Cook County Jury Awards $12.2 Million in Illinois Record Nursing Home Verdict
Won by Levin & Perconti.
A Cook County jury delivered Illinois's largest-ever nursing home verdict, $12.2 million, finding that chronic understaffing at Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center caused Shirley Adams to develop fatal pressure wounds during her stay.
What happened
Shirley Adams was 79 years old and, by her family's account, in good physical health when she entered Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center on Chicago's North Side in June 2021. She had early-stage dementia but no significant wounds. Within three months of admission, pressure sores had formed.
Over the following months Adams endured more than 20 surgical procedures as the wounds worsened and became infected. She was transferred to another facility in November 2021, but the damage had been done. She died in February 2023 from complications tied to those injuries. Her family brought a wrongful-death action against Lakeview Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, LLC and its management company, Infinity Healthcare Management of Illinois, LLC, alleging that chronic understaffing had made basic preventive care impossible.
Levin and Perconti attorneys Paul Connery, Steven Levin, and Margaret Battersby Black presented the family's case over three days in a Cook County courtroom. The core argument was straightforward: routine repositioning and skin monitoring, the kind of care every nursing home is expected to provide, would have prevented every wound Adams developed. 'The care that would prevent this is extremely routine. There is no excuse that this should not have been happening,' Connery told reporters after the verdict.
The jury deliberated roughly 90 minutes before returning a verdict of $12.2 million, the largest nursing home jury award in Illinois history. Levin called the outcome a direct response to operators who put profits over residents: 'This was a preventable tragedy.'
In the months after the verdict, the family had not received payment. Illinois law does not require licensed nursing homes to carry liability insurance, and the facility carried only $250,000 in per-incident coverage. The CEO of the management company, Moishe Gubin, declined to pay the judgment. A Cook County judge subsequently threatened contempt charges. The verdict amount remained intact as of published reporting; no reduction or remittitur has been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Fox 32 Chicago (Nic Flosi): Chicago family awarded record $12.2M verdict in nursing home death case·Archived copy
- 2.WBBM Newsradio 780 (Mike Krauser): Law firm CEO refuses to pay record jury verdict·Archived copy
- 3.WGN-TV Investigates via AOL (Lourdes Duarte): $12 million verdict exposes loophole in Illinois nursing home laws·Archived copy
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