Trampoline Parks: The Hidden Risks You Need to Know

Travis:
All right, David Chazen, welcome to the podcast. How you doing this morning?
David Chazen:
Thanks, I'm doing well. Thanks for having me
Travis:
You bet. Thank you for taking a leap of faith on me and being my first guest. I know we've had a few technical issues, but I think we are ready to rock and roll. How are you doing this morning?
David Chazen:
I'm doing well. Just got back from a nice trip and back in the back at the grind now.
Travis:
Okay, very good. Back in the saddle. So you're a lawyer up in New Jersey, and I know you focus on trampling park cases now, but obviously that has not always been the case in your career. So how long you've been practicing law and what have you been doing, I guess before you started doing trampling park cases?
David Chazen:
Well, I became a licensed lawyer in 1981. I was a prosecutor for a while and then I went into private practice with my father, primarily personal injury work. And then about 10 years ago, 2015, the first trampoline park case came into my office and now it seems to be the overwhelming majority of my work now.
Travis:
Okay, that's interesting. I actually also practice with my dad, Patterson Law Group, my wife, my dad. you I get the whole family law firm dynamic. So it's really interesting to me when personal injury lawyers go into a niche of some sort, whether it's...
you know, products liability, your medical malpractice or auto products, in your case trampoline parks. So how did you get started in trampoline parks? Did you set out saying I want to go into this world or did this world kind of find you?
David Chazen:
Uh, in 2015, a family came in their nine year old, uh, had an open fracture of his ankle while he was playing dodgeball at the trampoline park. And, uh, they walked in with this waiver and in my personal injury experience, I hadn't really encountered a waiver like that. And when I read this waiver, uh, it was mind boggling. mean,
You waived the right to sue. If you did sue them, you had to pay them liquidated damages. And if you wanted to bring any sort of action, it had to be arbitration. And even though this was all a New Jersey-based incident, according to this document that you had to sign before you went into the trampoline park, you would have to go to Texas
to arbitrate and arbitrate according to Texas law. yeah, so I was overwhelmed, you know, in reading this thing and it also had an indemnification provision so that if the trampoline park had to pay any money to the injured party, the parents would have to reimburse them for whatever they paid and their legal expenses and so on. And I, you know, I...
Travis:
That's crazy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
David Chazen:
I said, come back in two weeks, I have to research this. And it turned out that basically everything in that contract was unenforceable in the state of New Jersey, and most of it would be unenforceable in other states as well, although the law from state to state varies.
Travis:
Great.
Travis:
Yeah, and we're going to get into the waivers. Obviously, the saddest part about the waivers is that people think they are ironclad. So people don't even make the call to a lawyer to see, do I have any rights here? Because I did sign this waiver. And so they think it's just game over. And it's just not the case. And we're going to get into that. But backing up for a second. So 2015, you had your first trampoline park case.
and I assume you had some success with it and word spread around town. I first learned about you because I saw your mug on CBS News a couple years ago. I've seen, you know, ABC, NBC, know, various news outlets have gotten into this and have interviewed you. So since that first case in 2015, how many of these kinds of cases have you done around the country?
David Chazen:
I'm involved in close to 150 cases.
Travis:
And that's current. Those are current cases.
David Chazen:
A portion of them resolved. But since, in terms of active cases, well over 100.
Travis:
Okay.
Travis:
Now, trampoline parks, let's back up for a second. Because when I grew up in the 90s, primarily, everywhere I went, pretty much, someone had a trampoline in the neighborhood, a backyard trampoline. And back then, trampolines looked a lot differently than they do now, the consumer backyard trampoline. What happens?
You know either in the late 90s or in the 2000s that changed backyard trampolines our backyard trampolines regulated and if so by who
David Chazen:
All right, so if you want, I'll give you an overview of the history of trampolines. So in 1945, the first trampoline was patented by a man named George Nissen. George Nissen was a gymnast. They used it for training purposes. then the military used it for pilots in terms of helping them with orientation.
Travis:
Sure.
David Chazen:
when they would fly upside down and do other aerobatic tricks in an airplane or maneuvers. And then eventually the trampoline became a gymnastics apparatus and gymnasts would compete on the trampolines. And these trampolines ended up in...
high schools as part of a phys ed program. And what started happening was, especially with people doing flips, bad injuries started occurring and the trampolines came out of the school programs and the gymnastics community in the mid 80s developed rules and primarily
Travis:
All right.
David Chazen:
They recognized the trampoline as a potentially dangerous device. It's not a toy. And they started certifying their coaches in the ways that a trampoline can be used safely. And there's basically a few components to that. One is you have a professional coach who understands skill assessment. Some people aren't meant to do
certain skills on a trampoline. They're just not physically capable of doing it safely. Then the next thing is you have skill progression. So the coaches have you master the simple basic techniques of using a trampoline before you advance to more complicated or risky types of maneuvers. And then the third thing is professional supervision because
It may involve spotting. It may involve a harness. It may involve just watching and seeing whether somebody is getting tired or not doing things safely. And so you need professional supervision. And when that program was implemented in the mid 80s, the the serious injuries on trampolines in gymnastics went to a very, very
insignificant number and it's pretty much stayed that way in gymnastics. You don't hear of serious trampoline injuries in gymnastics. Then the consumer or backyard trampoline came along and when you ask whether they're regulated, they're not really regulated. There is a ASTM F381 standard.
Travis:
Right.
David Chazen:
It's an international standard that applies to backyard trampolines and probably the most important rules that apply that would come with a backyard trampoline when you purchase it is that no flips are allowed, no somersaults, no flips. Children six years and under shouldn't be on the trampoline and one person on a trampoline at a time
jumping in the center, jumping vertically, and also adult supervision at all times. And so that's the backyard trampoline set of rules. Those rules don't translate to the trampoline parks. Okay.
Travis:
Yeah, and whether or not, yeah.
