Denver Jury Awards $3 Million After Insurer Refused to Pay Crash Victim Any Benefits
Won by Dan Caplis Law.
After Cincinnati Casualty told an Aurora man he owed nothing following three spinal surgeries from a multi-car crash, a Denver jury returned a verdict of more than $3 million for breach of contract and insurance bad faith.
What happened
On the morning of October 25, 2013, Alex Headley was driving northbound on Interstate 25 near Castle Rock when a driver named Kelsey Meyer fell asleep at the wheel. Meyer's vehicle struck another car, which then hit Headley's company truck. The force of the crash caused severe and lasting damage to Headley's spine.
Over the years that followed, Headley underwent three surgeries, including artificial disc replacement, lumbar fusion, and a third procedure to remove hardware from his lumbar spine. He also faced significant lost income. Meyer's Allstate policy carried a $1.25 million limit, which Headley settled for, but his total losses ran well beyond that amount. He turned to his employer's commercial auto policy issued by Cincinnati Casualty Company, which provided up to $1 million in underinsured motorist (UIM) benefits.
Cincinnati's response was to commission a brief independent medical examination and then notify Headley that the Allstate payment had already made him whole. The insurer placed zero value on his remaining UIM claim. According to Law Week Colorado's account of the trial, the company sat on the claim for more than two and a half years before Headley retained an attorney, and it declined to credit the opinions of his treating physicians.
Headley retained Dan Caplis of Dan Caplis Law and Jeremy Sitcoff of Levin Sitcoff PC. The legal team brought claims for breach of contract, bad faith breach of insurance contract, and statutory violations under Colorado Revised Statutes sections 10-3-1115 and 10-3-1116, which permit extra-contractual damages and attorney fees when an insurer unreasonably delays or denies a valid claim.
After an eight-day trial in Denver District Court, the jury returned a verdict of more than $3 million in October 2019. The finding of statutory bad faith also triggered an award of attorney fees and costs on top of the jury's damages figure. As Caplis stated after the verdict, a policyholder should not have to hire a lawyer to collect insurance benefits that are owed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.