$101 Million Birth Injury Verdict Against West Suburban Medical Center
After trial: Before the verdict, Tenet Healthcare and the family had signed a high-low agreement capping any recovery at $50 million in exchange for the hospital's promise not to appeal. When the jury returned $101 million, the agreement reduced the payout to $50 million and the case ended without an appeal.
Won by Clifford Law Offices.
A Cook County jury returned a $101 million verdict against West Suburban Medical Center after staff ignored fetal monitoring for six hours during labor, though a pre-verdict high-low agreement limited the family's recovery to $50 million.
What happened
In 2014, an expectant mother arrived at West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, Illinois, roughly 34 weeks into her pregnancy. She told staff her baby had stopped moving. The hospital placed her on external fetal monitoring and ordered an ultrasound. For about six hours, the monitoring strips and the imaging pointed to a baby in distress, and no one acted on what they showed.
No physician was alerted while there was still time to respond. The emergency cesarean section that could have spared the child was never ordered during that window. By the time the baby was delivered, the damage was done.
The boy was born with hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, a brain injury caused by a loss of oxygen. He cannot speak, walk, or sit up on his own, and he needs care every hour of every day. Physicians expect him to live a normal lifespan, which means decades of complete dependence on others.
Clifford Law Offices brought the family's case in Cook County Circuit Court at the Daley Center, before Judge Robert E. Senechalle Jr. The trial team of Keith Hebeisen, Bradley Cosgrove, Sarah King, and Charles Haskins spent about a month in trial. Their experts testified that the child would have been born healthy if nurses and other staff had reported the monitoring abnormalities to a doctor and a cesarean had followed. "Communication breakdowns are the number one reason that patients in America are injured by medical negligence," King told reporters.
A jury of six men and six women deliberated for six hours. It returned a verdict of about $101 million against the hospital and its staff. Reporters described it as the largest medical malpractice verdict in Illinois in 2019.
The family did not collect the full sum. Before the verdict came down, both sides had signed a high-low agreement that capped damages at $50 million if the jury awarded more than that. Under the agreement, the family received $50 million. Tenet Healthcare, the company that then owned West Suburban Medical Center, did not appeal.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Clifford Law Offices
All Clifford Law Offices proven verdicts →Robert Clifford co-led the families of 68 people killed when American Eagle Flight 4184 iced over and crashed near Roselawn, Indiana, to a record $110 million settlement and an apology in open court.
A Cook County jury found plastic surgeon Dr. Ayoub Sayeg liable for the death of Idalia Corcoles, a 39-year-old mother of four who bled to death after liposuction and a tummy tuck, in a case that produced a $66.262 million judgment.
Clifford Law Offices secured a $60 million settlement for Sarah Grasser, 31, left paraplegic when another driver swerved to avoid a deep pothole in an I-55 work zone and struck her car, rolling it into a ditch.
On June 29, 2026, a Cook County jury returned a $50 million verdict against First Ascent Climbing and Fitness for the sexual abuse of an 8-year-old boy by an older camper at its Peoria summer camp in 2022. The award was $49 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages. The jury found the company negligent and guilty of willful and wanton misconduct. The company has said it is weighing an appeal.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.