$2.1 Million Verdict Against Acuity After Insurer Offered 16% of Policy Limit to TBI Survivor
Won by TSR Injury Law.
A corporate executive and mother of two suffered a traumatic brain injury when an underinsured driver T-boned her car; her own insurer, Acuity, offered $250,000 against a $1.5 million policy, and a Minnesota jury returned a $2.1 million verdict.
What happened
The crash happened on an ordinary afternoon. A woman had just left her child's school award ceremony when an underinsured driver struck her car broadside, sending the vehicle into a tree. The collision left her with a traumatic brain injury that would reshape the rest of her life.
The plaintiff was a corporate executive and single mother raising two children. She had rebuilt her life after losing her first husband to ALS, and by the time of the crash she had remarried and was eight years past that loss. The TBI took her career from her. Despite sustained effort to recover and return to work, she could not.
She carried underinsured motorist coverage with Acuity Insurance and had paid premiums faithfully for years. When the at-fault driver's coverage fell short, she turned to her own policy. Acuity's response was to offer $250,000, roughly 16 percent of its $1.5 million policy limit, and hold that position.
TSR Injury Law partners Rich Ruohonen and Chuck Slane took the case to trial before a Minnesota jury. Ruohonen's trial theme focused on perseverance: his client had not given up after her husband's death, had not given up after the crash, and had not given up when her insurer refused to honor its coverage. The jury returned a verdict of $2.1 million, exceeding the policy limit by $600,000.
The result earned Ruohonen his sixth Minnesota Lawyer Attorneys of the Year recognition, announced in February 2025 for work performed in 2024. No reduction or remittitur has been reported.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from TSR Injury Law
All TSR Injury Law proven verdicts →A Hennepin County jury awarded $6 million after a drop-in daycare at Grand Casino Mille Lacs left a three-year-old boy unsupervised for roughly 90 minutes while an older child physically and sexually assaulted him.
A 53-year-old nurse rear-ended by a semi-truck on Highway 94 suffered a mild traumatic brain injury that cut her working capacity in half, and a three-attorney arbitration panel awarded her $3,041,784 after four years of litigation.
A 91-year-old woman lost her leg in a car accident where fault was admitted immediately, but American Family Insurance delayed paying her claim for months; a Minnesota jury awarded $2.2 million after the insurer's repeated low offers.
Related car accident verdicts
On December 7, 2021, a Nueces County jury in Corpus Christi returned $1.04 billion in actual damages and $300 billion in exemplary damages, about $301.04 billion in total, against Beer Belly's Sports Bar and its owner for overserving a driver who killed Tamra Kay Kindred, 59, and her 16-year-old granddaughter in a 2017 crash. It was reported as the largest jury verdict ever recorded, and it was built to be symbolic: the bar had closed in 2019, Texas does not require bars to carry liquor liability insurance, and the family and its lawyers said openly that they expected to recover nothing and sought the number as a public statement against drunk driving. John Flood of Flood Trial Lawyers was lead counsel, with Sico, Hoelscher & Harris LLP as co-counsel; Craig Sico delivered the closing argument that asked jurors to decide how loudly their voice would be heard.
An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.
A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.
A Harris County jury awarded Mary Johnson $557 million against Union Pacific for a 2016 Houston train strike that cost her a leg, several fingers, and left her with a brain injury, a figure the trial court later cut and an appeals court reversed for a new trial.