Michael Kilgore

A Jackson County jury returned a $108.6 million verdict for the parents of a woman who died from sepsis after her husband's religious group prevented her from receiving medical care during a botched home birth.

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.