$100 Million Verdict for Toddler Permanently Injured by Doctor Who Operated Ten Days After License Was Revoked
Won by Grossman Yaffa Cohen.
A Palm Beach County jury awarded $100 million to a toddler left permanently injured after Dr. Berto Lopez performed a circumcision ten days after the Florida Board of Medicine revoked his license.
What happened
On February 5, 2021, the Florida Board of Medicine revoked the medical license of Dr. Berto Lopez, a West Palm Beach physician with a history of patient harm stretching back to 2004 and linked to nearly 20 serious injuries, including six deaths. Ten days later, Lopez performed a circumcision on a newborn at his West Palm Beach office.
The procedure, which should have taken minutes, lasted approximately one hour. Lopez removed tissue and disposed of it, leaving the infant with permanent and irreparable injury. Surgical correction was not possible.
Attorneys Gary Cohen and Aimee Ferrer of Boca Raton firm Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen filed suit on behalf of the boy's family. The case went to trial in Palm Beach County Circuit Court in August 2024. Lopez did not appear in court and did not retain defense counsel.
The trial revealed a systemic breakdown: when the Board of Medicine revoked Lopez's license, notification was sent by mail rather than through any immediate alert system. Local police, called after the procedure by the family, initially reported that Lopez held an active license. The gap between revocation and effective notice allowed him to continue seeing patients. Cohen pointed to the Board of Medicine's multi-year failure to act, noting complaints against Lopez dated to 2004.
On August 27, 2024, the jury returned a verdict of $100 million for physical impairment and mental anguish. The award is held in trust, available to the child upon adulthood, with provisions for medical expenses and emotional support during childhood. The boy's father acknowledged that Lopez, who has no known assets, is unlikely to satisfy the judgment, but said the family pursued the verdict to draw public attention to the licensing oversight failures. No post-verdict reduction or appeal has been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.CNN Newsource via KESQ: Boy mutilated by disgraced doctor awarded $100 million by Palm Beach County jury (Aug. 30, 2024)
- 2.CBS12 News: $100 million awarded in Palm Beach County's boy botched circumcision case (2024)
- 3.NewsRadio WFLA: Palm Beach County Family Awarded $100 Million Over Botched Circumcision (Aug. 2024)
- 4.KRDO News (CNN Newsource): Boy mutilated by disgraced doctor awarded $100 million by Palm Beach County jury (Aug. 30, 2024)
More proven verdicts from Grossman Yaffa Cohen
All Grossman Yaffa Cohen 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.
Stuart Grossman, Neal Roth, and Alex Arteaga-Gomez of Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen represented families in the $127.5 million federal settlement arising from the FBI's failure to follow up on a tip warning that Nikolas Cruz was planning a school shooting five weeks before the February 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.
A Palm Beach County jury awarded $100 million against former OB/GYN Berto Lopez, who performed a catastrophic circumcision on a 10-day-old boy ten days after the Florida Board of Medicine revoked his license, though the unlicensed doctor skipped the trial and collection remains doubtful.
Stuart Grossman and Seth Miles won an $80 million federal default judgment for three Cuban nationals who were trafficked to Curaçao and compelled to work 16-hour shifts repairing ships for a fraction of a cent per hour under the Alien Tort Claims Act.
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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.