Jamie Karek

After fifteen years of litigation and three failed bankruptcy maneuvers by Johnson and Johnson subsidiaries, Ashcraft and Gerel attorneys R. Bryant McCulley and Michelle Parfitt helped negotiate a global, uncapped settlement of at least $5.5 billion covering approximately 76,000 ovarian-cancer claims.

An L.A. jury awarded Eva Echeverria $417 million after finding that decades of Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder use caused her ovarian cancer, though the trial judge later vacated the verdict and the Court of Appeal affirmed the vacatur.

A federal jury in Cleveland awarded $5 million to Paul Decker and his wife after finding that GE Healthcare failed to adequately warn patients about the risk of nephrogenic systemic fibrosis from its Omniscan MRI contrast agent, making Decker the first gadolinium NSF case in the country to reach a jury verdict.

A seven-year-old boy lost three fingers on his left hand when an old Navy practice bomb from the Duck, North Carolina bombing range exploded in February 1967. After a bench trial under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the court found the Navy negligent for leaving live bombs accessible on an unfenced range and awarded the boy $160,000, plus $1,700.30 to his father for medical expenses.

As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.