Arthur Swanson

The City of Seattle and its five insurers paid $65.75 million to Brooke Taylor, a 38-year-old Susman Godfrey partner who suffered a catastrophic traumatic brain injury when a Seattle Fire Department aid unit went through a red light at Fourth Avenue and Seneca Street in April 2016 and struck her Porsche, spinning it into a signal box and a tree. Todd Gardner of Swanson Gardner Meyers negotiated the settlement, approved in King County Superior Court in late December 2018 and reported as the largest personal injury settlement in city history and likely the largest in Washington state.

A tower crane being disassembled in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood collapsed onto a city street in high wind on April 27, 2019, crushing an Uber carrying 19-year-old Seattle Pacific University student Sarah Wong and killing her. A King County jury found Northwest Tower Crane Service 45 percent at fault and Omega Morgan Sarens 30 percent at fault, and set the damages for Wong's death at more than $72 million as part of a verdict topping $150 million for five victims of the collapse. Because the remaining 25 percent of the fault went to Morrow Equipment, which had settled and was not a trial defendant, the two trial defendants were jointly and severally liable only for their combined 75 percent share, which left the Wong family $54.15 million under the judgment. Todd Gardner represented the Wong family at trial. Omega Morgan appealed on four grounds, and the Washington Court of Appeals affirmed in 2023.

A King County jury awarded $50 million to Rhea and Brock Wuth after Valley Medical Center failed to send LabCorp the family genetic report needed to screen for a known chromosome translocation and LabCorp ran only a routine karyotype without asking for it, leaving the couple's son to be born with the unbalanced translocation the testing was meant to detect. The verdict was affirmed on appeal in 2015.

Michael Trujillo, a 62-year-old electrician from Colorado, was diagnosed with ALS in 2017 and sought treatment at Seattle Stem Cell Center after seeing the clinic's online marketing. In April 2019 a physician at the clinic gave him a spinal injection without imaging guidance while he was taking a blood thinner, causing catastrophic bleeding and brain herniation, and he was pronounced dead the next day. A King County jury returned a unanimous $24 million verdict for his estate, his widow and their five adult children, finding that negligence in his care caused his death. The clinic's owner, Dr. Tami Meraglia, said she intends to appeal.

A King County jury found that a speed bump the University of Washington had known for years was dangerous to cyclists caused a 2020 crash that left finance executive Jonathan Spencer with a severe traumatic brain injury. The jury set total damages at $40.7 million and assigned 60 percent of the fault to Spencer and 40 percent to the university, leaving the state liable for about $16.3 million. Five earlier cyclist crashes at the same speed bump, including one that had already produced a jury verdict against the university, had put UW on notice before Spencer's crash. UW removed the speed bump two years after Spencer was hurt. Todd Gardner represented Spencer at trial.