Largest Personal Injury Settlements of 2013

Ellen Relkin served as court-appointed co-lead plaintiffs counsel in the DePuy ASR hip implant MDL, helping negotiate a $2.5 billion settlement for roughly 8,000 patients who required revision surgery after the metal-on-metal device failed.

A Polk County jury awarded $110 million in compensatory damages and $1 billion in punitive damages over the death of 69-year-old Arlene Townsend, who fell 17 times at the Auburndale Oaks Healthcare Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case against Trans Healthcare entities that had defaulted, stopped defending, and were already insolvent and in receivership, which is why the judgment was largely symbolic and the estate ultimately recovered only a small share of a later multi-estate settlement.

A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.

An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.

A nearly decade-long securities fraud class action against Fannie Mae and its former auditor KPMG, brought on behalf of Ohio pension funds holding millions in Fannie Mae stock, settled for $153 million after Bill Markovits served as lead counsel for the class.

A Los Angeles County jury awarded $150,750,000 against truck driver Rudolph Ortiz and Bhandal Bros. Trucking for a girl who was orphaned when her family's SUV struck an 18-wheeler parked without lights on the shoulder of the 210 Freeway and caught fire, killing her parents and eldest brother. Brian Brandt tried the case for the plaintiff. The verdict did not stand: on February 3, 2014, Judge Marc Marmaro granted the defense a new trial, finding the award excessive, and the case then settled in April 2014 on confidential terms before any retrial.

A unanimous Dimmit County jury awarded $281 million, including $181 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages, to the family of Carlos Aguilar, a 31-year-old Army veteran and father of seven killed when a drive shaft broke off a Heckmann Water Resources 18-wheeler and crashed through the windshield of the pickup he was riding in. Gene S. Hagood of Alvin tried the case with Laredo co-counsel John R. Solis and Jose Luis Castillo. The trial court reduced the judgment to $163.8 million and then to $105.2 million on post-trial motions, and in July 2014 the case settled on confidential terms, with parent company Nuverra disclosing it funded $5.5 million of the settlement alongside an undisclosed insurer payment.

Joel Feller and Matt Casey of Ross Feller Casey represented seven of the 26 survivors who reached a global civil settlement with Penn State University totaling $59.7 million, the largest single-firm contingent in the proceedings.

A New Mexico jury awarded $58.5 million, believed at the time to be the state's largest truck verdict, to the family of Kevin Udy, a mechanical engineer killed in 2010 when a tanker truck turned into his path on a highway near Carlsbad.

CohenMalad partner David Cutshaw co-led a $55 million Indiana Patient's Compensation Fund settlement for 282 patients who underwent unnecessary or damaging sinus surgeries performed by Dr. Mark Weinberger, a Merrillville ENT who later fled the country and was found hiding in the Italian Alps.

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.

A federal jury awarded Cara Munn $41.7 million after she contracted tick-borne encephalitis on a school-sponsored trip to China and lost the ability to speak, and the Connecticut Supreme Court later held that schools can owe students a duty to warn about and protect against insect-borne disease on trips abroad.

On July 26, 2007, a 6-year-old boy drowned in his family's backyard pool in Greenwich when his arm was sucked into a wall drain feeding a spillover spa. Connecticut had required dual drains and a vacuum-release device since 2004, a year before the pool was permitted, and the builder had installed neither. The pool company's president pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide in 2011, the first such prosecution of a pool builder in the country. By May 2013 the parents, Brian and Karen Cohn, had settled with all nine defendants for a combined $40 million, all of it directed to the water-safety foundation they created in their son's name.

Conor Kelly and Melinda Derish proved that a Bakersfield hospitalist never examined Kody Myrick or ordered a neurology consult, letting a treatable basilar-artery stroke destroy his brain stem, and a San Francisco jury fixed his damages at $38.6 million.

A Chittenden County jury returned $43,101,162 against Johnson Controls, the seat manufacturer, after a Vermont woman was left with a catastrophic spinal-cord injury when the single-sided recliner mechanism in her car seat collapsed during a rear-end collision she should have survived. The trial court entered final judgment at $36,948,123, and the appeal was later dismissed by stipulation.

Goldberg & Rosen attorneys Judd and Brett Rosen secured a $35 million jury verdict against drunk driver Thomas Cypress, whose blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit when he killed retired Maryland couple Robert and Paulette Kirkpatrick on Tamiami Trail in 2009, producing what was at the time the largest damages award for surviving adult children in Florida history.

A Sacramento County jury awarded $34,921,215 to Debra Hackett and her husband after a Silva Trucking tractor-trailer jackknifed on Highway 12 and left Debra paralyzed from the waist down with a traumatic brain injury.

A Manhattan jury returned a $190 million consolidated verdict against boiler manufacturers Cleaver-Brooks and Burnham LLC on behalf of five tri-state tradesmen who developed mesothelioma from occupational asbestos exposure, setting a record as the largest consolidated asbestos verdict in New York history.

Cohen & Malad's Irwin Levin secured a $30 million class action settlement in 2013 after proving the Indiana Bureau of Motor Vehicles had been charging drivers as much as $6 too much per license for six years.

A jury in the Stamford-Norwalk Judicial District awarded Mary Margaret Farren $28.6 million after finding that her former husband, David Farren, attacked her with a hammer and a knife during their divorce proceedings, leaving her with severe and permanent injuries.

A Laclede County jury awarded Philip Berger, a Copeland Scroll Compressors worker, $5 million in compensatory and $23 million in punitive damages after he developed hypersensitivity pneumonitis from contaminated cooling fluid. The trial court later granted a new trial on damages, and the Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed that order in 2016, so the verdict did not stand.

Antonio Steward, a 17-year-old student, was sitting on a stairwell outside his family's Fontana apartment at 12:30 a.m. on August 26, 2006, when a Crips gang member from a nearby group of ten men drinking and partying in violation of the complex rules shot him nine times. The Stratus Security guard on duty had spoken to the group about a noise complaint and then walked to his car to write a report. Gangrene cost Steward both legs above the knee that day, and he went through 56 more surgeries that removed 40 percent of his stomach. On June 13, 2013, after a trifurcated trial, a San Bernardino County jury found the security companies and their owners 49 percent at fault and set his damages at $55,151,509.72; after apportionment under California's several-liability rule he recovers $27,024,239.76.

A Hampton jury awarded Christopher Denton $25 million after a cardiologist read his cardiac test results as normal, diagnosed a minor heart infection, and sent him home on over-the-counter medication, months before Denton suffered a massive heart attack that left him functioning with roughly half his cardiac capacity.

GJEL attorney Luke Ellis secured a then-record $20.452 million settlement for an 18-year-old who lost her left leg when an AC Transit bus struck her in Montclair, California, the largest individual recovery against any bus company in California history.