About Pressley Henningsen
Pressley Henningsen has practiced law since 1996. He began in a small rural town handling everything from estate work to boundary disputes, which gave him a broad foundation before narrowing to serious injury cases. He is a partner at RSH Legal and has tried significant wrongful death, paralysis, and complex medical malpractice cases before juries.
He was inducted into the American Board of Trial Advocates in 2017, has an AV Preeminent Martindale-Hubbell rating, and has been on the Great Plains Super Lawyers list since 2014. He is a past president of the Iowa Association for Justice (2012-2013) and a Trial Lawyers College graduate. He earned his J.D. with Distinction from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1996.
Proven verdicts and settlements
Cedar Rapids' insurer paid $8 million to Jerime Mitchell, a quadriplegic man shot by Officer Lucas Jones during a 2016 traffic stop, in what attorneys described as the largest police-misconduct settlement in Iowa history.
A Waterloo man lost all feeling below the waist after a cervical radiofrequency ablation at the C5-6 level in December 2014. A Black Hawk County jury found Dr. Ashar Afzal and Cedar Valley Medical Specialists negligent and awarded $7.36 million to him and his wife. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2021.
Ross Hall died after what his family alleged was negligent cardiology care. The jury awarded $5,500,000, and the allocation is the striking part: only $250,000 for his own pain and suffering before death, and the remaining $5.25 million to his widow and three children for what they lost.
A Cerro Gordo County jury found Good Shepherd, a Mason City nursing home, negligent and willful and wanton in its care of an 84-year-old dementia resident who lost 43 pounds and died of dehydration in April 2015. It awarded her four children $150,000 in compensatory and $750,000 in punitive damages. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2018.
Seven adult children of an 84-year-old resident of Mill Valley Care Center in Jackson County, Iowa, sued after she fell from the toilet in January 2016 and died five days later of head injuries. A jury found the home negligent in December 2019 and awarded $800,000 in compensatory damages plus $1.37 million in punitive damages. The trial court set aside the punitive award, and the Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed in 2021, so the $800,000 compensatory award stood.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
