About Todd Gardner
Todd W. Gardner is a founding partner of Swanson Gardner Meyers Cohon PLLC, co-founding the firm with Art Swanson in the 1980s to represent seriously injured Washington residents. He earned his B.A. magna cum laude in Economics from the University of Washington in 1977, where he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and then earned his J.D. with Honors from the University of Washington School of Law, receiving his Washington bar admission on October 24, 1980. Gardner limits his practice to personal injury and wrongful death litigation and has secured over $1 million verdicts in more than 20 trials. His significant results include a $150 million verdict in a case involving two deaths and three disabling injuries, a $50 million verdict that stands as the largest medical negligence verdict in Washington State history, and the state's two largest single personal injury settlements.
He also secured the first million-dollar wrongful death verdict for a child in Washington. Gardner holds the Martindale Hubbell Pre-eminent AV rating and has been recognized as a Washington Super Lawyer annually since 2003. He is a member of the Inner Circle of Advocates, limited to the top 100 plaintiff attorneys in the country, and is also a member of the American College of Trial Lawyers, the American Board of Trial Advocates, the National Trial Lawyers Top 100, the American Association for Justice, and the Washington Association for Justice as an Eagle Member.
Proven verdicts and settlements
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 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.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
