Founder’s Story

On an afternoon in October 1999…

My grandmother, Fay, was laid on her back on a gurney with her head tilted to one side and was vomiting into my hands.

The vomiting was caused by a high dose of Vicodin to dull her pain.  In my grandmother’s pragmatism, she mustered in pain, “Please don’t let it get in my hair or Suzette (her stylist) will have a fit!” A piece of a chipped tooth was dangling in her hair. 

Rewinding the clock about six hours, it was a pristine fall morning in San Diego. My grandmother was headed to her weekly ladies bridge game and it was her turn to bring a snack, so she stopped by the local Safeway (grocery store) for a half dozen oranges. After checking out she walked out the sliding doors and turned left heading to her car, walking along a breezeway passing through a strip mall. 

Adjacent to the Safeway was a popular store at the time known as RadioShack. This particular morning they were demoing a new satellite TV technology known as DirectTV. To display the picture on televisions indoors, they had a satellite in a parking lot and ran the cables about 50 yards across the parking lot, up over a curb, and loosely taped across the walkway into RadioShack. 

Now, my grandmother was a brisk walker. She could take the grandkids to SeaWorld all day long and pop up the next day for an encore if needed. This would be the last day she walked without aid. 

Carrying her oranges she tripped over the poorly marked wires and fell forward on her left side, breaking her wrist and hip, and crashing her teeth into the cement. She laid there in agony, with bits of her teeth by her face. An ambulance came within moments and transported her to the hospital where she underwent multiple surgeries to repair her wrist and hip that week. She would see the dentist to fix her broken teeth in the following weeks. 

Her recovery was not going well. The HMO had a limited budget for convalescent homes, and my grandmother had developed painful bedsores — open wounds in the body from the blood not circulating through the tissues. The recovery was slow, she eventually caught pneumonia from another patient and died from her complications in September 2000.

Her medical provider was the same one my grandfather had at the time of his death in 1995. He died from complications during a surgical procedure where the necessary life-saving procedure could not be performed due to since-lifted age and health insurance restrictions.

My grandmother’s case was a mix of premises liability leading to what was essentially a wrongful death. We were recommended to a lawyer the family knew, and even though it was not his specialty, he assured us he could do it. That guy definitely saw dollar signs. 

RadioShack and DirectTV’s lawyers were a legal army. They had a job to do and did it well. They overwhelmed our family’s ambitious lawyer who frequently presented an excuse, and his communication was poor. 

Backed into a corner, a very low settlement that covered only direct medical bills had to be accepted.

As you can imagine given my grandfather’s situation, I’m not a big fan of health insurance companies and considered lighting the RadioShack on fire several times. More than anything I realized what a bad job our lawyer did. He was later disbarred for other legal malpractice. 

Less than a year later, I saw the same DirecTV satellite in another parking lot running wires into a RadioShack. No change for the safety of others ever came. 

So, what is Obu?

Obu is the product of a founder who is intrigued by user behavior and analytics, coupled with a mission to ensure when a family needs a lawyer, they find a lawyer with the experience and resources to ensure that the negligent parties will be held accountable. And more importantly, that the same devastating injury, or death, will not happen to someone else. 

This is why at Obu when it comes to selecting the clients we choose to work with we live by the motto: We will only work with a lawyer who we would hire to represent our own families.

We do it for my grandmother and the tens of thousands who have suffered from corporations who put profits over people.