Top Individual Personal Injury Verdicts and Settlements of 2009

A Jefferson County bench trial ended in a $2.88 billion judgment against former HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy for orchestrating an accounting fraud that inflated the company's reported earnings by $2.6 billion over six years.

A Galveston federal jury awarded $100 million to ten contract workers who suffered toxic exposure to carbon disulfide at BP's Texas City refinery in April 2007, though the punitive damages were later vacated by the trial judge.

A DeKalb County jury awarded $40 million to Jessica Mundy and her husband after her 2004 Ford Explorer spontaneously shifted from park into reverse, striking and running over her, after the trial team showed Ford had known about the 'false park' transmission defect for decades.

A Philadelphia jury awarded Donna Kendall $6.3 million in compensatory damages and $28 million in punitive damages after finding that Wyeth's Prempro hormone-replacement drug caused her breast cancer and the double mastectomy that followed; the Pennsylvania Superior Court restored the full punitive award in 2012 after the trial judge had cut it to $1 million.

A Cook County jury awarded commuter Renea Poppel $29.6 million after a Metra Rock Island train took a 10 mph crossover at 69 mph and derailed, the largest Illinois verdict for one person injured in a mass-transit crash.

A Harris County jury awarded about $21 million to Santiago Arias, a construction worker paralyzed from the chest down after falling roughly 20 feet at a Houston job site where his employer had provided no fall-protection equipment or safety training.

Joseph Bruno served as Liaison Counsel in the federal class action that secured a $20.2 million settlement from the Orleans, East Jefferson, and Lake Borgne Basin levee districts for negligent levee maintenance that contributed to catastrophic flooding during Hurricane Katrina.

A federal jury awarded roughly $18.3 million to musician Dax Pierson after a defective seat restraint in a 2005 Ford passenger van separated during a rollover, driving his head into the roof and leaving him paralyzed from the chest down.

A Dallas County jury awarded $17.5 million to David Fitzgerald, a former maintenance worker who lost both arms and both legs after his infectious disease physician administered eight ineffective antibiotics while never prescribing the one drug that would have stopped his MRSA infection.

A six-year-old girl suffered cardiac arrest and permanent brain damage when a surgeon used a morcellator he had never operated during a routine spleen removal, and the case settled for $17.3 million, the largest sum reported to the Wisconsin Law Journal in 2009.

Richard Adler and co-counsel Mike Nelson secured a $14.6 million settlement for Zackery Lystedt, a 13-year-old Tahoma Junior High football player left with catastrophic brain damage after coaches returned him to play following a concussion in October 2006.

A Tulare County jury awarded $13,284,363 to a nineteen-year-old Farmersville woman who suffered permanent traumatic brain injury and hemiparesis when a multi-vehicle chain-reaction crash sent an oncoming car into her lane.

A Middlesex County jury found that a Perth Amboy oral surgeon committed malpractice by extracting a 21-year-old man's wisdom teeth without first obtaining medical clearance, despite knowing the patient had a hereditary condition that made routine dental trauma dangerous. Twelve hours after the August 2005 surgery, the patient's throat swelled shut and he suffocated. The jury cleared the referring family dentist and awarded the man's family more than $11 million against the oral surgeon. David Mazie of Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman represented the family at trial.

Mack Pitts was working as a spotter on the international terminal project at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on June 14, 2007 when a dump truck driven by a coworker backed over him after bypassing the site's safety rules. His children and estate sued the truck's owner, A & G Trucking, Inc., and the driver, Sarah Okoro, in the State Court of DeKalb County. On October 23, 2009, a jury returned a $5,470,000 verdict for the family. A & G Trucking appealed on a single evidentiary issue, and the Georgia Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full on November 5, 2010. A related Georgia Supreme Court opinion later confirmed that A & G Trucking could not pay the judgment.

Following a $24 million wrongful-death jury verdict, Anoka County District Court Judge Ellen Maas imposed more than $4.2 million in additional sanctions against BNSF Railway for destroying evidence, fabricating records, and obstructing the investigation of a crash that killed four young people.

A Boise jury awarded more than $1.66 million to a commercial tenant who suffered permanent brain damage after falling on improperly installed stairs, a verdict affirmed on appeal by the Idaho Supreme Court.

A Tucson jury awarded $1.5 million to a woman who slipped on water leaking from a BCI Coca-Cola refrigerator at a grocery store, after the bottling company rejected a $150,000 settlement offer.

A Jefferson County jury awarded $1,200,626 to a Fort Knox Staff Sergeant whose left arm was permanently impaired after an AmeriGas propane delivery truck drifted into his lane and clipped his motorcycle on Blevins Gap Road in September 2005.

A woman came to the Wetzel County Hospital emergency room in 2001 and came under the care of a surgeon who, the estate proved, failed to perform the exploratory surgery that would have found and corrected her intra-abdominal condition. She went into shock and died the next day. The jury awarded $4 million. She was paid $1,162,741.60.

A 16-year-old student athlete passed out while exercising on a treadmill at IMG Academies' Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, and died of cardiac arrest. His family sued IMG Academies, the academy's staff physician and its nurse, claiming they failed to adequately monitor and treat his heart condition. After a 15-day trial in Manatee County in October 2009, a jury awarded $1.5 million, $500,000 for past damages and $1,000,000 for future damages, then apportioned fault 18 percent each to IMG Academies, the physician and the nurse, and 46 percent to the boy's mother, who brought the claim. That split cut what the three defendants owed to 54 percent of the award. Attorneys from what was then Wilkes & McHugh, P.A., now Wilkes & Associates, P.A., tried the case for the family.

A federal jury found that a North Dakota debt-collection law firm violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by filing and pursuing a credit card lawsuit it knew was barred by Montana's statute of limitations, awarding Timothy McCollough $311,000 in statutory, emotional distress, and punitive damages.

In a landmark 2009 bellwether trial, U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval held the Army Corps of Engineers liable for negligent maintenance of the MRGO shipping channel, awarding roughly $719,000 to plaintiffs whose homes were destroyed when Hurricane Katrina surge poured through the corridor into St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward.

Michael Slack secured a confidential settlement against Robinson Helicopter after defective aluminum fuel tanks on an R-44 ruptured in a 2006 Fredericksburg, Texas crash and fire that killed the pilot and two passengers, with the deal requiring Robinson to retrofit its entire fleet with crash-resistant bladder tanks.