$114 Million Verdict Against USAA for Bad-Faith Handling of Rear-End Crash Claim
After trial: USAA filed a notice of appeal to the Nevada Supreme Court in March 2025 challenging the judgment; as of the briefing schedule in January 2026 the appeal was still being briefed, with no ruling issued.
Won by Bighorn Law.
A Clark County jury awarded Timothy Kuhn $114 million after USAA spent years stonewalling his claim from a 2018 rear-end collision it had originally conceded was not his fault.
What happened
In 2018, Timothy Kuhn was sitting in stopped traffic on Interstate 15 in Las Vegas when a Ford F-150 struck the rear of his BMW sedan at roughly 45 mph. USAA, his own insurer, promptly determined the other driver bore full responsibility for the crash.
Kuhn suffered a traumatic brain injury with lasting symptoms including memory loss, disrupted executive functioning, chronic headaches, and loss of smell. His treatment involved neurologists across the country and generated substantial medical bills. Despite its own liability finding, USAA opened negotiations at $10,000, a figure it maintained for years while the case moved toward trial.
The insurer's conduct grew more aggressive over time. USAA reversed its original position and argued in court filings that Kuhn had caused the collision himself. It retained expert witnesses to contest the severity of his brain injury, even as his medical record continued to build. Only as trial was about to begin did USAA agree to pay the $250,000 policy limit it had withheld for years.
Bighorn Law attorneys Kimball Jones, Joshua Berrett, and Emily Grable took the case to a Clark County jury on a bad-faith insurance theory. The trial team presented USAA's internal claims conduct alongside the medical evidence USAA's experts had disputed. Berrett noted after the verdict that the firm could not understand why USAA refused to resolve the matter earlier, 'other than them thinking that they could get by on their reputation.'
On January 31, 2025, the jury returned a verdict of $14 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages, totaling $114 million. USAA stated it 'respectfully disagrees with the trial outcome' and was evaluating its legal options, including a potential appeal, as of the date of reporting. No ruling on any post-trial reduction had been issued at that time.
CVN editorially selected the verdict as the number-three most impressive plaintiff verdict of 2025 across the country.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Courtroom View Network: USAA hit with $100M punitive bad faith verdict over delay in paying zero-fault insured's claim (Feb. 4, 2025)·Archived copy
- 2.Las Vegas Review-Journal: Las Vegas jury hits insurance company with $100M verdict (Feb. 7, 2025)·Archived copy
- 3.Insurance Business Magazine: USAA hit with $114 million decision over bad faith·Archived copy
- 4.CVN: editorial 'Top 10 Most Impressive Plaintiff Verdicts of 2025' (entry no. 3, editorially selected)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Bighorn Law
All Bighorn Law proven verdicts →A Clark County jury awarded $550 million, $50 million compensatory and $500 million punitive, to Nimfa Escobia after her husband Marcial was killed by a driver traveling 107 mph while impaired by alcohol, methamphetamine, ecstasy, and marijuana.
A Clark County jury awarded $101 million against Progressive, $1 million compensatory and $100 million punitive, after the insurer delayed paying Hal Goldblatt's medical bills for months following a 2022 crosswalk collision that caused a traumatic brain injury.
In 2021, Omar Alrabadi was beaten unconscious by two men after a dispute that began inside Chayo Mexican Kitchen and Tequila Bar and spilled onto the LINQ Promenade in Las Vegas. A Clark County jury found Caesars Entertainment and Three Amigos Restaurant Group each 50 percent responsible for security failures and awarded $56.5 million on August 7, 2026. The award was $15 million in past damages and $41.5 million in future damages. The jury assigned no fault to Alrabadi.
A Clark County jury returned a $2.96 million verdict for a mother and her four children whose minivan was struck by a driver who had consumed alcohol and cannabis before traveling nearly 70 mph and crossing a median.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.