Largest Personal Injury Settlements of 2014

A Pensacola jury awarded Cynthia Robinson $23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds over the 1996 lung cancer death of her 36-year-old husband, the largest single-plaintiff award of Florida's Engle tobacco litigation, but the trial judge called the number constitutionally excessive, an appeals court ordered a full retrial over improper closing arguments, and a second jury returned a complete defense verdict in 2019, so the estate ultimately collected nothing.

On Nov. 3, 2014, Howmedica Osteonics, doing business as Stryker Orthopaedics, settled the claims of about 3,000 people who had surgery to remove recalled Rejuvenate and ABG II modular hip stems. The deal was announced in the Bergen County courthouse and paired with a parallel proceeding in the federal MDL in Minnesota. It sets a base award per failed implant plus enhancements for complications, with no fixed fund, and was expected to pay out more than $1 billion. Thomas Anapol of Anapol Schwartz sat on the court-appointed Plaintiff Steering Committee for the New Jersey litigation.

Boehringer Ingelheim agreed to pay $650 million in May 2014 to resolve approximately 4,000 federal lawsuits claiming the blood thinner Pradaxa caused life-threatening bleeding injuries without adequate warnings, in an MDL presided over by Judge David Herndon in the Southern District of Illinois where the court appointed TorHoerman Law's Tor Hoerman as one of five plaintiffs' co-lead counsel.

Jonathan Schochor served as lead attorney for more than 8,000 women who reached a $190 million class-action settlement against Johns Hopkins Hospital after gynecologist Dr. Nikita Levy secretly filmed patients during examinations over a 25-year career.

Thomas Moore won a $172 million jury verdict in Bronx Supreme Court for a woman left with catastrophic brain damage after FDNY EMTs responded to her 1998 cardiac arrest without essential equipment and advised her family to wait for a second ambulance instead of transporting her immediately.

A Montgomery County jury awarded the estate of Ellen Gregory Robb $124.26 million in November 2014 against her husband, a former Penn economics professor who killed her in 2006 and pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter. Of the total, $100 million was punitive damages. The proceeds were for the couple's daughter, the estate's beneficiary. The award stood after Robb's post-trial challenge, though collection was limited to his retirement and investment assets.

A New Mexico jury found German device maker Biotronik and its sales representative liable for conspiring with a Las Cruces cardiologist and a hospital to implant medically unnecessary pacemakers in dozens of patients for profit.

In early 2014, Biomet agreed to pay at least $56 million to settle about 1,000 federal lawsuits over its M2a 38 and M2a Magnum metal-on-metal hip implants, consolidated in the Northern District of Indiana. Qualifying patients who had the device revised received a base award of $200,000, adjusted by individual factors. Thomas Anapol was court-appointed Co-Lead Counsel with W. Mark Lanier and signed the agreement for the Plaintiffs' Executive Committee. The figure covers many unrelated plaintiffs, is a reported minimum rather than a final total, and is not itemized by person.

A Philadelphia jury found that a defectively designed seat belt in a 1999 Acura Integra left driver Carlos Martinez a quadriplegic after a rollover on Interstate 70 near Baltimore, and awarded him and his wife $55,325,714. Stewart J. Eisenberg and Daniel J. Sherry Jr., then of Eisenberg, Rothweiler, Winkler, Eisenberg & Jeck (now Eisenberg Winkler Jeck Schwartz Schoenhaus & Sherry), tried the case against Honda. The trial court denied Honda's post-trial motions and entered judgment on the full verdict plus $2,066,002 in delay damages, a molded judgment of $57,391,716. Honda appealed, arguing that a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision handed down while its post-trial motion was pending had rewritten the state's products liability standard. On April 19, 2017, the Pennsylvania Superior Court rejected every argument Honda raised and affirmed.

A Philadelphia jury returned a $45 million verdict in favor of Tamara Breeden, a mentally disabled woman who was confined, abused, and robbed of her Social Security benefits for more than a decade by Linda Ann Weston and two associates.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $39 million to the widow of a highway paving inspector struck and killed on Interstate 271 after the paving contractor failed to follow its court-approved safety plan.

Murphy Falcon and Murphy served as lead class counsel in a $37 million settlement on behalf of 273 patients who underwent medically unnecessary cardiac stent procedures performed by Dr. Mark Midei at St. Joseph Medical Center in Towson, Maryland.

Paul Pennock, now head of mass torts at Morgan & Morgan, then co-lead counsel of the federal Actos MDL at Weitz & Luxenberg, helped try the bellwether case that produced a $9 billion punitive verdict against Takeda and Eli Lilly for hiding the diabetes drug's bladder cancer risk. The award was later cut to about $36.9 million, but the verdict drove Takeda to a $2.4 billion global settlement in 2015.

A Louisiana federal jury awarded Terrence Allen $9 billion in punitive damages against Takeda and Eli Lilly after finding they hid Actos's bladder cancer risk for years, with W. Mark Lanier serving as lead trial counsel in the first federal bellwether trial of the massive MDL.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded a combined $42.4 million in October 2014 to Joshua Rojas ($34.6 million) and Kiara Torres ($7.8 million), two teenage passengers who suffered brain injuries when the car they were riding in collided with a Concrete Designs Inc. dump truck; Andy Young, now of The Law Firm for Truck Safety, served as trial counsel, and in 2019 Ohio's Eighth District affirmed the verdicts while vacating a later prejudgment interest award.

A federal jury in Jacksonville found for Judith Berger, a forty-year smoker with end-stage COPD, on all claims against Philip Morris USA in September 2014. It awarded $6,250,000 in compensatory damages and $20,760,000.14 in punitive damages. The trial court set aside the fraud claims and the punitive award, but the Eleventh Circuit reinstated them in 2018 and held in 2021 that the punitive award was not unconstitutionally excessive.

A jury awarded $26,255,367 to Maryam Hedayati after a driver ran a red light and struck her in a marked crosswalk, leaving her with a severed leg, a shattered leg, and catastrophic brain trauma.

A Milwaukee County jury awarded $25.3 million after emergency room providers failed to tell Ascaris Mayo that her symptoms could mean a Strep A infection, an omission that cost her all four limbs, though the Wisconsin Supreme Court later reinstated the state's $750,000 cap on noneconomic damages.

A Vermont jury awarded $22.5 million, the second-largest verdict in state history at the time, to a Maine utility lineman who lost both legs below the knee after an ungrounded, defectively installed air-break switch at a Richford substation released a 5,000-degree electrical arc through his body.

Billy Moyle, 24, was driving behind a Mack concrete truck on US Highway 75 near Nebraska City on Halloween 2012. The truck moved into the left turn lane and then turned right across his path, running his pickup off the road. He suffered a broken vertebra and a partially severed spinal cord.

A Monterey County jury returned an $18.7 million verdict against Caltrans and a trucking company after finding the state had ignored three decades of its own data showing that the left-turn configuration on Highway 156 made the road one of California's most dangerous corridors.

A Barren County jury awarded $18.27 million after finding that nurses at T.J. Samson Community Hospital disregarded the treating obstetrician's standing Pitocin orders during a 2007 delivery, depriving newborn Tristan Hamilton of oxygen and leaving him with spastic quadriplegia.

A Suffolk Superior Court jury awarded $16.7 million after a Brigham and Women's Hospital radiologist read a 2006 chest X-ray as normal, missing a visible lung nodule that would develop into terminal cancer within 13 months.

Gayle Blatt of Casey Gerry served on the plaintiffs' leadership committee in the consolidated MDL arising from the 2011 hack of Sony's PlayStation Network, which exposed the personal data of approximately 77 million accounts, resulting in a $15 million class settlement.