Kline & Specter Wins Appeal Preserving Record $207.6 Million Birth Injury Judgment Against Penn Hospital
After trial: The jury awarded $182,737,791, and the trial judge added about $24.9 million in Pennsylvania Rule 238 prejudgment interest, bringing the judgment to $207.6 million. Pennsylvania's Superior Court unanimously affirmed the full judgment on July 10, 2025.
Won by Kline & Specter, PC.
A Philadelphia jury found the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania liable for the brain injury a newborn suffered when staff delayed a cesarean section, a $182.7 million verdict that grew to a molded judgment of about $207.6 million, the largest medical malpractice award in Pennsylvania history. Kline & Specter argued and won the appeal, where the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment in July 2025.
What happened
In February 2018, Dajah Hagans arrived at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania to deliver her son. She had chorioamnionitis, an infection of the membranes and fluid surrounding the baby, and the hospital staff knew it. Rather than move quickly toward delivery, they waited. By the time her son was born, he had suffered permanent brain damage. He was later diagnosed with cerebral palsy. Today he cannot walk or speak, relies on a feeding tube, and depends on others for nearly every part of daily life.
The case put before a Philadelphia jury turned on timing. The standard of care, the plaintiff's experts testified, required a prompt cesarean section once the infection was recognized. The staff instead delayed about 45 minutes. Had the baby been delivered sooner, those experts said, he would have avoided the neurological injury that now shapes his life. The trial record centered on that gap: what the providers knew, when they knew it, and what a careful delivery team would have done. Penn Medicine disputed both causation and the scale of any award. The jury was not persuaded.
On April 26, 2023, the jury returned a verdict of about $183 million. The award included $101 million for the lifetime cost of the boy's care, $70 million for future pain and suffering, $10 million for past pain and suffering, and $1.7 million for lost earning capacity. It was the largest medical malpractice verdict in Pennsylvania history, surpassing a $100 million mark that had stood since 2000.
Penn Medicine moved to overturn or reduce the verdict. Judge Gwendolyn N. Bright denied those post-trial motions, and with about $24.9 million in delay damages added, the judgment was molded to roughly $207.6 million. Kline & Specter handled the post-trial and appellate fight, where Charles Becker, who leads the firm's appellate practice, argued for the family alongside Shanin Specter and Andra Laidacker. The hospital argued that an award of this size was excessive and would strain care across the region. On July 10, 2025, a three-judge panel of the Pennsylvania Superior Court unanimously affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment, holding that the award did not shock the conscience.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Kline & Specter, PC
All Kline & Specter, PC proven verdicts →As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.
A Philadelphia jury found that Monsanto failed to warn that Roundup could cause cancer and awarded John McKivison $2.25 billion. The trial judge later reduced the award to $400 million.
After Amtrak Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia in May 2015, killing eight and injuring more than 200, Kline & Specter's Thomas R. Kline led the plaintiffs' negotiations that produced a $265 million settlement fund for the victims.
A Philadelphia jury awarded Ernest Caranci $175 million after finding that decades of Roundup use caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that Monsanto failed to warn of the risk. Kline & Specter tried the case, the first Roundup trial in Philadelphia, and the verdict was later upheld on appeal.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
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.