Right, right. And that's a big kind of overarching point is that we're here today to talk about the dangers of trampoline parks because where David gets these calls and where I've gotten the calls, it's from trampoline parks. Trampolines today, the backyard trampolines, whether it was driven by regulation or driven just by the market consumer demand, they are a heck of a lot safer now than they were when I was a kid. You you see the netting around them.
that are all springless or spring free, I don't know what you call it, with those rods so you're not pinching your hands or breaking fingers in those things anymore. So they are much safer. even those companies, you look at their own websites, they say one at a time, jump in the middle, don't do flips. And so ultimately it's going to be up to the parents to monitor that and regulate that the best you can. Now trampoline parks look a lot different than pack yard trampolines, as you mentioned, David.
Trampoline parks vary of course across the country. They all have different features and they're all coming out with new attractions all the time. Whether it's, you know, slam dunk zones or, you know, slides that shoot you off into the air or whatever the little side attraction is. But the main thing that most of these trampoline parks have in common is this grid, right? This looks like a checkerboard of trampolines.
David Chazen:
In the industry, it's referred to as a trampling court.
Travis:
the trampoline court. So how does, let's just start with the actual trampoline itself in these standard trampoline courts and then we'll talk about how the fact that these are all interconnected and the hazards that that adds on top to this. But the trampoline itself, how is that physically different than a backyard trampoline aside from the obvious parts of not having a net around each trampoline?
David Chazen:
Well, when the trampoline parks were first started back in Las Vegas in 2004, the trampolines were more of a standard size in that court, in the trampoline court, which would be seven by 14. Over time, they've shrunk and they're about six by six, six feet by six feet. And they use a polypropylene
black bed or dead bed as they're referred to. They're very thick. They're very heavy. And they are suspended by thick heavy springs like anybody who's been around a backyard trampoline. Those springs are long and kind of soft and you can take them on and off by hand. The springs that the trampoline parks use are shorter.
thicker and you need a device to put them on. And they surround that six by six trampoline with over 140 springs. At least that's been my count when I've gone underneath to inspect. And so these trampolines are under tremendous tension. Now they're designed not to let you jump too high. So you get
two, three, four feet, maybe if you're very athletic, you can get higher.
Travis:
Which seems like a good idea in and of itself, right?
David Chazen:
That's a good idea, but the problem with the trampoline now is that these trampolines are very powerful and they don't move that much so it's deceptive. you, if you saw a gymnastics trampoline you'd see it going down maybe a foot, foot and a half and it's shooting you back up, but it's power over distance. These trampolines are going down a couple inches.
Travis:
Right.
David Chazen:
And when they come back up and I've taken biomechanical engineers into the trampoline parks to measure it, they're coming up at thousands of pounds per second really fast. And they're capable of breaking any bone in the body. And they do. I mean, I have a four year old who had his femur snapped just by the trampoline coming back up into its position.
Travis:
Right.
Travis:
Yeah, and that's so important for people to know. It's not that all injuries happen because collisions happen. We're talking about a kid jumping normally, as he's supposed to, being properly supervised and everything, and his femur snapping, in the case of David's client, just because of the tension of these trampolines. You know, David, I was thinking about this. It reminds me of airbags.
I tell people, get your foot off the dashboard all the time because people don't realize the force that airbags come out at. We've measured that too and there are studies about it. But it's kind like that with these trampoline park trampolines. Just the power and the speed that these trampoline parks after somebody goes up in the air where they come back to the normal position, that's a dramatic force. And then what happens if...
you know there's another jumper on that trampoline let's talk about that scenario and you've got one kid who is in the air on their way down and then another kid just jumps and so the trampoline now is returning back to the neutral position while the first kid is coming down you know what happens then in some of these cases
David Chazen:
Well, the industry term for that is a double bounce. And basically when that trampoline comes back up, if the kid is coming into contact with it while it's rising, there's going to be a problem. And it can vary from a broken ankle to a broken tibia fibula, a derangement of the knee.
a broken femur, some sort of hip injury. Sometimes it can even, if the person is positioned in a certain way, it can impact their spine as well. So it's just a very powerful force and depending on the position of the person coming down, coming down into it, it can really break anything. so,
Travis:
Yep. And these are still.
David Chazen:
basic rule for the trampoline parks is you're supposed to separate people by age and size because the larger the person is, the more energy is going to be involved. And so I have cases where parents unknowingly broke the legs of their young child and
Travis:
Right.
Travis:
jumping with the kids.
David Chazen:
Yeah, and they weren't doing anything extreme. You know, they were treating the situation gently as you would with a child. And nonetheless, the trampoline came up with such force that it snapped their leg. And I mean, this is borne out by the surveillance videos that all these trampoline parks have. So we know exactly what happened. We can see it. And the parents weren't doing anything dangerous from their point of view.
unknowing not knowing how dangerous this trampoline bed is
Travis:
Right, they might do it in their own backyard, jump gently with their kids, and then doing that same thing at a trampoline park, there's just heightened dangers that they're just not aware of.
David Chazen:
And they see all the other parents with their kids doing the same thing and they're trying to spend time with their children and enjoy a recreational activity together. And they think it's safe.
Travis:
Yeah, and then the other, know, so let's talk more about the core, the trampoline core. These are interconnected. So what, so you have springs underneath the mats. So, you know, backyard trampolines don't have springs typically anymore. Like the springs when we were kids is what you're referring to, but they're just bigger and they're tighter and they have to have machines to put them on. So what's the spring actually connected to? Is it connected to like a metal grid system or are these trampoline
these trampolines in the court interconnected where there is energy that goes from one trampoline to another.
