Mitch Drach

A Manhattan jury awarded $72.5 million on February 22, 2024 to Aurora Beauchamp, a stage 4 cancer patient who was struck in a Lower East Side crosswalk by an MTA bus and dragged roughly 20 feet before it came to rest on her legs, crushing her pelvis and paralyzing her left leg, in what was widely reported as potentially the largest pedestrian knockdown verdict against the MTA. On September 17, 2026 the Appellate Division, First Department cut the award to about $47.8 million, unless the plaintiffs reject the reduction and accept a new trial on damages.

A Rockland County, New York jury found two neurosurgeons at fault after a 2009 cervical spine operation left their patient, Patricia Jones, a quadriplegic, and in 2019 returned a verdict the trial court itemized at approximately $45.9 million, on top of $11.8 million her family had already recovered from defendants who settled before trial. The jury found that a spinal cord injury developing after the surgery went unrecognized and untreated until it was too late, and it apportioned 25 percent of the fault to each of the two doctors who stood trial. In a July 2023 order the court held the pain and suffering and loss of consortium awards excessive under New York law and reduced them, bringing the award as reduced to about $23.4 million, conditioned on the family accepting the cut or trying damages again. Evan Torgan of Torgan Cooper + Aaron is named in the decision as counsel for the family.

In October 2003, James McMillan was one of roughly 1,500 passengers on the Staten Island Ferry Andrew J. Barberi when it hit a maintenance pier at close to full speed after its solo pilot blacked out, a crash that killed 11 people and left McMillan a quadriplegic. Liability was already settled by the time his case reached trial, so Judge Jack B. Weinstein tried damages in the Eastern District of New York with an advisory jury, with Torgan & Cooper, P.C. (now Torgan Cooper + Aaron) representing McMillan. The City argued his future medical costs should be figured on race-based life expectancy statistics predicting a shorter life for a Black claimant; Weinstein refused, in the first federal ruling to hold that such statistics cannot be used to calculate damages. His own findings of fact, amended twice, fixed the award at $18.3 million, the largest of the cases brought against the City over the crash, and the City paid it.

In November 2002, 14-year-old Edward Beloyianis underwent surgery at a Manhattan hospital, then part of Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, to correct severe scoliosis, and came out of it paralyzed from the waist down after four screws meant to anchor the correction were misplaced and left pressing against his spinal cord. Beloyianis and his parents sued the hospital and the surgeon, alleging the surgical team never performed the CT scan that would have caught the misplaced hardware in time to reverse the damage. Beloyianis died in 2010 at age 22 from complications tied to the paralysis, and in May 2015 a Bronx jury awarded his parents $45,625,000, splitting fault evenly between the hospital and the surgeon. The trial court later cut the award to $9,242,000 on the defendants' post-trial motion. Both sides appealed, and two unaffiliated attorney blogs report that the case settled for $10,900,000 in late 2018 before the appeals were perfected, a figure that no news account or court record confirms.