$1.1 Million Verdict After Teen With Learner's Permit T-Bones Woman, Who Needs Three Neck Surgeries
Won by TSR Injury Law.
A TSR Injury Law trial team secured a $1.1 million jury verdict for a woman who suffered three cervical surgeries after a 16-year-old driving on only a learner's permit struck her car broadside.
What happened
The collision happened when a 16-year-old, holding only a learner's permit and driving without the required adult supervision, ran into the plaintiff's vehicle in a T-bone impact. The force of the crash left her with serious cervical injuries that would require three separate surgical procedures to address.
Before trial, the defense's position was that she was not as injured as she claimed. Their medical expert pointed to her history of chronic neck problems, arguing the surgeries were rooted in a preexisting condition rather than the crash itself.
The defense made an offer of $150,000 to settle. She turned it down.
TSR Injury Law partners Rich Ruohonen and Jenny Olson took the case to a jury. At trial, Ruohonen methodically cross-examined the defense's medical expert, drawing out the weaknesses in the preexisting-condition theory. Ruohonen later described it as one of the best cross-examinations of his career.
The jury sided with the plaintiff and returned a verdict of $1.1 million, more than seven times the defense's settlement offer. The result was one of two seven-figure verdicts Ruohonen secured within a two-month span in 2024, a year in which he was named a Minnesota Lawyer Attorney of the Year for the sixth time.
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.
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.
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.