David Chazen:
Okay, so it depends on the trampoline park. Skyzone uses a one inch chain, one inch chain link. And the chains run from one end of the trampoline court to the other. And then they're tightened by a turnbuckle. The tension on the chain is through a turnbuckle that's turned and it pulls on the chain. So,
in one direction you have, you know, seven or eight chains running the distance and then in the other direction you have seven or eight chains or more running in the other direction. They create squares and then the trampolines have the springs through eyelets in the trampoline bed and then the other end of the spring is hooked onto the chain link. Now if you have a chain link
and there's a trampoline on one side of it and a trampoline bed on the other side of it, they share the same chain link. This is at Skyzone. So, these chains are not under a uniform tension. There's no way of measuring it. Also, over time, the chains stretch, the turnbuckles loosen, and you can...
you can have all kinds of different tensions on the chains. Some, some sky zones that we've inspected, it's almost like a water bed. The chains are so loose, chains are so loose, it's almost like a water bed. You know, other places are, are, you know, more uniform, um, in terms of their tension, but you don't know. So what does this do? Number one,
As you have people jumping on these trampolines, it's creating waves of energy that go back and forth like a water bed in the trampoline court.
Travis:
All right.
David Chazen:
And that affects the tension on a trampoline. So one minute somebody's jumping on a trampoline and it's giving them a certain kind of bounce. And the next minute they're bouncing on it and they get a different kind of reaction out of the trampoline bed. So you have all that energy transfer. And there's a concept called proprioception. And that's the
body's ability through the senses to anticipate a surface that you're walking on or jumping on or landing on so you think of it like Right yeah, like your body tenses a certain way when you're running on a hard floor versus running on a on a beach and and Compensates for it. So if all of a sudden the tension on the trampoline changes
Travis:
Your landing zone changes mid-air on you and you don't expect it.
Travis:
Okay, right.
David Chazen:
and your body is not expecting it, your legs may buckle, and you don't end up with the same bounce or reaction. And if you're trying to do a skill, like jumping from trampoline to trampoline or doing a flip or somersault,
Travis:
Yeah, yeah, I mean, so going back to just the original trampoline design and even trampolines today, if I'm not mistaken, you're supposed to jump in the middle of the trampolines, right? Because as you get closer to the edges or to the springs, it's going to be more rigid, tighter. Yeah, oh, and you have obviously a greater chance of landing on the padding or the floor nearby.
David Chazen:
People get hurt that way.
David Chazen:
The tension increases.
Travis:
But when you have these kids on this court going from trampoline to trampoline, you know, they're just jumping across, know, like bunny rabbits. They're not always landing right in the middle of the trampolines, right? I mean.
David Chazen:
It's really impossible. And if you had a skilled gymnast, perhaps they could, or an acrobat, perhaps they could negotiate jumping from trampoline to trampoline. But these trampoline parks aren't necessarily maintained very well. So as you're jumping from trampoline to trampoline, you're getting a different tension. And that dictates that you're gonna maybe
Travis:
Right. It's just a complete design flaw.
Travis:
Right.
David Chazen:
falls shorter or go longer than you anticipated. may end up, you know, you may end up landing near the edge where the tension is harder and that can cause a fracture or, or God help you, you land on the pad because the pads in these trampoline parks are a lot of nothing. They're like an inch, inch and a half of foam that has been beaten up and it's probably years old and, and deteriorated.
And so you're landing on either the springs or a metal frame or a one inch chain link that's going to move on you when you land on it. And so people end up with list Frank fractures, basically the foot breaks in half or an ankle fracture or, you know, a knee derangement again. Um, that's another issue. Um, one of my experts said,
Travis:
Mm-hmm.
David Chazen:
Trying to jump from trampoline to trampoline is like trying to keep your balance running downhill. At some point, you lose your balance and you end up getting hurt that way.
Travis:
So.
Travis:
types of injuries, you know, you've talked about the foot fractures, shin fractures, hip issues, spine issues. Have you seen paralysis and or death from trampoline park cases?
David Chazen:
Yes, have been deaths. And one of the deaths involved a champion gymnast. Again, whatever he was capable of doing on a trampoline in a gymnastics facility, he didn't get what he expected when he went into this trampoline park. And he passed away. There are many quadriplegic.
It's not even necessarily a paraplegic. Typically people are involved in some sort of somersault or flip, which the trampoline parks encourage with their marketing. And they're quadriplegics. And there's numerous instances of that. There are numerous instances of open fractures because of all the power. And open fracture means that the bones came through the skin. I have one case where
Travis:
Yeah.
David Chazen:
a teenager's bone poked a hole in the trampoline bed when he opened fractured his leg. A tib fib, mean, they're gruesome injuries. They are not your typical playground injury where you got a slight fracture and you put the person in a cast for six weeks. These are communuted
grossly displaced fractures that require surgery with the use of plates and screws and rods. And they're life changing and many times the tissue around the fractured area is all torn up so the leg is never going to be normal.
Travis:
Right. So let's talk about flips for a second. You said most of these paralysis cases, and I assume the deaths that have happened as well are in the scenario where someone's attempting to do a flip.
David Chazen:
Or they're going to a foam pit. The foam pits are another issue.
Travis:
Yeah, I got a call, and this is a buddy of mine. He went for his kid's birthday party or something, and he jumped into the foam pit. the employee was sitting there and said, go ahead and jump. It's whatever. He jumped, and there just wasn't enough foam. And I mean, he had some resistance. He was caught a little bit. But he hit the concrete floor. And he was shaken up. And he thought he had damaged his spinal cord. He was scared.
And it turned out to be OK, but yeah, these foam pits are whole other ball of wax.
David Chazen:
Yeah, we can talk about that too. mean, the foam pits, the foam pits in these trampoline parks violate F 2470.
Travis:
But.
Travis:
Which is what? mean, regulations is it?
David Chazen:
F2970 is the standard for trampoline parks, ASTM standard.
