$1.2 Million Verdict Against Colorado Springs Attorney Who Let Client's Brain-Tumor Claim Expire
Won by Anderson Hemmat.
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.
What happened
In 2006, a neuroradiologist in Colorado Springs reviewed Della Gallegos's MRI scan and missed a benign brain tumor. Had the tumor been caught at that stage, physicians said it could have been treated with Gamma Knife radiosurgery, a minimally invasive procedure carrying a success rate above 95 percent. Instead, the tumor went undetected for three years.
Gallegos eventually hired attorney Patric J. LeHouillier to file a medical malpractice action against the radiologist. LeHouillier obtained expert confirmation that the physician had breached the standard of care. The statute of limitations, however, ran out in December 2011, and no lawsuit was ever filed. By then, Gallegos had undergone three open brain surgeries. She was left with permanent loss of vision in her left eye, hearing loss on the left side, left-sided facial paralysis, and severe short-term memory loss. She could no longer work.
Gallegos filed a legal malpractice claim against LeHouillier. The case had an unusual history: a jury first found him negligent in 2014, but the Colorado Supreme Court reversed that verdict and ordered a retrial. Chad Hemmat of Anderson Hemmat took the case back to trial in January 2020 alongside co-counsel Cameron Hunter and Jason Alleman.
At the six-day retrial before Judge David A. Prince, Hemmat argued that LeHouillier not only missed the deadline but then tried to conceal his failure. LeHouillier testified that he had dropped Gallegos as a client in 2010, before the limitations period ran. His own case file, updated with fresh work nearly a year after his claimed withdrawal date, told a different story. His paralegal also contradicted his account of how the disengagement supposedly occurred.
The jury returned a verdict on January 21, 2020, assigning 72 percent of the fault to LeHouillier and 28 percent to Gallegos. The base damages award was $1,585,760. After applying the comparative-fault reduction and adding accrued interest, the court entered a final judgment of $2,204,783.31 on July 21, 2020. The case was ranked among the top verdicts in Colorado for the year by Law Week Colorado.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Colorado Springs Gazette: 'Jury awards $1.2 million for negligence by longtime Colorado Springs attorney' (Jan. 2020): names Chad Hemmat as plaintiff's attorney, reports verdict details and LeHouillier's contradicted testimony·Archived copy
- 2.InsuranceNewsNet: 'Jury awards $1.2 million for negligence by longtime Colorado Springs attorney' (Jan. 2020): republication of Gazette article confirming verdict amount, parties, and plaintiff injuries·Archived copy
- 3.Law Week Colorado: 'Top Verdicts 2020': lists Gallegos v. LeHouillier as 7th highest Colorado verdict of 2020 ($1,585,760 jury award·Archived copy
- 4.MoreLaw: verdict report for Della Gallegos v. Patric J. LeHouillier, 4th Judicial District, El Paso County, Colorado: confirms parties, court, and $1.2 million plaintiff verdict (Jan. 25, 2020)
More proven verdicts from Anderson Hemmat
All Anderson Hemmat proven verdicts →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.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.