS, Jennifer faced permanent disability.

A year later, the law firm that was handling Jennifer’s legal case against the City of L.A. transferred it to Christienne “Christi” Papa, partner at Ardalan & Associates. Specializing in personal injury, catastrophic injury, and wrongful death cases with a focus on litigating public entities, Christi unearthed a prior complaint that had been sent to the city seven years ago about the broken sidewalk, which was then insufficiently patched over. She also learned that an adjacent private property owner had pulled a permit for root pruning years ago, but it was never performed. Photos of the area showed it was undeniably dangerous, and she felt confident that the City’s liability was ironclad.

Knowing this, the City’s attorneys attempted to devalue the case by shifting blame onto Jennifer. They went so far as to call her an exaggerator and a liar. They argued that she should have been paying attention to where she was walking. But when this strategy gained no traction, the defense zeroed in on an off-hand comment in her medical records: Jennifer’s doctors noted that she had been doing "cartwheels and calisthenics” before the fall. The defense tried to spin this as their golden ticket out of liability and repeatedly brought it up in depositions. But Christi successfully quashed their attempts to paint her client’s aerobics workout as the source of her injuries.

Meanwhile, the case progressed slowly as Christi had to constantly deal with the bureaucracy inherent to a public entity and its team of lawyers. To reach a settlement, L.A. City’s defense lawyers had to go through multiple layers of approval from their supervising attorney all the way up to Mayor Karen Bass. This meant that Christi needed to find a compelling way to communicate the severity of Jennifer’s CRPS to an entire chain of public workers. Thus, she reached out to DK Global to create an animation that could succinctly capture the otherwise invisible nature of Jennifer’s lifelong disability. 

The DK Global animation opened with a 3D model of Jennifer and the diagnostic criteria for CRPS. Four categories of symptoms were shown. After this, Jennifer's model unveiled her underlying nervous system, which demonstrated how pain signals travel to the brain. The sequence showed how the nervous system of CRPS victims flares at sudden, excruciating intervals. Then, a 3D illustration demonstrated how Jennifer’s neuroinflammatory response affected blood flow and caused swelling in her leg. The animation concluded by outlining how Jennifer’s initial symptoms progressed to meet a diagnosis of CRPS — including symptoms to her Vasomotor system, Sudomotor mechanisms, and changes to her Motor/Tropic condition.

Before the CRPS diagnosis, the defense’s initial offer was only $15,000. But as Jennifer’s injuries progressed, Christi believed the actual case value was significantly higher. Once she presented Jennifer’s diagnosis and the DK Global animation, the defense offered $1,000,000, which would normally be a “slam dunk” for a sidewalk case. However, Christi knew a jury would love her client and sympathize with her lifelong disability. Eventually, the defense had Mayor Karen Bass sign-off on an offer of $5,000,000 to settle the case, which Christi accepted. The historic amount for a sidewalk case was an immense relief to Jennifer, who took comfort in knowing that her future medical needs were financially secured. 

Christienne Papa, partner at Ardalan & Associates, handles complex personal injury and wrongful death cases. She has secured multiple seven- and eight-figure verdicts on behalf of her clients, many of which have been recognized by TopVerdict.com as record-breaking verdicts in California. Christi is licensed to practice in California, Florida, and Illinois, and is an active member of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA). She has been recognized as a National Trial Lawyers Top 40 Under 40 honoree in 2023, 2024, and 2025, and was named a Super Lawyers Rising Star in 2026.