Travis:
Now, do the trampoline parks, you know, to my understanding, trampoline parks here in Texas are not regulated. There's no insurance requirements. There's no reporting requirements, which is another frustrating thing here is all these injuries that you've talked about that you've seen because you get the phone calls from all over the country. You know, it's not like we have a database where we can tell people like these are the risks that you're looking at because you don't hear about it.
David Chazen:
Well, let me put the injuries in a perspective based upon some of the discovery that I've done. I took a deposition of the director of risk management for one of the major trampoline companies in the country. their franchises are required to report injuries to him. They may not report all their injuries, but I asked him, I said,
Can you tell me in the average month as to each trampoline park, all these franchises, what do they report? How many injuries do they report a month to you? And his response was 20 to 30 a month, maybe more.
Travis:
per part.
David Chazen:
per park. So now currently,
Travis:
So that's one reportable injury per day almost.
David Chazen:
20 to 30 or more per month per park. Now there are 1500
Travis:
Yikes.
David Chazen:
parks, reportedly there are 1500 trampoline parks globally right now. If you do the math, it's at 20 a month, it's 360,000 injuries a year. If it's 30 a month, it's over 500,000 injuries a year.
Travis:
Yeah, these are what that franchise has described and taught their franchisees to be reportable injuries. So we are not talking about stubbed toes and skin knees here.
David Chazen:
Reportable.
David Chazen:
Well, mean, they didn't, it's not a breakdown by seriousness of injury. So maybe some of the injuries aren't serious. But on the other hand, you know, some trampoline parks may be hesitant to report every injury and some people, especially like with a little kid, will run out the door with their kid and not report it. They'll just be trying to get their kid to the hospital as fast as possible. So, you know,
It's a lot of injuries. People are getting injured because of the design and the lack of supervision. The fact that they don't offer any kind of instruction. And most these trampoline parks do not comply with F2970 and train their court monitors in the fundamentals of trampoline jumping as required by the standards.
Travis:
Yeah, every trampoline park case that I've worked on, and these cases are hard to take because of the waivers and things we'll talk about here in a second, but the supervising employees seem to be high school kids for the most part in these cases who don't have any training on what to do to prevent injuries and they have no training on what to do when the injuries happen in the cases that I've looked at. Is that something that you see as well?
David Chazen:
Yes, and also I see that trampling parks are often understaffed. So they'll have 10 attractions going and there'll be two people on the floor.
So, and you know, and that again, that's a violation of the F 2970 standard.
Travis:
Do trampoline parks across the country have to comply with that standard or what's the penalty if they don't?
David Chazen:
Well, a handful of states regulate and some of those states incorporate the F-2970 standard. They make it part of the regulation. Rather than just writing their own, they adopt it. So, there are certain attractions that aren't allowed in some states, but the same trampoline park company puts them in other trampoline parks in states that don't regulate.
So there's an attraction called the Wipeout, which involves eight pie-shaped trampolines and a beam that spins around, and you're supposed to try and avoid having that beam knock you down. And there was so many injuries that states like Colorado and Iowa have banned them, thrown them out. And there was one case where
you know, the owner of a wipeout attraction moved it to another state and then the next thing you know that on that same attraction there was a quadriplegic injury, you know, a young father of a family.
Travis:
Yeah, and this is where it gets really frustrating for me is when states like my state, Texas, don't step in and they just say, you know what, this is we're pro business. Let's let the business, let's let the free market play itself out. And if kids are really getting hurt all the time, then families are going to stop going there.
David Chazen:
Well, mean, that's why there are plaintiff's attorneys. People may criticize us, but on the other hand, we go after unsafe products and situations, and through the force of lawsuits, we can affect change too. And frankly, that's what I'm trying to do.
Travis:
Yeah.
Travis:
That's right. I completely agree with that. And then to do that, obviously, I think we've said this already, but people need to come forward.
Right, if they have injuries, in whatever scenario, they need to not be chilled from coming forward and talking to a lawyer. Don't be worried about a waiver, or indemnity agreement, or arbitration clause, or all that legalese. Go talk to a lawyer and see what your rights are. Because with good lawyers, and hopefully with good laws, we can fix some of this stuff and make this stuff a lot safer. I completely agree with that.
We don't even have, so there's no reporting requirements. We don't have insurance requirements in Texas. We don't even have inspection requirements as far as I'm aware. So these facilities can just, they're free to essentially just inspect themselves. So these trampolines that get worn down, these pads that get worn down, these springs that get worn down, they just kind of sit there, you know? And some of these injuries, we haven't talked about this yet.
You know, there's a hole in the trampoline and a kid falls through the hole. His foot goes in the hole and there's the injury. And a good inspection would have caught that. But we're not inspecting these places. So what do you think about that? The states that do regulate trampoline parks, I assume they all have some kind of inspection requirement?
David Chazen:
Um, yes, and they're probably the safer for it, but as we were talking about earlier, there's a basic design defect in these trampoline courts. And there's a basic problem in the way they allow people to use them. Doing flips. In the gymnastics world, they're frightened.
Travis:
All
David Chazen:
let people do flips without the proper training and supervision. These trampoline parks, they encourage it. market, you know, when you watch their marketing stuff, the kids are flipping all over the place.
Travis:
Yeah, I've seen a genesse.
Travis:
Yeah, and I assume there's some trampoline parks out there that have figured this out. they, you know, they're not obviously bad people. They don't want kids getting severely hurt.
David Chazen:
I haven't seen that. I heard a rumor that one of the trampoline parks is going to ban flips. But when you say they're good people, it's probably an insurance company telling them, we're not going to cover you anymore.
for these quadriplegic cases and you better implement a rule that bans flipping so that if somebody does a flip, we have a defense. And that's...
Travis:
So in the last 10 years, David, you have not seen a single case that you worked on. And you've worked on hundreds of these. You've not seen a single case where a trampoline park band flips.
David Chazen:
I'm not aware of any. Look, as far as the major companies are concerned, absolutely not. Because a mom and pop can open up a trampoline park. They can get a building and get a company to come in and set up the ABC trampoline park. Maybe there's someone out there like that.
