About Brendan Chandonnet
Brendan Chandonnet directs the firm's mass tort practice, drawing on two decades of litigation across mass torts, product liability, personal injury, and wrongful death. He has first-chaired jury trials to verdict in both state and federal courts and works extensively in nationwide multi-district litigation. Before joining the firm he spent 15 years as in-house counsel to a major metropolitan transit agency managing significant injury and mass tort dockets, preceded by years defending product liability cases at an Am Law 50 firm. He holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from the College of William and Mary, with bar admissions in the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Proven verdicts and settlements at Ben Crump Law
These results are credited to Ben Crump Law. A result appears under an attorney's own name only when a published source names them as counsel on the case.
Lewis Butler, a security guard, was shot eight times and killed in November 2023 during an armed robbery at an internet cafe in Havana, Florida. The cafe's operators had not reported a robbery three weeks earlier in which the gun used against him was stolen. In December 2025 a Gadsden County jury awarded his widow $779,389,024, including $550 million for pain and suffering and $225 million for loss of companionship.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.
Ben Crump, with co-counsel Antonio Romanucci and L. Chris Stewart, negotiated a $27 million settlement between the family of George Floyd and the City of Minneapolis, announced by the family's lawyers as the largest pretrial settlement of a civil rights wrongful-death claim in American history. The city council approved the payment unanimously in March 2021, while jury selection in Derek Chauvin's murder trial was underway blocks away.
Charles Payne Sr., 75, died after an HPD patrol car driven by Officer Christopher Cabrera struck his vehicle on North Shepherd Drive in Houston on December 26, 2021. A federal jury found in November 2025 that the City of Houston was deliberately indifferent in adopting an inadequate policy that let officers drive recklessly. It awarded $13 million to his family. The city's new-trial motion was denied and its appeal to the Fifth Circuit is pending.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
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