Berman & Simmons

A federal jury in Pennsylvania awarded $25 million to Travis Sweigart after a tractor-trailer driver turned left across his path at the exit of Interstate 176, crushing Sweigart's pelvis and leaving him with injuries the treating surgeon described as unquestionably the worst pelvic fracture he had ever seen.

A jury awarded Robert Giordano $23.1 million after a Northern Light radiologist failed to report a large bony mass compressing his spinal cord, leaving him permanently paralyzed from the chest down.

A Vermont jury awarded $22.5 million, the second-largest verdict in state history at the time, to a Maine utility lineman who lost both legs below the knee after an ungrounded, defectively installed air-break switch at a Richford substation released a 5,000-degree electrical arc through his body.

Emily Mitchell went to Inland Hospital in Waterville for laparoscopic surgery to remove a benign cyst on her left ovary. The surgeon removed her bladder instead, and pathology on the excised tissue found bladder wall and no ovarian tissue at all. She now lives with a bladder rebuilt from her small intestine. A jury awarded her $15.75 million and her husband $1.25 million.

A Cumberland County jury awarded $6.5 million to the family of Peter Smith, a 25-year-old who died of Lyme carditis in July 2017 after a Mercy Hospital physician twice failed to diagnose his Lyme disease despite a textbook presentation of symptoms.

A Cumberland County jury found Mid Coast Hospital and its contracted emergency physician group liable after a walk-in clinic PA sent Joshua Desjardins home with a flu diagnosis in December 2018, when he was already showing signs of bacterial pneumonia and sepsis; three days later he was airlifted to Maine Medical Center, where he spent 31 days on life support and suffered more than ten strokes.

A hand surgeon put a compression screw into Robbie Nason's fractured wrist, then read several imaging studies over months without noticing the screw was protruding and grinding into cartilage. A second surgeon spotted it on sight. Nason lost the bone entirely, and the Law Court affirmed his $2 million verdict in full.

John Pierce was sent home from a Bangor emergency department before his blood cultures came back. They were positive for a bacterium that signals a potentially fatal heart-valve infection. The result never reached his primary care physician, the infection ran untreated for eight months, and it destroyed his heart valves.

A federal judge awarded $1,380,414.82 to the widow of Roy Palmer, a 69-year-old Army veteran who died at the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta, Maine after staff co-administered an opioid and a benzodiazepine that carry an FDA black-box warning against simultaneous use.

A Hancock County jury awarded $750,000 to a Milbridge woman who suffered permanent hip and leg impairment after her orthopedic surgeon failed to review her post-operative X-rays for over two months and then left a centimeter-long gap in her femur during revision surgery.