But in terms of the major companies, you know, I've heard a rumor that one of the companies is about to ban flips, but that's not confirmed. As far as I know, you can flip in any of the major trampoline parks currently.
David Chazen:
Well, and the other thing is, so they make a six by six trampoline bed, it's too small. It's too small to do a flip. you know, it's just, you know, and then people are doing flips off the side walls. Side walls are dangerous. As a matter of fact, the F2970 standard says that trampoline to trampoline jumping, jumping off a side wall,
and doing aerial maneuvers or flips are high risk maneuvers with a high risk of injury and that people should master the fundamentals before they even attempt these types of things. Well, a lot of the trampoline parks don't post that warning that's part of F2970. And then you have to ask yourself, well, all these kids are going to birthday parties?
and maybe one of the kids is a gymnast and the other kids want to try and do things that the gymnast is doing. Maybe a flip. Well, and if that sign is posted, if that warning is posted and they get stopped, you know, what happens now? The parent is going to take them to a gymnastics facility where they're going to learn the fundamentals and then, and then
you know, come back to Trampoline Park and be able to do those skills. You know, and meanwhile, they're being supervised. If a teenager court monitor happens to be present,
He's not that court monitor is not trained in the fundamentals of trampoline jumping. So, you know, it's just, it's just a ridiculous type of business practice by these trampoline parks. And then, and then they don't want to be held responsible for the children that they're attracting and for the terrible life changing injuries that occur to these children.
Travis:
Right.
Travis:
Yeah, and so in the trampoline park cases I worked on, say, well, there's an inherent risk here. And trampolines are dangerous. We all know that. You guys know that. There's an inherent risk here. There's an inherent risk in everything. And this is kind of the comment I get from lot of parents that I talk to about this kind of stuff. Like my kids, for example, I've got four of them. I've got ages from eight to one. And we don't go to trampoline parks. They've never seen the inside of a trampoline park.
But they do things that do have an element of danger to them, right? They play sports. They go skiing. They go swimming. All these kinds of things. They're very active children. But trampoline parks is where I draw the line. So what is your advice to parents? Do you agree with that, first of all, that you
David Chazen:
Well, if you want to take your kids skiing, put them in, unless you're teaching them yourself, you put them in ski school, and they learn the snow plow, and they learn how to fall, and they learn how to stop, and so on. If you're gonna introduce your kids to swimming, you put them in swimming classes, you give them boards.
to float around on and practice their kicking and they do their strokes and they hold their heads underwater to learn how to hold their breath. They learn the basics, they get safe in the fundamentals, they know how to do the dead man's float and that sort of thing. So that they're not just going into something and have no clue as to how to survive or be safe doing that activity. These trampoline parks,
Travis:
Right.
David Chazen:
You know, your kid is four five years old, gets invited to their first birthday party at a trampoline park.
Travis:
Right.
David Chazen:
There's no instruction. There's no training. There's no warning.
Travis:
And there's not much, you know, it's not like bikes or skiing or, you know, where I can take these baby steps and I can get them prepared. What can I do as a parent to mitigate the damages that are present in a trampoline park for a little kid?
David Chazen:
Well, F 2970 says that there should be a children's zone for young children, say six and younger. Okay. So you go into a trampoline park, do they have a children's zone? Because you want to keep the bigger kids and the adults away from your little kid. Cause they're going to end up with a typical fracture from a double bounce. It could be worse.
but the typical fracture is a fracture of the tibia right below the knee. And many times those are treated with just a cast, a full leg cast. So you're going to be dealing with your child in a full leg cast for the time it takes to heal. But then they have to be monitored until they're finished growing because of something called the valgus syndrome, which basically means that the leg is going to heal funny over time and become bowed.
If that happens, then the kid is gonna need corrective surgery. So if you have a little child, you can perhaps minimize some of the risk by only going to a trampoline park that has a children's zone. And you as a parent, don't go on there. And you don't let the older brothers or sisters go on there either. And if that's not being monitored by
Travis:
Right, that's important.
David Chazen:
by the facility, I wouldn't bring a young child in there. And then, of course, whether or not you should even bring a young child onto a trampoline is the first issue, because there are numerous papers or policy statements by pediatric orthopedic groups, societies that say,
Travis:
Yeah.
David Chazen:
The bones of these young children are not developed enough for them to safely jump on a trampoline. Don't allow it. As contrasted with SkyZone's policy that says if you can walk, you can jump. They have no age restrictions whatsoever. So.
Travis:
Yeah, saw that on their website. I think it was in their frequently asked questions about, you know, are there age restrictions? And it said, if you can walk, you can jump. Because I've heard you said that before.
David Chazen:
Yeah, well, you can go back to 2014 and watch Undercover Boss with Jeff Platt of Skyzone. And he's answering the phone and he's asked a question by somebody calling about whether or not there's a minimum age. And he says, oh no, if you can walk, you can jump at Skyzone.
Travis:
and we talked about the age restrictions, I think it was at the American Academy of Pediatrics and also some orthopedic groups who all agree that essentially under the age of six, your kid shouldn't be on a trampoline anywhere.
David Chazen:
That's my understanding, that's correct.
Travis:
And then of course, as we talked about, trampoline park trampolines are stronger. They have the stronger tension. They have the big springs. They have the pads on the sides. So it's an even worse scenario. So if there is no children zone at this trampoline park, which I assume looks a lot different than the standard trampoline courts that we're talking about.
David Chazen:
They're not necessarily different, it's just separation. You want to protect these little children. But you get these birthday parties where, say it's a birthday party for a five-year-old or six-year-old, but they've got a two three-year-old sibling, and they run onto the trampolines or they're on the trampolines, and everybody's kind of watching out for them.
Travis:
designated area.
