John Gellatly

A King County jury returned a $150 million verdict against two crane subcontractors whose safety failures caused the April 2019 South Lake Union crane collapse, which killed four people and injured three others.

A Snohomish County jury awarded Paramjit Singh and his family $40.1 million after an Edwards Lifesciences cardiac monitoring device overheated during bypass surgery and destroyed his heart, forcing a transplant, because the manufacturer had concealed a known software defect for years.

Two men who suffered severe blast, burn, and traumatic brain injuries when a KOMO news helicopter fell onto their vehicles during morning rush hour in March 2014 received a $40 million settlement five weeks into trial.

A King County jury awarded $38 million to Thyce Colyn, a commuter cyclist who suffered permanent brain damage and a shattered pelvis after a Standard Parking valet driver struck him while cutting illegally across 8th Avenue in downtown Seattle.

In 1999, a federal jury in Boise found that Dr. Ian Ross Donald had punctured a fetal blood vessel during an amniocentesis on Sandy Kirkland, causing internal bleeding that went undetected for about sixteen hours and left her son with severe brain damage and spastic quadriplegia. The jury awarded $29,715,077, finding Donald 75 percent at fault and reckless and Wood River Medical Center 25 percent at fault and merely negligent, while clearing Sandy's other treating physician entirely. Because Idaho's noneconomic damages cap does not apply to a defendant a jury finds reckless, only the hospital's share of noneconomic damages was reduced, leaving roughly $26,538,077 of the award standing. The Idaho Supreme Court later upheld the cap's constitutionality on a certified question from the case. Paul Luvera, of the firm now known as Luvera Law Firm, represented the Kirkland family at trial.