Chapecoense Soccer Team Crash: $844 Million in Judgments for 43 Families
After trial: Combined judgments and settlements for the families of 43 victims of a single crash, not one plaintiff's award.
Won by Podhurst Orseck PA.
Steven Marks and Kristina Infante of Podhurst Orseck secured a combined $844 million in wrongful-death judgments for 43 families of passengers killed when LaMia Flight 2933 crashed near Medellin, Colombia, in November 2016, killing 71 of the 77 people aboard.
What happened
On the night of November 28, 2016, a chartered Avro RJ85 carrying most of the Chapecoense Association Football Club to the Copa Sudamericana Finals in Medellin, Colombia, lost all power and crashed into a hillside outside the city. Seventy-one of the 77 people on board died, including players, coaching staff, and journalists. Six survived. Colombian aviation authorities later determined that the crew had skipped a planned refueling stop and then failed to declare a fuel emergency until the engines were already flaming out.
Families of the victims retained Podhurst Orseck. Steven Marks and Kristina Infante filed wrongful-death and negligence claims in Miami-Dade Circuit Court against the airline's owners and operators: Linea Aerea Merida Internacional de Aviacion, co-owner Marco Antonio Rocha Venegas, aircraft owner Kite Air Corp., and a fourth related party. The suit alleged that the defendants knowingly operated a flight beyond the aircraft's fuel range, ignored pre-departure warnings, and withheld the emergency from air traffic control until recovery was no longer possible.
Less than two years after filing, the firm obtained judgments for 43 of the victims. Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Martin Zilber entered individual awards ranging from $5 million to $30 million, calibrated to each victim's circumstances. The total across the 43 families reached $844 million. Florida's Third District Court of Appeal affirmed the judgments in July 2020. The Daily Business Review named Marks, Infante, and colleague Pablo Rojas among its Most Effective Lawyers of 2020 for the result.
Collection of the judgments proved complicated. LaMia had carried a $25 million aviation policy through Bolivian insurer Bisa, and the insurer had partially funded a humanitarian assistance fund for families who accepted early payments. The bulk of the $844 million remained unpaid and was directed toward the airline's reinsurers, a London underwriting syndicate led by Tokio Marine Kiln, and broker Aon. Podhurst retained U.K. firm Penningtons Manches Cooper to resist an anti-suit injunction the reinsurers had obtained in English courts to block U.S. proceedings. In December 2022 an English High Court judge vacated that injunction as to the reinsurers, allowing the Florida enforcement action to proceed. The Aon injunction remained in place, limiting any claim against the broker to English courts.
As of the English ruling, the principal judgment of $844 million remained the operative figure, with accumulated interest projected to push the total exposure above $920 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.