David Chazen:
but then somebody bounces on the same trampoline as that little child and they end up with a fractured leg or a fractured arm.
Travis:
Send some, send.
Travis:
Yeah, all of a sudden they send a little kid flying and there's nothing any parent or anybody can do at that point.
David Chazen:
Or the kids, actually the kids just go down right there, ton of bricks, boom. It's not like they get launched. That trampoline just comes up a couple inches, hits them, and down they go.
Travis:
Yeah, mean this is essentially why my advice to people is just don't go. Just skip that birthday party. It's not worth it. Whether or not you want to get into the specifics of what you've learned about trampoline park injuries, it's up to you. White lie never hurt anybody. Just tell them you're not available and just go to the next party.
David Chazen:
That would be my advice. see the, the youngest client is one year old with a fractured leg. got two year olds, three year olds, four year olds, five year olds. mean, you name the age, little kids, you know, and it's just, it changes the child. The trauma changes the child. It's just not right.
It's just not right. Little children don't belong in these trampoline parks. They get very overcrowded. They're noisy. Sometimes they're blasting the music. Sometimes they turn the lights down.
Travis:
Yeah, I've had one of those cases. There was like a DJ, I think, and they turned the lights down and lasers. it just seems like it's just a race to do the next great attraction or the next big thing to get all the kids excited about these places. I don't know what their incentives are, but it doesn't seem like safety is always at the top of the incentive list or the top of their concerns. Yeah.
David Chazen:
Not at all. It's revenue driven. is a secondary consideration. If they can implement a safety practice without hurting the revenue, they're more than willing to do it. over and over, we see that whether, I mean, you're supposed to be able to jump and perceive the trampoline bed and now they're.
They call it a glow night in some of the trampoline parks. They turn the lights down and they have, you know, the iridescent clothing that reacts to the light. And now you're supposed to be able to have perception of where you're landing and where the trampoline is. mean, how does that make any sense? And of course then the music is blaring. You can't necessarily hear the person next to you when they talk to you. I mean,
It doesn't make sense from a safety perspective. It's frightening at times.
Travis:
Right. know, it's hard as a parent, right? Especially in Texas, you know, we go two or three months in the summer where it's 100 plus degrees every day. Kids are out of school and you're looking for something to do with them. you might look at a trampoline park down the street and say, well, at least there they're going to be active. They're going to be athletic. They're going to be socializing with their friends. They're going to be off of devices, which
whole other podcast but you know so the parent thinks that this is a good option but it's just do you really understand and appreciate the dangers that are involved and hopefully with podcasts like this and other material and in the work that you are doing around the country parents become more educated I want to talk about waivers David
because just about any these parks are going to require you to sign a waiver of some sort when you go in there. The big fancy ones that have hundreds of locations, you know, it's going to be probably electronic at this point. We used to see these as like paper waivers and then something happens and they can't find the paper waiver. That seems to be fewer and far between nowadays. And so it's electronic. Of course, you're going in there. You've got a bunch of kids with you.
Parents are not reading these things, obviously. But they sign it, and they go in there. And then something bad happens in one of these scenarios we talked about. And there's a clear case of, from a lawyer's perspective, clear case of liability against the park with improper supervision or defective products, which you see in a lot of these cases. Clear liability, clear damages, Broken bones or some of the even scarier stuff that you've seen.
But these parents don't come forward because of the waivers. There's this idea in society that says, I signed a waiver, so I've accepted all the risks that might happen. And what people need to realize is, A, this varies state by state. But even in the most conservative states in the country, Texas being one of them, one of the things that Texas law gets right is that you cannot waive
Travis:
a kid's Period. End of story. And that has been the law of the land of Texas for a hundred plus years. So what I mean by that is, pre-injury, if I sign a document that says, no matter what happens to my kid, we will not pursue legal action, that contract is not worth the paper that it's written on.
Right? Because the public policy in this state and in most states that I'm aware of is to protect the interest of children. And so when I first started looking at these cases, it was a pretty vanilla waiver like that. And I said, no problem. We're going to go forward and we're going to help you guys out. Now whether or not the park actually had insurance is a whole other ball of wax. But we could at least survive the motion for summary judgment when the park tried to pour us out of court because of this waiver. And the judges.
routinely said no that waiver's not gonna work.
Then the parks figured out, they hired federal defense lawyers, I guess, and they figured out that we can ratchet these up a little bit with parental indemnity agreements. And for those people who don't practice law every day like David and I, what that is is a paragraph in this waiver that says, okay, so maybe a lawsuit does happen out of this. The parent, however, will agree to pay for
all the damages that result from this lawsuit plus all the defense lawyer fees and costs. right? And their argument is that, you can't waive a kid's rights, but this is different. This is a parent who's, you know, older than the age of 18 agreeing, signing a contract, and
Travis:
In lot of states we have freedom of contract and so adults can make contracts. Adults can typically make indemnity agreements. You know it's pretty standard in different business deals and things like that. But what happens with these trampoline park cases is, wait a second, I thought the public policy was we can't waive a kid's rights. If we're allowing parental indemnity agreements to be valid, David isn't that the exact same thing as saying that we can now waive a kid's rights?
David Chazen:
well, in the state of New Jersey, like Texas, a pre-injury waiver for a minor is just unenforceable and like you said, not worth the paper it's written on. That same New Jersey Supreme Court case also cites an older case that said parental indemnification agreements are
void as a matter of public policy, because they interfere with the parent's ability to do what's in the best interest of the child.
Travis:
1000 % and that's exactly how it plays out. And I think, you know, I think if the Texas courts got a case on this exact issue, as conservative as the courts might be, they will still say, no, we're going to rule in favor of children, right? Because that's something we should all agree on. so parental and dental agreements are the exact same thing as waivers, and they should not be binding in the state of Texas. The jury is still out on that because we just haven't had that case.
