Michael Ketchmark
Proven VerdictsAbout Michael Ketchmark
Michael Ketchmark is the President and Managing Partner of Ketchmark & McCreight, P.C., where he has represented seriously injured individuals against some of the most powerful corporations in the country for more than 30 years. He has tried wrongful death cases against major manufacturers to verdict on multiple occasions, a feat accomplished by very few trial lawyers in the United States. In 2023, he obtained a $1.8 billion jury verdict in Burnett v. National Association of Realtors, one of the largest antitrust verdicts in American history. He also secured a $2.2 billion verdict in a case involving a pharmacist who deliberately diluted chemotherapy drugs administered to cancer patients.
Ketchmark has been recognized by Forbes as one of America's Best-In-State Lawyers and was named Lawyer of the Year by Missouri Lawyers Media. He has tried cases in Missouri, Kansas, and courts across the country. He received his law degree from the University of Iowa College of Law and has been practicing since 1990.
Proven verdicts and settlements
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.
A Clay County, Missouri jury awarded $76 million to the family of David Ford, a 48-year-old delivery driver crushed by moving machinery while dropping off vehicle seats at Ford Motor Company's Kansas City Assembly Plant. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the verdict in full in 2019.
A woman sued a commercial property owner for wrongful death after her child was shot and killed on the property in Kansas City, alleging the landowner had failed to provide adequate security measures and precautions. The case was handled under a confidentiality agreement that keeps the parties' identities and the property's location out of the public record. It was resolved in Jackson County Circuit Court on May 31, 2024, under the caption Confidential v. Confidential, for $27,000,000. Missouri Lawyers Media, which reported the settlement and reached plaintiff's counsel for comment, later listed it as the top settlement in its Top Verdicts and Settlements roundup for 2024.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
