$13 Million Nightclub Assault Verdict
After trial: A Miami judge vacated the award in 2024 and ordered a new trial after finding the defendants were wrongly barred from presenting certain defenses.
Won by Goldberg & Rosen.
Goldberg and Rosen secured a $13 million jury verdict on behalf of a man left near death after a nightclub bouncer's felony battery, but a Miami judge vacated the award in 2024 and ordered a new trial after finding the defendants were wrongly barred from presenting certain defenses.
What happened
A night out at a since-closed Miami nightclub ended with a patron in critical condition after a security employee beat him in what prosecutors later classified as a felony battery. The man survived but suffered serious injuries, and his path to trial stretched across roughly seven years of litigation.
Goldberg and Rosen took on the case, representing the injured patron against the security company that employed the bouncer and the employee himself. The firm's approach at trial was direct: Judd Rosen later told the Daily Business Review that the strategy was to present the evidence without reservation. Attorneys pressed hard on the medical testimony, and the three-day trial concluded with a jury deliberating approximately five hours before returning a $13 million verdict for their client.
The verdict drew coverage in the Daily Business Review, which reported that attorneys for the plaintiff had effectively turned defense medical experts during cross-examination, contributing to the outcome. The security company and its employee were held liable under theories of negligent hiring and retention and vicarious liability.
In August 2024, a Miami state court judge vacated the verdict and ordered a new trial. The court found that the defendants had been wrongly barred from presenting certain defenses and evidence during the original proceeding. Law360 reported the ruling on August 12, 2024, naming Goldberg and Rosen as plaintiff's counsel. Defense attorneys from GrayRobinson, Cole Scott and Kissane, and Marlow Adler represented the defendants.
The case now returns for retrial. The $13 million award no longer stands as of the judge's 2024 order, and the underlying liability questions remain to be decided again before a new jury.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Goldberg & Rosen
All Goldberg & Rosen proven verdicts →The families of 98 people killed in the June 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida, recovered over $1 billion through a class settlement run by a court-appointed Plaintiffs' Steering Committee, with final approval reached in under a year.
Goldberg & Rosen attorneys Judd and Brett Rosen secured a $35 million jury verdict against drunk driver Thomas Cypress, whose blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit when he killed retired Maryland couple Robert and Paulette Kirkpatrick on Tamiami Trail in 2009, producing what was at the time the largest damages award for surviving adult children in Florida history.
A Miami-Dade jury awarded $10,577,853.93 to plaintiff David Brown after a 2015 T-bone collision left him with a traumatic brain injury, a stroke, and two years during which he could not speak, eat, or drink.
A Miami jury awarded $5.2 million to the estate of cyclist Miguel Del Angel Ortiz, killed in a 2022 truck collision, after Goldberg and Rosen attorneys rejected a $80,000 settlement and proved the driver was distracted on a phone call.
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Anapol Weiss shareholder Kristen Gibbons Feden helped secure $1.6 billion in default verdicts for 104 women sexually abused as children by former Long Island pediatrician Stuart Copperman, one of the largest cumulative civil awards against a single individual in U.S. history.
A Dallas jury awarded $1.1 billion against a trust fund heir who beat a 2-year-old into a permanent vegetative state in 2021, a verdict the firm calls the largest child-assault award in U.S. history.
A Clayton County jury awarded $1 billion to a woman who was raped at age 14 by an armed security guard her employer hired without verifying he was licensed to carry a weapon.
Joseph Bruno and Bruno & Bruno served as lead plaintiffs' counsel in a landmark class action brought by more than 8,000 Gentilly residents exposed to a butadiene tank-car fire in 1987, securing a jury verdict that included $2.5 billion in punitive damages against CSX Transportation alone, later reduced to $850 million on appeal and affirmed by Louisiana's Fourth Circuit.