Manhattan Jury Awards $102.1 Million Against Live Nation for a Worker Whose Booth Was Hit by a Forklift at Jones Beach, and Even After Appellate Cuts the Case Set New York's Record for Pain and Suffering

On June 26, 2013, Mark Perez, a 30-year-old worker, was helping assemble a Best Buy vendor booth ahead of a concert at the Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, on Long Island. A forklift operated by a stagehand crashed into the structure while Perez was on it, and he fell about ten feet to the ground. He fractured his skull, suffered a severe traumatic brain injury, and went on to endure four brain surgeries. Doctors at one point gave him a 10 percent chance of survival. The injuries left him with permanent cognitive deficits, traumatic epilepsy, chronic pain, and a need for lifelong care.

Perez sued Live Nation, the concert promoter, in Supreme Court, New York County, under index number 158373/2013, with Benedict P. Morelli of Morelli Law Firm PLLC as his trial lawyer. In 2016 the court found Live Nation liable, so the trial that mattered was about damages alone. According to press accounts, Live Nation offered $31 million to settle about a week before trial, and Perez turned it down.

In December 2019, after a weeks-long damages trial, the Manhattan jury returned a verdict totaling approximately $102.1 million: $10.5 million for past pain and suffering, $75.25 million for future pain and suffering over 43 years, more than $5.1 million in future lost wages, over $10.7 million for future medical, rehabilitation, and custodial care, plus past economic damages.

Then came the part most verdict headlines leave out. In July 2020, Justice John J. Kelley ruled on Live Nation's post-trial motion and ordered a new trial unless Perez accepted a reduction of future pain and suffering from $75.25 million to $30.1 million and future lost wages to $1.92 million. Live Nation appealed even that. On April 13, 2021, the Appellate Division, First Department, in Perez v Live Nation Worldwide, Inc., 193 AD3d 517, cut pain and suffering further, to $5 million past and $15 million future, while affirming the future care and lost wage awards. Benedict Morelli and Sara Mahoney of the firm defended the verdict on appeal alongside David B. Saxe of Morrison Cohen, himself a former First Department justice, against a wall of amici that included the City of New York, the Transit Authority, and the defense bar, who urged the court to ban the anchoring technique Morelli had used in summation. The court declined.

The honest ledger reads like this: the verdict was $102.1 million, the compensatory total after all reductions was about $33.1 million, and with prejudgment interest running from the 2016 liability finding, court records show a total recovery of about $55 million. Even reduced, the $20 million pain and suffering award was the largest ever approved by a New York appellate court in the 34 years since the legislature empowered those courts to trim excessive verdicts. The aftermath was messier still. Perez paid the firm its agreed one-third fee, about $18.3 million, and Morelli later sued him for another $5.5 million he claimed was owed for the appellate work, a dispute that drew national coverage. The record the case set stands either way.