$30.4 Million After a Delayed C-Section Left a First-Time Mother Unable to Have More Children
After trial: The jury returned $30.4 million on October 11, 2024, after an eight-year defense of the case. Silver Golub and Teitell has said prejudgment interest could bring the total to roughly $68 million, but that is the firm's own projection and no independent source confirms a judgment entered at that figure.
Won by Silver Golub & Teitell LLP.
Elizabeth Tigani was 32 when she was admitted to deliver her first child. After nearly a day of labor she had a cesarean section that, her lawyers argued, was both ordered too late and performed negligently, permanently injuring her bladder and uterus. A Stamford jury awarded $30.4 million after an eight-year fight.
What happened
Elizabeth Tigani was 32 years old and expecting her first child. She was admitted on December 6, 2014, and her labor did not progress. Almost twenty-four hours later, in the early hours of December 7, she was taken for a cesarean section.
The case she later brought had two parts, and both mattered. The first was timing: that Dr. Sara Elias should have ordered the cesarean earlier than she did, and that the delay itself contributed to what followed. The second was the operation. Her lawyers argued that the C-section was performed negligently and caused severe, permanent injuries to her bladder and her uterus.
The consequence was that Tigani could not have more children.
That is a particular kind of loss to put to a jury. It is not a disability that can be scored on a functional scale, and it is not a stream of future medical bills. It is the removal of a possibility from a 32-year-old's life, discovered in the course of the delivery that was supposed to begin her family rather than close it. The economic damages in the case were modest by comparison to the award: roughly $1.4 million. The jury put $29 million against the non-economic harm.
Sean McElligott and David Golub of Silver Golub and Teitell represented Tigani. She sued Westchester Medical Group, Dr. Elias, and the hospital in 2016, and the defendants contested the case for eight years before it reached a courtroom. Trial ran three weeks before Judge Sheila A. Ozalis in Stamford. On October 11, 2024, after about four hours of deliberation, the jury found the defendants negligent and returned $30.4 million.
One figure attached to this case should be read carefully. Silver Golub and Teitell has said that with prejudgment interest the total could reach as much as $68 million. That is the firm's own projection, and no independent source has confirmed a judgment at that number. The verified figure is the $30.4 million the jury returned.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.Connecticut Post: independent local reporting on the verdict, the 2014 delivery, and the injuries at issue
- 2.Insurance Journal: independent trade reporting on the $30 million award for injuries during the cesarean section
- 3.Darien Patch: independent local reporting giving the economic and non-economic damages split
More proven verdicts from Silver Golub & Teitell LLP
All Silver Golub & Teitell LLP proven verdicts →A federal jury found that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company had defectively designed Salem cigarettes and awarded Barbara Izzarelli nearly $8 million; punitive damages and years of accruing interest, upheld on appeal and left standing when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, eventually brought the total to $52.3 million.
Jennifer Anderson tested positive for high-risk HPV at annual visits with her gynecologist over several years, and no colposcopy was ever performed. By the time her cervical cancer was found in 2019 it had spread to her chest, abdomen, and pelvis. A Stamford jury awarded her $39 million and her husband $10 million.
On July 26, 2007, a 6-year-old boy drowned in his family's backyard pool in Greenwich when his arm was sucked into a wall drain feeding a spillover spa. Connecticut had required dual drains and a vacuum-release device since 2004, a year before the pool was permitted, and the builder had installed neither. The pool company's president pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in 2011, the first such prosecution of a pool builder in the country. By May 2013 the parents, Brian and Karen Cohn, had settled with all nine defendants for a combined $40 million, all of it directed to the water-safety foundation they created in their son's name.
Elizabeth Oram delivered twins at Stamford Hospital on April 4, 2003. The first was born healthy at 3:11 a.m. Two minutes later the second twin showed fetal distress from a compressed umbilical cord, but the cesarean was not completed until 3:38 a.m. The boy was born with severe brain damage and cerebral palsy. After a seven-week trial, a Stamford jury found obstetrician Dr. Corinne de Cholnoky liable in February 2008 and awarded $38.5 million, then the largest medical malpractice verdict in Connecticut.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.