About Chance Lynch
A native of Enfield in Halifax County, North Carolina, Chance Lynch earned his English degree from North Carolina A&T State University in 2006 and his J.D. from North Carolina Central University School of Law in 2009, where he served as Student Bar Association president. He began as an assistant district attorney in Halifax County, later founding Lynch Law, PLLC in Charlotte in 2020, and has served as counsel in high-profile civil rights matters including the case of Andrew Brown Jr., who was killed by sheriff's deputies in Elizabeth City. The Root named him among the 100 most influential Black Americans of 2022, and in 2023 he received the A&T Four Award, his alma mater's highest civilian honor.
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.