The House of Frames Fire

One of the memorable cases that we had an opportunity to try in front of a jury involved a business that many of you all may be familiar with called the House of Frames. The House of Frames was a framing business on Cobb Parkway. It was there for a very long time and unfortunately it was burned down and we were hired to represent them in recovering all of the inventory that was destroyed in that fire. The way it happened was, is that there was a business in the same building that recycled padding, carpet padding. And their business model was, is that they would have carpet people that were installing carpet all over Metro Atlanta come and dump their padding in the back parking lot. I did not know this until I got involved in the case, but carpet padding is extremely flammable. And somehow one night a fire broke out and that carpet padding just lit up in flames and the flames went into the building and destroyed the House of Frames inventory. One of the issues we ran into was we had no idea how the fire started. And so you may ask yourself, how in the world do you prove negligence when you don’t know what happened? Well, fortunately, the law recognizes that there are some fact scenarios that you can’t prove exactly what happened. And that’s why we were able to make a claim based on nuisance instead of negligence. In Georgia, if you create a dangerous condition, like inviting people to dump flammable carpet padding in your parking lot next to a business, you can still be held responsible for the natural consequence of that nuisance behavior. Interesting little tidbit, my law school diploma and law review diplomas were actually framed at the House of Frames while they were still in business.