Largest Personal Injury Recoveries Confirmed Paid of 2020
Personal injury results from 2020, nationwide where the record shows the money was paid, or the defendant is an insurer or institution that pays, ranked by amount.
- $125 millionSettlementPaid
$125 Million Settlement for Lawyer Paralyzed by Falling Utility Pole at a Union City Bus Stop
A 43-year-old utility pole that Verizon had been told to remove in 1999 snapped and fell on attorney Maria Moser Meister at a Union City bus stop in 2017, leaving her with a severe brain injury and paralysis. In May 2020 a New Jersey judge approved a $125 million settlement, reported as the largest personal injury settlement in state history.
After trial: This was a pre-trial settlement, not a jury verdict. Verizon agreed to pay $125 million total, $118,275,000 to Maria Meister and $7 million to her husband, before the case went to trial, and an Essex County Superior Court judge approved it at a friendly hearing in May 2020.
Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman, LLC2020 · Superior Court of New Jersey, Essex CountyRead the full story → - $6.8 millionSettlementPaid
Missed Appendicitis Diagnosis at Albuquerque Clinic Leads to $6.8 Million Federal Settlement
In December 2015, a physician at First Choice Community Healthcare in Albuquerque examined a 14-year-old boy for stomach pain and fever but ordered no laboratory or imaging tests. His appendix ruptured two days later, and the septic shock that followed caused a hypoxic brain injury and acute kidney injury that left him permanently disabled after eight months in the hospital. Because the federally funded clinic's staff are treated as federal employees, the family sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico. The case settled for $6.8 million in 2020, with most of the money placed in a fund for the boy's future medical care. Robert C. Gutierrez of Will Ferguson & Associates signed the complaint as an attorney of record for the family, alongside Kathryn L. Eaton of Eaton & Eaton Law PC.
After trial: This was an FTCA claim against the United States, paid from federal funds rather than a private insurance policy or the clinic's own assets, so collectability is not in question. Most of the $6.8 million was structured into a fund for the boy's future medical care rather than disbursed as a lump sum.
Will Ferguson & Associates2020 · U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico (Albuquerque)Read the full story → - $3 millionSettlementPaid
Family of Journalist Who Died Hours After Childbirth Settles Harlem Hospital Malpractice Case for $3 Million
Amy Lam, a 34-year-old journalist, died roughly 11 hours after giving birth at home in West Harlem on August 1, 2016, after she was taken to Harlem Hospital Center because her placenta had not been expelled. At least five physicians treated her over about 10 hours, she received more than 20 blood transfusions, and her aorta dissected and ruptured in the operating room, leaving her with no blood volume. Her family, represented by medical malpractice attorney Susan Karten, sued in 2017, naming Harlem Hospital, New York City Health + Hospitals and five physicians, including Dr. Thomas J. Byrne, who performed a hysterectomy on Lam in the hours before her death. Attorneys for the hospital wrote in court records that what happened to her was a rare and unforeseeable lethal event, while Karten and her experts argued that her life could have been saved had the doctors moved sooner to find the source of the bleeding. The case settled for $3 million in 2020, with New York City Health + Hospitals as the only settling defendant.
After trial: Settled in 2020 for $3 million, paid by New York City Health + Hospitals, with no trial and no appeal. The individual physicians named in the complaint were not part of the settlement.
Susan M. Karten & Associates, LLP2020 · New York State Supreme Court, New York City, NYRead the full story →
61 results, largest first
Frantz Law Group, representing roughly 5,000 victims, helped negotiate a $13.5 billion PG&E bankruptcy settlement covering tens of thousands of survivors and families from the 2015 Butte, 2017 North Bay, and 2018 Camp wildfires.
As co-lead counsel in the federal Roundup multidistrict litigation and the first firm to sue Monsanto in 2015, Weitz and Luxenberg helped negotiate a $10.9 billion settlement resolving approximately 125,000 non-Hodgkin lymphoma claims against Bayer-owned Monsanto.
Court-appointed Chair Lead Counsel Peter Prieto of Podhurst Orseck coordinated the nation's largest automotive defect MDL, securing more than $1.5 billion in settlements from seven automakers for tens of millions of vehicle owners harmed by defective Takata airbag inflators.
Steven Marks and Kristina Infante of Podhurst Orseck secured a combined $844 million in wrongful-death judgments for 43 families of passengers killed when LaMia Flight 2933 crashed near Medellin, Colombia, in November 2016, killing 71 of the 77 people aboard.
