About Chad Hemmat
Chad Hemmat attended school through high school in Golden, Colorado. He received his B.A. from Colorado State University in 1988 and his J.D. from the University of Denver College of Law in 1991. Mr. Hemmat began his legal career at the Hawaiian firm Schutter and Glickstein PC during appellate litigation in Missaki v. General Motors, then the largest individual jury verdict against GM. He then spent nine years as an associate and partner at a Littleton firm, handling hundreds of car accident, commercial truck accident, and premises liability cases, and directing litigation for clients injured by defective spinal surgical screws, filing hundreds of the first defective breast implant product liability cases in Colorado, and handling wrongful death claims.
Since co-founding Anderson Hemmat, Mr. Hemmat has brought some of Colorado's most significant civil cases: a $33 million wrongful death verdict in 2021 for a 30-year-old engineer killed by a motorist driving over 100 mph (reported as the largest wrongful death verdict in Colorado history at the time); the wrongful death lawsuit for the family of a former middleweight boxing champion killed by a negligent bus driver; the only wrongful death lawsuits involving the Guffy Family Murders of 2001; the only Colorado class action against Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley; and the only Colorado class action against Pfizer over Neurontin misrepresentations. He also secured a $3 million settlement in a negligent shooting case and $4.5 million from State Farm in a crosswalk injury case where coverage limits were only $250,000. Mr. Hemmat's pre-trial work established new Colorado law recognizing wrongful death standing for a premature baby born at 20 to 22 weeks gestational age following a vehicle collision.
Proven verdicts and settlements
Chad Hemmat and co-counsel secured a $33 million wrongful death verdict for the mother of a 30-year-old Aurora engineer killed when a driver traveling nearly three times the posted speed limit ran a red light and T-boned his car at an I-225 interchange.
After Owners Insurance refused to fairly pay a rear-end collision victim's underinsured motorist claim and offered only $150,000 on a $1 million policy, a federal jury found the insurer liable for breach of contract and statutory bad faith. The district court applied Colorado's unreasonable-delay statute to bring Donald Etherton's judgment to $2.25 million, a result the Tenth Circuit affirmed in full in 2016.
Chad Hemmat secured a $1.2 million jury verdict for Della Gallegos after her former attorney, Patric LeHouillier, allowed the statute of limitations on her brain-tumor medical malpractice claim to expire, leaving her blind in one eye, partially deaf, and unable to work.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
