The Collins arbitration: how a signed waiver became a $15.6 million award.

In July 2021, Damion Collins went to a birthday party at a Kansas trampoline park. He was a young man with no history at the park; it was his first visit. Like every guest, he entered under the park's standard liability waiver, a document that also routed any dispute into private arbitration. Within hours, he was in an emergency room with a cervical spinal cord injury. He has been paralyzed from the chest down ever since.

What happened in between took place on an attraction called the Wipeout: a ring of triangular trampolines surrounding a set of rotating arms that sweep across the jumping surface. Guests are expected to time the arms, ducking under one and leaping over the other, while bouncing. Damion attempted a maneuver on the attraction, came down on his neck, and did not get up. The incident was captured on the park's own video.

The attractionThe Wipeout at the park where Damion was injured. A warning sign inside the enclosure states that impact can result in serious or fatal head injury, paralysis, and fracture.

What the evidence showed

The park's insurance adjuster came to us before we filed anything. He sent over the surveillance footage and the waiver. His message was blunt: Damion was breaking the rules. He signed a waiver. This case should never be filed and they would never pay a dime.

Most attorneys would have closed the file right there. We relied on our experience instead. We took the footage to experts. We researched the attraction on our own. The evidence told a different story and the arbitration gave us the chance to develop all of it.

The investigation established that the Wipeout was not an unknown quantity. The same attraction had already proven dangerous at another park before it was ever put into service at this one. The companies that built it, sold it, and operated it were in a position to know what it could do. The guests bouncing on it were not. No one instructed Damion on how to use the attraction. No one warned him of what had already happened elsewhere. The information that mattered most never made it past the corporate offices to the person standing on the trampoline.

The defendants never produced the Iowa incident reports. We found them on our own through independent research and a third party. One of them describes a child hurt on this same Wipeout in a manner nearly identical to what happened to Damion.

The hazard analysisFrom the Activity Hazard Analysis of the Wipeout performed after Iowa regulators shut the attraction down in 2019. Its own risk matrix defines catastrophic as loss of life or limb or paralysis. This file existed years before Damion was hurt.

An Iowa incident reportOne of the reports the defendants never produced. A child jumped to clear the highest arm and landed on the pad instead of the trampoline. Nearly identical to Damion's injury.

That gap between what the companies knew and what the patron was told became the center of the case.

The waiver, and why it did not end the case

The waiver did what trampoline park waivers do: it recited the inherent risks of jumping and directed disputes into arbitration. But a guest can only assume a risk he is told about or could reasonably appreciate. The danger at the heart of this case was not the ordinary risk of bouncing on a trampoline. It was a specific, known hazard in a specific attraction, one the operators had reason to understand and the patron had no way to discover. A form signed at the front desk does not answer for that kind of silence.

The actual waiverThe release section of the waiver from Damion's case. The highlighted language purports to release the protected parties from all liabilities even for their own negligence. It did not end the case.

So the case proceeded, in the very forum the park's own paperwork selected. Arbitration is a venue parks generally believe favors them: private, streamlined, and away from juries. We prepared the Collins matter the way we prepare a jury trial, with the incident video, the attraction's history, and the corporate record fully developed. The forum changed. The evidence did not. It helped that the forum was familiar: Humphrey, Farrington & McClain has handled more than 1,000 arbitrations since 2020, work that has produced more than $100 million in awards for clients.

Reaching past the front counter

Trampoline park chains are structured in layers: a local franchise entity operates the building, a national franchisor licenses the brand and writes the manuals, and affiliated companies design and sell the attractions. When someone is hurt, that structure works exactly as designed, with each layer pointing at another.

The Collins award cut through it. Responsibility was assigned across the corporate structure, with the largest share falling on the national franchisor rather than the local franchise. The entities that operated the park, the franchisor that governed it, and the company behind the attraction were each held accountable. For families and for referring attorneys, that allocation is the most important fact of the case after the number itself: the decisions that lead to these injuries are usually made well above the building where the injury happens, and the case has to be built to reach them.

The case, in sequence

Results that actually matter

Because of this result, Damion and his family were able to move to a home built for his life: fully accessible, with a wheelchair-accessible van in the driveway, on its own land, overlooking a small pond. He could get outside again. The award did not give him back what was taken at that park, but it gave him back a measure of the world.

Damion was an amazing client and it was an honor to represent him.