Our client went to a trampoline park; a place families visit for a few hours of fun. He jumped from an elevated platform down onto a trampoline, an activity the park set up and allowed. On impact, his leg snapped.
The break was not a clean, simple fracture. It was a compound fracture, meaning the bone broke through the skin, requiring six surgeries to repair and a long, painful recovery.
This was not bad luck or an inherent risk he accepted by walking in the door. The park lacked meaningful safety rules, had not properly trained its staff, and had not maintained its equipment as it should have. Those failures allowed impact forces high enough to break a leg. The Townsley Law Firm recovered a settlement of over $775,000.
A Trampoline Park Is a Business With Safety Duties
Trampoline parks are commercial operations that generate significant injury risk, and Louisiana law holds businesses responsible for the safety of the people they invite onto their premises.
A property owner or operator accepts a duty to keep the premises reasonably safe, to identify and correct hazards, and to warn of dangers that cannot be eliminated. For a trampoline park, meeting that duty means real, enforced safety rules governing how attractions are used, staff trained and positioned to monitor and stop dangerous activity, equipment inspected and maintained so it performs safely, and attractions designed and set up so that ordinary use does not produce extraordinary forces.
When a park invites the public to jump from an elevated platform onto a trampoline and fails to build the safety framework around that activity, it has not only failed to prevent an accident, but it has also actively created a dangerous environment. That distinction is central to this premises liability case.
Why the Impact Was Strong Enough to Break Bone
A trampoline works by storing and returning energy. The same physics that makes jumping fun, makes it dangerous when the setup is wrong or unsupervised.
Jumping from an elevated platform adds the energy of a fall to the energy of the trampoline’s rebound. Landing mechanics, the condition and tension of the trampoline bed and springs, whether multiple jumpers are affecting the surface, and whether anyone is enforcing safe technique all determine whether that energy is absorbed safely or channeled destructively into a jumper’s body. When maintenance is neglected and rules go unenforced, the forces involved can climb well beyond what a leg can withstand.
A compound fracture of the tibia, the shinbone, is exactly the kind of injury those forces produce. It is among the more serious orthopedic injuries a person can sustain because the bone breaking through the skin introduces a high risk of infection and often requires surgical hardware, multiple procedures, and a prolonged recovery. Six surgeries reflect how much reconstruction our client’s leg required.
Assumption of Risk Does Not Excuse a Park’s Negligence
Parks often argue that anyone who jumps on a trampoline accepts the risk of injury, and many require visitors to sign waivers before entering.
Waivers are not automatically enforceable for every kind of harm, and Louisiana courts scrutinize attempts to disclaim liability for a business’s own negligence. Choosing to jump on a trampoline means accepting the ordinary risks inherent in that activity. It does not mean accepting the added risk created by a park that failed to enforce safety rules, train its staff, or maintain its equipment. A visitor cannot knowingly assume a risk the park concealed through its own negligence.
The core question is not whether jumping carries some inherent risk. It is whether the park’s failures created a danger beyond what a reasonable visitor should have expected, and whether those failures caused the injury.
