June 2, 2026
Signify Wins Reversal Of $41.9 Million Verdict
Appeals court found Rexel's handling decisions outweighed Signify's shipping practices
A Connecticut appellate court handed Signify a complete reversal on Friday, throwing out a $41 million judgment that had been entered against the world's largest lighting manufacturer after a warehouse worker was paralyzed in 2017.
The case traces back to a pallet of Philips-branded LED lamps shipped from Signify's Pennsylvania facility to Capitol Light, the Hartford-area distributorship operated by Rexel USA. The load, weighing somewhere between 800 and 1,300 pounds depending on which filing you read, was not properly stretch-wrapped to its pallet when it arrived. Capitol Light stored it on an upper rack. Several days later, a temporary worker operating a reach truck in an adjacent aisle bumped the load. It came off the shelf and fell onto Juan Cruz, a Capitol Light employee. Cruz was left a paraplegic.
A jury originally returned a $100 million verdict in 2022, assigning 90 percent of the fault to Signify and the rest to the forklift operator. The trial court later reduced the award to roughly $41.9 million.
Where The Court Drew The Line
The Connecticut Appellate Court reversed that judgment entirely, finding that Signify owed no duty of care to Cruz because his injuries were not a reasonably foreseeable result of the company's presumed failure to stretch-wrap the shipment. The court's reasoning turned on what happened after delivery: Capitol Light accepted the load, had a stretch-wrap machine on site, and according to testimony from its own warehouse manager, had a policy of not placing unsafe loads on elevated racks. Then Paez, the temporary worker assigned through a staffing agency, made contact with the pallet anyway. The court concluded that the chain of independent decisions made by Rexel and Paez after the lights arrived broke any reasonable line of foreseeability running back to Signify's shipping practices.
Signify Responds
"We are pleased with the decision of the Connecticut Court of Appeals vacating the judgment against Signify and agreeing with us that Signify cannot be held legally responsible to the Plaintiff," the company said in a Friday statement to Inside Lighting. "Today's judgment affirms that Signify is not legally or financially responsible for injuries that are not a reasonably foreseeable result of Signify's conduct, and is reassurance that the courts will offer adequate protections for companies who exercise diligent care in their complex operations."
The Wrangling Between Rexel And Signify Continues
The ruling does not fully resolve the separate dispute between Signify and Rexel. Counterclaims over indemnification under their International Cooperation and Services Agreement remain pending, with a remote status conference scheduled for October 2026.
Whether Friday's appellate reasoning has any bearing on those claims is an open question; the indemnification dispute turns on contract interpretation, not the negligence focus that drove the court's reversal.