David Chazen:
Well, and
Yeah, well, and the other thing that I think lawyers should argue to the courts is that these trampoline parks are inherently unsafe and unsafe in a way that's unknown to the users. And they're unsafe from the point of view of the design and also the way they operate, their supervision and so on.
So all these people are being injured. Many of them are either uninsured on Medicaid or even with private insurance. We all are subsidizing the ability of these trampling parks to be in business. And this type of
waiver indemnification agreement is basically putting a burden on
this on society to cover the damages for the injuries, the medical treatment that is required for all these injured people.
Travis:
Yeah, that's a great point.
I mean, also, have these. These are essentially contracts. The beneficiary of the contract is the minor, because the minor can use the part in exchange for signing the contract. But as we all learned in law school, contracts with minors, even contracts where the minors are the beneficiaries, are voidable as a matter of law by the minor. And so that's another argument that I think lawyers can make in these cases, is that the minor hereby elects to void the contract. And.
That's the risk you take by having a business that makes money off of the entertainment of children. If you're going to do that, you need to do it as safely as possible. We have to bring back the incentives to increase the safety standards of any business that's entertaining the children.
David Chazen:
Well, one of the reasons that the trampoline parks fight these cases so hard is because if you were to try and make trampoline parks safe, you know, use use trampolines that are separated, limit people to one person on a trampoline at a time and not have them interconnected, stop the lateral jumping. And we should talk about lateral jumping and why that's dangerous. And just in
in and of itself, their business model wouldn't work. So.
Travis:
Yeah, it's inherent in the business model.
David Chazen:
You know, I just, you know, we, we, just want to make this point about the lateral jumping because, uh, you know, I know we've already kind of talked about injuries. We can go back to the waiver, but I just want to make a quick point. Trampolines are supposed to be used where people jump vertically. That means the energy is going to be distributed along the length of your leg. Um, when you laterally jump from trampoline to trampoline, you're putting a
Sideway or lateral pressure on your bones and just like if you took a pencil and tried to break it by pressing it lengthwise you couldn't do it But if you if you press it sideways laterally you snap it easily That's what happens when people are jumping from trampoline to trampoline that's sideway pressure snaps bones now, you know snaps snaps the legs the the tibs fibs the shins the ankles and so on
I just, it's, it's an inherently dangerous concept of having these trampolines interconnected so that people can jump laterally. Trampolines are not designed or intended to be used that way. Okay. I just wanted to get that out there so that people understood, you know, how these injuries happen without collisions. mean, frankly,
Travis:
Yeah, no, it's a great.
David Chazen:
I don't have collision cases. My cases involve double bounces, lateral jumping, doing a flip in a six by six trampoline, the transfer of energy on these trampoline courts, the foam pits that are too shallow don't meet the standards. They're set right on concrete floors instead of having a trampoline bed
Travis:
Wow.
Travis:
Yeah
David Chazen:
supporting five feet of foam and then having that trampoline suspended six inches over the floor and then and now they've introduced airbags airbags that don't hold up to the use and and they don't function the way they're intended and people go right through the airbags again three feet and they contact the concrete floor
Travis:
Yeah.
David Chazen:
and crush the bones in their legs.
Travis:
It's such an important point for parents to remember. Because there's this huge bias, right, when we're talking to a jury or when we're just educating the public on stuff like this. And it's that this will never happen to me. This will never happen to my kid. Because I'm a good parent. And if I go there, I'm going to supervise my kid. OK, well.
What David just said there, what you just said is that most of your cases, they're not even collision cases. And so it's just your kid jumping on a trampoline. And yeah, maybe they get double balanced, maybe they don't. But it's just, especially with little kids, it's the trampoline versus the kid in David's cases. It's not kid versus kid injuries in most of these. And so there's really not, you can't supervise your way out of this. Supervision, of course, helps to mitigate the collision cases.
But it's really hard for parent to go in there and truly mitigate all the dangers that are present in these places. Is that right?
David Chazen:
Well, yeah, I mean, you're going to tell your kid, well, you can jump up and down, but don't jump sideways. Or the parent's going to go look at the foam pit and climb into the foam pit and see how deep it is and see if it's suspended on trampoline bed or if just three feet of foam over a concrete floor. Or they're going to open up the airbag to see if the structure in the internal structure of the airbag
Travis:
Yeah.
David Chazen:
has been destroyed and not maintained. Because when you look at the airbag, looks like it's full of air and it's gonna do its job. You can't, you can't know. And people walk in there assuming, oh, it's a big company, it's got all kinds of pretty colors, maybe it even looks fresh and clean. But you don't understand.
Travis:
Yeah, and.
David Chazen:
what's necessary. And maybe the five-year-old jumping into the foam pit doesn't have a problem, but then the big 16-year-old does have a problem because the three foot of foam with a concrete floor is not.
enough of an attenuation device to absorb their energy when they fall, when they jump into it.
Travis:
Yeah, when I was a kid, we did gymnastics for a little bit. I know I don't look like a gymnast. I'm not a gymnast. But in any event, we did gymnastics one summer. And I remember there was a foam pit there at the gymnastics studio. But that foam pit was probably 20 feet deep, full of nothing but foam, jumping one at a time. And so when you talk about a foam pit in a trampoline park, that's not what we're talking about.
David Chazen:
No, no, not at all. mean, I've got foam pit cases and I've gone and inspected them. And well, in a gymnastics facility, on top of that, they're supposed to do a regular maintenance, like depending on how much use is going on, it could be every hour. And it's something called fluffing. And so they're supposed to basically like fluff a pillow, fluff up the foam.
Travis:
Right, fluffing, OK.
Travis:
Yeah, put the phone back.
David Chazen:
Don't let it get impacted down. that doesn't happen. And you'll look at some of these videos and you'll see where people were jumping in the same spot over and over. So maybe you had a three foot foam pit, but in the area where the injury occurred, it was more like two feet.
