$4.037 Billion Settlement for Maui Wildfire Victims
After trial: Global, multi-firm.
Won by Leavitt, Yamane & Soldner.
Leavitt, Yamane and Soldner represented Maui wildfire survivors and victims' families in the $4.037 billion global settlement resolving approximately 450 lawsuits arising from the August 2023 Lahaina fire.
What happened
On August 8, 2023, a wind-driven fire tore through Lahaina on the western coast of Maui, killing 101 people and incinerating thousands of homes and businesses across the historic town center. The disaster displaced roughly 12,000 residents and became one of the deadliest wildfires in modern American history.
Investigators traced the ignition to a deteriorating utility pole that snapped under high winds. Aaron Creps of Leavitt, Yamane and Soldner, who represented families of those killed and survivors who lost their homes, described the core liability theory: the pole had been weakened by termite damage, and Hawaiian Electric reconnected power to the lines without first confirming the area was safe, which ignited the blaze.
Within weeks of the disaster, Leavitt, Yamane and Soldner partnered with the Frantz Law Group to file claims on behalf of Maui victims. The litigation grew to encompass roughly 450 lawsuits in state and federal courts, naming seven defendants: Hawaiian Electric, the State of Hawaii, Maui County, Kamehameha Schools, West Maui Land Co., Hawaiian Telcom, and Spectrum/Charter Communications.
As cases were scheduled for trial beginning November 2024, Creps argued before Judge Peter Cahill that consolidating the first four filed cases into a single proceeding was the most practical path forward, noting that trying them one household at a time would impose an undue burden on court staff and the jury pool. Mediation ran in parallel, with sessions lasting more than four months.
In August 2024, the parties reached a $4.037 billion global settlement, the largest in Hawaii history. Hawaiian Electric agreed to contribute $1.99 billion, the single largest share. The settlement still required resolution of a subrogation dispute: property and casualty insurers who had paid approximately $2.4 billion in claims sought the right to recover those costs directly from the defendants. Creps argued that Maui victims had not yet been made whole, which under Hawaii law would bar insurer subrogation. The Hawaii Supreme Court accepted briefing on that question in late 2024, with the case set to return to the Maui Circuit Court after the court's ruling.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Hawaii News Now: Maui wildfire lawsuit attorneys clash over first trial in November (July 6, 2024)·Archived copy
- 2.Hawaii Public Radio: Subrogation legal issue holding back Maui wildfires settlement (Nov. 7, 2024)·Archived copy
- 3.CBS News: Maui wildfire victims reach $4 billion settlement (Aug. 2024)·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Leavitt, Yamane & Soldner
All Leavitt, Yamane & Soldner proven verdicts →A Hawaii jury awarded $12.1 million to a Waipahu family after labor-induction negligence at Kapiolani Medical Center cut off a newborn's oxygen for 26 minutes, causing permanent brain damage and cerebral palsy.
A 38-year-old man paralyzed at a Waipio crosswalk in April 2015 settled for $11.4 million after attorney Woodruff Soldner proved the City of Honolulu repaved the road in 2014 without completing the safety checklist its own laws required.
Leavitt, Yamane & Soldner, alongside two co-counsel firms, secured a confidential settlement for families of the four people killed in the July 2017 Marco Polo condominium fire in Honolulu, the costliest fire in Hawaii history.
Related wrongful death verdicts
In December 2011, a Fayette County, Texas jury awarded the family of an 8-year-old Splendora boy $150.37 billion after he was doused with gasoline and set on fire by a 13-year-old neighbor in 1998, two weeks after the same neighbor sexually assaulted him. The boy survived third-degree burns over 99 percent of his body for nearly 13 years before dying in April 2011 of a skin cancer linked to his injuries. The defendant, Don Wilburn Collins, never appeared to answer the civil suit, and the jury awarded $370 million in actual damages plus roughly $150 billion in punitive damages, the largest civil verdict in U.S. history. Attorney Craig Sico, who represented the family, said from the outset that the judgment was not collectible and was intended to pressure prosecutors into reopening the long-dormant criminal case. Prosecutors did reopen the case, and Collins was later convicted of capital murder in a separate criminal proceeding.
A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.
A Polk County jury awarded $110 million in compensatory damages and $1 billion in punitive damages over the death of 69-year-old Arlene Townsend, who fell 17 times at the Auburndale Oaks Healthcare Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case against Trans Healthcare entities that had defaulted, stopped defending, and were already insolvent and in receivership, which is why the judgment was largely symbolic and the estate ultimately recovered only a small share of a later multi-estate settlement.