Hare Wynn Newell & Newton

A Jefferson County bench trial ended in a $2.88 billion judgment against former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy for orchestrating an accounting fraud that inflated the company's reported earnings by $2.6 billion over six years.

Scott Powell of Hare Wynn Newell and Newton served as one of four co-lead class counsel in the $1.51 billion nationwide settlement against Syngenta, recovering losses for hundreds of thousands of U.S. corn growers, grain handlers, and ethanol producers whose market access to China was cut off after the company prematurely commercialized an unapproved GMO corn trait.

A class action filed in 2002 on behalf of roughly 400,000 residents across six north Alabama counties ended in a court-approved $300 million cleanup settlement requiring 3M and co-defendants to remediate PFAS contamination throughout the Tennessee River watershed.

Scott Powell of Hare Wynn Newell and Newton served as co-lead class counsel when a Kansas federal jury returned a $217.7 million compensatory verdict against Syngenta, finding the seed company negligent for commercializing its MIR162 GMO corn trait in the United States before China approved it for import, triggering a market collapse that cut off American farmers from one of their largest export buyers.

Hare Wynn secured a $100 million cash settlement from UBS on behalf of HealthSouth derivative stockholder plaintiffs, resolving claims that the investment bank aided and abetted one of the largest accounting frauds in American corporate history.

Hare Wynn attorneys Scott Powell and Bruce McKee won a roughly $48 million trial verdict for 11 Arkansas rice-farming families after Bayer CropScience's unapproved genetically modified rice contaminated the national supply and shut down European export markets. The verdict was one of the bellwether outcomes that pushed Bayer toward a $750 million global settlement.