Travis:
Right. We need to bring back fluffing, David.
David Chazen:
So it's.
Travis:
Well, appreciate all this. This has been very helpful, I think, for parents. Whether you're a parent thinking about going to trampoline park cases or you've got a who's, excuse me, whether you're a parent who goes to trampoline parks with your kids or an attorney who gets these phone calls like I do routinely, not routinely, I'd say I get about one a month. And this is not my bailiwick, like it is yours. We do other stuff. But I think it's just good information to have handy.
So you can make smarter choices for your children, whether you decide to go to these places or not. If you do go there, take David's advice to heart, especially with little kids. Keep them away from the big kids. I think that's the biggest takeaway. That and no flips. Get rid of flips and keep your kids separated. That will help. It's not going to prevent all these injuries. There are still inherent risk in these trampoline parks because of the tension, because of the equipment.
And there's just nothing you can really do as a parent to prevent that. So you have to decide for yourself if that's an acceptable level of risk for you and your kids. If, God forbid, David, something does happen, I know you are in New Jersey, but you do cases all over the country, correct?
David Chazen:
Yeah, I mean, I work with lawyers across the country. Not all lawyers want to take on these cases. So I try to cultivate lawyers around the country who are, such as yourself, who are willing to take on these cases. They're time consuming. They can take a long time to resolve. They're expensive.
Understandably, lawyers have to be selective, given the facts and other factors in deciding whether to take a case, because of course these cases are taken on a contingency basis. So that means that the attorney is taking the risk that ultimately there's going to be a recovery, because if there is no recovery, the lawyer is going to lose the money that they put into the case and the time that they put into the case.
Travis:
And not to mention surviving the waivers and the identity agreements and all those things that the lawyers will have work way through. Yeah, absolutely.
David Chazen:
Well, you're going to do all those things are going to have to be addressed. There are going to be all kinds of, you know, hearings in court, you know, whether the waiver is enforceable or not. You know, in New Jersey, the law is very clear. So they don't try to enforce a waiver as far as a minor is concerned. When it comes to my adult cases, waivers are only effective
for ordinary negligence. If I can show gross negligence or willful and wanton type conduct, then the waiver is no longer enforceable. And I have had some success with convincing a court that not only was it gross negligence, but they were subject to punitive damages because there was
Travis:
Right.
David Chazen:
reckless conduct. And that was in Florida because Florida won't allow you to make a complaint that includes a claim for punitive damages unless it's approved by a judge. And I was involved in a case in Florida where we were able to convince the judge that the circumstances in that case warranted the court allowing us to amend the complaint.
and allege that the trampling park should be subject to punitive damages when the case, you know, for the jury to consider when the case went to trial.
Travis:
Yeah, and that's an important point. And for the non-lawyers listening, standard negligence just means essentially doing something that a reasonable person would not do in the same or similar circumstances. A common example is running a stop sign. Gross negligence is a heightened degree of risk. So that's doing something, and you're aware, or you should be aware, of a substantial degree of a risk involved. A classic example is drunk driving. That's what we would consider to gross.
David Chazen:
Or you ran the stop sign at 100 miles an hour.
Travis:
Right, excessive speed, something like that. That would be gross negligence. And so to David's point, in trampoline park cases that he's worked on, not all of them, but he's been able to convince courts that it wasn't just negligent what this park was doing. It was grossly negligent, meaning it was extremely risky and that park darn well knew or should have known about the substantial degree of risk in that particular case. And so that's just crazy to me that you can have a trampoline park case.
talking about gross negligence and the waivers that I see here in Texas, it says you hereby waive the park and indemnify the park not only for the negligence but for the gross negligence, okay, also for the intentional acts of the employees. So if an employee punches my son, I have indemnified the park for that? Is that right?
David Chazen:
So in New Jersey, there was a class action suit because of this language in the waiver that violated New Jersey case law. And there was ultimately a settlement. Okay, we won't use that language anymore in our waivers. They still do. They still do. I mean, their business
Travis:
They still do. mean, and surely.
David Chazen:
practice is to intimidate the people who are injured.
Travis:
Yeah, we chill and we intimidate. Yeah, you can have the exact same defendant. And they go through a case, judge tells them this waiver does not apply in this state. can't waive a kid's rights. And then they go back and they use the same waiver because it's just a numbers game. If we can chill the next round of lawsuits, that'll help the bottom line. Yeah, that's a huge problem. And that's why.
David Chazen:
Well, and I've had people contact me who said I spoke to a lawyer and he told me there was nothing that they could do because of the waiver. So, you you should get a second opinion, maybe a third.
Travis:
Yeah, absolutely. Find David and talk to him. David, how can people reach you if they do, if their kid got hurt at Trampoline Park or if they just want to see more of your work and visit your website? How can people reach you?
David Chazen:
Yeah, I have a lot of information on my website. So it's Chasen and Chasen, C-H-A-Z-E-N, Chasen and Chasen. It's got my contact information. If you want to speak with me, send me an email, call me on the phone. If I'm busy, I'll call you back.
Travis:
David, I appreciate your time today and I appreciate the work you've done in the last 10 years. We need good lawyers in this area who focus on this day in and day out because it does get complicated and it does get nuanced. And there's a lot to these cases. And trampoline parks are, I mean, like you said, there's thousands of them around the world. There's dozens of them in DFW alone. So they're all over the place. And so we need good lawyers out there getting the word out.
and hopefully if these places are going to stay in business to make them as safe as physically possible. And like you said, don't know if that's possible or not given the business model and given the layout of these places, but it's important for parents to have this information. So thank you for your time today. Thank you for your work. Is there anything else that you want to mention before we go?
David Chazen:
No, I think we've covered it pretty well and thank you for doing this. I think it's really important. And thank you for having me.
Travis:
All right, you bet. You bet. Talk soon.
David Chazen:
All right, bye bye.