Patrick Embrey

A Los Angeles jury ordered General Motors to pay $4.9 billion after a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu's rear-mounted fuel tank ruptured and burned six occupants in a rear-end crash, the largest US personal-injury verdict at the time.

On September 10, 2013, Faustino Torres Solorio was standing at the tailgate of a truck that had run out of gas and pulled onto the shoulder in San Bernardino County when a car driven by Gunnar Ayala, a parts delivery driver for Nissan of Fontana, struck him. Ayala was cited for an unsafe turning movement, and the officer at the scene concluded Solorio did nothing to cause the crash. He suffered multiple broken bones, deep lacerations, a lacerated spleen and an above-the-knee amputation of his left leg. The dealerships argued Ayala was an independent contractor, or at least outside the course and scope of his job at the moment of the crash. A San Bernardino County Superior Court jury found otherwise and awarded Solorio $46 million on August 9, 2016. No appeal has surfaced in the years since.

On December 12, 2025, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury awarded Deborah Schultz and her husband Albert $22 million after finding that decades of using Johnson's Baby Powder caused her ovarian cancer. The jury found Johnson & Johnson liable for negligence, failure to warn and concealing asbestos risk in its talc products, but declined to award punitive damages. The verdict came in the first bellwether trial of California's coordinated talc litigation, which also awarded a second plaintiff, Monica Kent, $18 million in a case tried alongside the Schultzes'. Dan Robinson of Robinson Calcagnie tried the case for the plaintiffs with Andy Birchfield of Beasley Allen; Johnson & Johnson has said it will appeal.

Gerald Barnett, a retired FBI agent from South Carolina, took Vioxx starting in 1999 for chronic neck and back pain and suffered a heart attack in September 2002 at age 58, followed by quintuple bypass surgery. His case was chosen as the second bellwether trial in the federal Vioxx multidistrict litigation, and on August 17, 2006 a New Orleans jury found Merck had negligently failed to warn his doctors of the drug's risks and had concealed information about those risks, awarding him $50 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages. The trial judge found the compensatory award excessive and ordered a new trial unless Barnett accepted a reduced award; Barnett accepted a remittitur of $1.6 million on June 20, 2007, and judgment was entered in that amount on June 28, 2007. Merck reported that it appealed that judgment, and no decision resolving the appeal has been published.

As chair of the plaintiffs' negotiating committee and Liaison Counsel in the Vioxx multidistrict litigation, Russ Herman directed the negotiations that produced a $4.85 billion settlement with Merck resolving approximately 45,000 to 50,000 personal-injury claims.