Kevin Boyle of the firm served as one of three plaintiffs' co-lead counsel in the $800 million settlement with MGM Resorts for victims of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting at Mandalay Bay.
Hunter Shkolnik of Napoli Shkolnik served as court-appointed co-liaison counsel for individual plaintiffs in the consolidated federal Flint water litigation, which produced a $600 million settlement from the State of Michigan in 2020.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
A 43-year-old utility pole that Verizon had been told to remove in 1999 snapped and fell on attorney Maria Moser Meister at a Union City bus stop in 2017, leaving her with a severe brain injury and paralysis. In May 2020 a New Jersey judge approved a $125 million settlement, reported as the largest personal injury settlement in state history.
As court-appointed lead plaintiffs' counsel, Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis negotiated the $117.5 million settlement resolving claims from Yahoo's 2013-2016 data breaches, the largest theft of personal data in history, touching roughly 3 billion accounts worldwide. Judge Lucy Koh approved the fund in 2020 after rejecting an earlier version as inadequate.
CohenMalad recovered $66.5 million on behalf of 262 patients who alleged that Dr. Arvind Gandhi and Cardiology Associates of Northwest Indiana implanted pacemakers and defibrillators and performed open-heart surgeries that were never medically necessary.
Roughly 700,000 Texas auto insurance policyholders shared a $52 million class settlement after a federal lawsuit showed Farmers Group charged long-term customers higher premiums than new customers for coverage that was functionally identical.
A federal jury in Columbus found that DuPont's C-8 contamination caused Travis Abbott's testicular cancer and awarded him and his wife $50 million. After the trial court applied Ohio's cap on his wife's loss-of-consortium damages, the enforceable judgment came to about $40.3 million, which the Sixth Circuit later affirmed.
Alan Feldman of Feldman Shepherd secured a $46 million settlement against IKEA on behalf of the family of a 2-year-old boy crushed by a MALM dresser in California, reported at the time as the largest child wrongful-death settlement in U.S. history.
Geoff McDonald and co-counsel represented roughly 7,600 universal life policyholders hit with steep cost-of-insurance increases by Banner Life and William Penn, securing a $22.5 million cash fund inside a settlement the court valued at more than $40 million.
A Clark County jury returned $38,625,000 against the owner of a Las Vegas apartment complex after National Guard Specialist Dylan Salazar was shot to death in its parking lot, the second-largest wrongful death verdict in the country in 2020.
A Racine County jury found Hyundai's driver-seat and head-restraint design defective and awarded Edward and Susan Vanderventer $38.1 million, the largest single-plaintiff compensatory verdict in Wisconsin history, later upheld on appeal.
Mary Alexander served as lead plaintiffs' counsel representing 13 of the victim families in litigation against the City of Oakland over the December 2016 Ghost Ship warehouse fire, which killed 36 people, securing a $32.7 million settlement covering 32 families and a survivor.
A Madera County jury deliberated for one hour before awarding $21,513,000 to an 18-year-old farm laborer left partially paralyzed after the van he was riding in was rear-ended at a railroad crossing.
A Missouri federal jury awarded Mary Bayes $21 million after her Biomet M2a-Magnum metal-on-metal hip implant failed catastrophically, requiring seven revision surgeries and leaving her with permanently constrained hip function.
Melissa Newton, a 36-year-old mother of three, was killed in May 2019 when real estate broker Scott Gragson crashed his Range Rover while drunk in The Ridges, a gated Las Vegas community. Settlement documents filed in her family's wrongful-death suit put the payout at $21 million, with $12.8 million coming from Gragson personally and $8.2 million from his insurer. Gragson pleaded guilty to DUI causing death and DUI causing substantial bodily harm.
William H. Murphy Jr. secured a $20 million settlement for the family of William Howard Green, a 43-year-old father shot six times by a Prince George's County officer while handcuffed in the front seat of a patrol car, at the time the largest such settlement ever paid by a Maryland local government.
A Los Angeles jury awarded $18 million after finding malice when a driver struck two pedestrians in a Calabasas crosswalk, killing the mother, and then moved the victims and gave misleading statements to police to alter the appearance of the scene.
Scott Busch was crossing a Portland crosswalk with the right-of-way when a McInnis Waste Systems garbage truck struck him and severed his leg; a jury awarded $13.5 million, and the Oregon Supreme Court struck down the state's $500,000 noneconomic damages cap as applied to his case.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.