Kenneth McClain

Attorneys Kenneth McClain, Jonathan Soper, Chelsea Pierce, and J'Nan Kimak secured $35.72 million in confirmed ERISA arbitration awards for 177 current and former DST Systems employees whose 401(k) profit-sharing plan collapsed after fiduciaries concentrated more than 45 percent of plan assets in a single pharmaceutical stock that lost roughly 94 percent of its value.

A Boone County jury awarded $35.25 million to the family of Anita Gibbs, a Kansas City elementary school principal killed when a CenTra Trucking driver failed to slow for stopped traffic on Interstate 70 in 2006, after Ken McClain of Humphrey, Farrington and McClain used offensive collateral estoppel to limit the trial entirely to damages.

Two Missouri salon workers who spent over a decade using a professional hair-smoothing product the manufacturer marketed as formaldehyde-free settled their product liability claims for $30 million after one developed reproductive cancers and the other gave birth to a child who later developed leukemia.

A Laclede County jury awarded Philip Berger, a Copeland Scroll Compressors worker, $5 million in compensatory and $23 million in punitive damages after he developed hypersensitivity pneumonitis from contaminated cooling fluid. The trial court later granted a new trial on damages, and the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed that order in 2016, so the verdict did not stand.

In March 2004 a Jasper County, Missouri jury awarded $20 million to Eric Peoples and his wife, Cassandra, against the makers of the butter flavoring used at the microwave popcorn plant where he worked. Peoples developed permanent lung damage after years of breathing vapors from the flavoring, and doctors expected he would eventually need a double lung transplant. The jury awarded $18 million to him and $2 million to his wife. He was the first of about 30 workers from the plant to take a case to trial, and the companies' appeal was later settled on confidential terms.

A federal jury in Missouri found FAG Bearings liable for exposing Jodelle Kirk to TCE from its Joplin plant while she grew up in Silver Creek, and she developed autoimmune hepatitis. It awarded $7.6 million in compensatory and $13 million in punitive damages. In 2018 the Eighth Circuit dismissed the parent company, kept the compensatory award against FAG Bearings, LLC, and ordered a new trial limited to punitive damages. The parties later settled on undisclosed terms.

In March 2009 a federal jury in Iowa found that flavoring maker Givaudan Flavors Corp. failed to warn of the dangers of inhaling diacetyl and awarded about $7.5 million to Ronald Kuiper and his wife, Conley. Kuiper, a butter flavor mixer at a Sioux City microwave popcorn plant, had bronchiolitis obliterans and died the day before the verdict. About $6 million of the award went to him and $1.5 million to his wife.

The family of Barbara Smith of Independence, Missouri, sued Brown & Williamson over her death after decades of smoking Kool cigarettes. A Jackson County jury found the company liable on design, warning and strict liability claims and found Mrs. Smith 75 percent at fault. After an appeal and a punitive retrial, the court's compensatory award of $500,000 and a $1.5 million punitive award were affirmed by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2013.

The parents of Derek Sheely, a Frostburg State football player who died in 2011 after a practice head injury, sued the NCAA, school staff and the helmet maker and retailer. After the court denied the NCAA's motion for summary judgment and a trial was set, the case settled in August 2016 for $1.2 million, paid to the Derek Sheely Foundation. No defendant admitted liability.