Hare Wynn Newell & Newton

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.

The widow of Derric Rush, a church music minister killed in a 2009 Birmingham crash by an off-duty police officer, won a default judgment against Club Volcano for serving the officer while intoxicated, after a trial on damages in 2013. The same judgment included $3.25 million against the officer, James Kendrick. The Alabama Supreme Court voided the club's judgment in 2014 because service by publication had not been shown to be justified.

A Bessemer jury returned a $15 million verdict against the owners of a BP convenience store that sold beer to an underage driver whose vehicle struck a tree, killing a 13-year-old passenger and injuring three others in May 2007.

A Houston County, Alabama jury awarded $6 million on September 17, 2024, to the family of Christa Anne Davis, 71, of Headland, who died of sepsis in September 2017 after gallbladder surgery. The family said a surgeon at the practice, filling in for her own surgeon, sent her home without checking her vital signs. The five-day trial was reported as the largest medical malpractice verdict in Houston County history.

In early 2014, Biomet agreed to pay at least $56 million to settle about 1,000 federal lawsuits over its M2a 38 and M2a Magnum metal-on-metal hip implants, consolidated in the Northern District of Indiana. Qualifying patients who had the device revised received a base award of $200,000, adjusted by individual factors. Thomas Anapol was court-appointed Co-Lead Counsel with W. Mark Lanier and signed the agreement for the Plaintiffs' Executive Committee. The figure covers many unrelated plaintiffs, is a reported minimum rather than a final total, and is not itemized by person.

A neurosurgeon performed a lumbar fusion in July 2005 and, according to the Trammells' expert, never examined Thomas Trammell afterward despite classic signs of cauda equina syndrome, waiting ten days to operate again. An Alabama jury in March 2011 awarded Thomas $1,650,000 and his wife Barbara $500,000 for loss of consortium. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed the judgment in May 2012.

In August 2019 a Calhoun County jury ordered a former Regional Medical Center emergency physician to pay $2 million to the widow of John Townsend, 60, who bled to death from a ruptured pseudoaneurysm the morning after he was sent home from the ER in 2014. The jury found the doctor responsible for not ordering a color Doppler ultrasound for a softball-sized groin lump. A second physician had settled with the widow before trial.

A nine-year-old girl's sciatic nerve was injured during hip surgery at Crestwood Hospital in Huntsville, Alabama in 1990. Her parents sued the hospital's operator, alleging an inadequately trained operating room technician. A jury awarded $818,000 in compensatory damages against the hospital and found for the surgeon's practice. The Alabama Supreme Court affirmed on March 7, 1997.