Top Personal Injury Recoveries Confirmed Paid of 2022
Personal injury results from 2022, nationwide where the record shows the money was paid, or the defendant is an insurer or institution that pays, ranked by amount.
- $150 millionSettlementPaid
Family of Two Children Killed in I-30 Truck Fire Settles With Werner for $150 Million
Before dawn on May 24, 2020, a Werner Enterprises tractor-trailer struck the rear of a passenger car stopped in a live lane of Interstate 30 near Sulphur Springs, Texas, with two children, ages 7 and 9, inside. The car caught fire and both children died. Their parents sued Werner and its driver, alleging negligent and grossly negligent operation of the tractor-trailer, negligent hiring, training, and supervision of the driver, and negligent entrustment of the truck. In July 2022, Werner announced it had agreed to pay $150 million to resolve the case without a trial, funded by the company and its insurance carriers. Goudarzi & Young, through founding partner Brent Goudarzi, represented the family.
After trial: Pre-trial settlement, so there was no verdict to appeal. Werner's SEC filing states the $150 million was funded by the company and its insurance carriers.
Goudarzi & Young, L.L.P.2022 · Interstate 30 near Sulphur Springs, Hopkins County, Texas (crash site; the case settled before trial and the filing court is not named in available sources)Read the full story → - $30 millionVerdictPaid
Newton County Jury Awards Indiana Farmer $30 Million After Semi Hits His Tractor on U.S. 41
Daniel Nelson, a farmer from Lake Village, Indiana, was driving his tractor north on U.S. 41 in Newton County on the morning of May 16, 2019, when a semitrailer that failed to slow down or change lanes struck it and threw him from the seat. He suffered head and brain injuries, a fractured pelvis and five broken ribs. Nelson and his wife, Diana, sued the trucking company, its customer and the driver, and after the case bounced between federal and state court on jurisdictional grounds, it was tried over seven days in Newton County Superior Court. On February 16, 2022, the jury deliberated about two and a half hours before awarding $25 million to Daniel Nelson and $5 million to Diana Nelson, a $30 million verdict that stood.
After trial: Counsel told The Times of Northwest Indiana that insurance would cover the verdict amount, which is the only public indication of payment; no satisfaction of judgment is available in an online record we could reach. No appeal of the verdict appears in Indiana appellate records and no appellate decision in the case has been published.
Schafer & Schafer LLP2022 · Newton County Superior Court, Kentland, Indiana (Cause No. 56D01-1911-CT-1189)Read the full story → - $12 millionSettlementPaid
City of Rochester Settles Daniel Prude Wrongful Death Suit for $12 Million
Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Rochester man in the middle of a mental health crisis, died in March 2020 after police officers put a spit hood over his head and held him face down on the pavement until he stopped breathing. The medical examiner ruled the death a homicide from asphyxia during restraint, though a state grand jury declined to indict the officers. Elliot D. Shields of Roth & Roth, LLP filed the family's federal civil rights suit against the City of Rochester in September 2020. On October 6, 2022, a federal judge approved a $12 million settlement, split evenly between pain-and-suffering and wrongful death claims, with the city admitting no liability.
After trial: Settlement approved by a federal judge on October 6, 2022 and funded by the City of Rochester, which denied liability. Because the case ended in a settlement, there was no judgment to appeal.
Roth & Roth, LLP2022 · U.S. District Court for the Western District of New YorkRead the full story → - $9.3 millionPaid
Jury Awards Lincoln Railcar Repairer $9.3 Million After BNSF Crane Accident Left Him With Spine Injuries
Curt Thege, a BNSF carman at the Havelock Car Shop in Lincoln, was thrown from a scissor lift in June 2019 when an overhead crane hoist moved higher than the operator intended. BNSF admitted it breached its duty of care under the Federal Employers' Liability Act, leaving the jury to decide damages. After a five-day trial the jury returned $9,333,016, and on December 15, 2022 the court entered a $9,295,988.96 judgment after subtracting benefits payments the plaintiff conceded.
After trial: The court cut the judgment only by $37,027.04 in Railroad Retirement Board and sickness benefits that the plaintiff conceded, and refused to remit the jury's valuation. BNSF did not appeal, and a satisfaction of judgment was filed in January 2023.
- $9 millionSettlementPaid
$9 Million Settlement, Connecticut's Largest to One Person, for Videotaped Abuse at Forensic Hospital
W.S., a profoundly mentally ill man committed to Whiting Forensic Hospital in Middletown, Connecticut since 1995, was kicked, hit, doused with liquids, pelted with food, made to wear a diaper on his head and sexually humiliated by the nurses and aides paid to care for him. Hospital cameras captured more than 50 incidents in 24 days in early 2017. Nearly 40 employees were fired, ten were arrested, nine were convicted and eight went to prison. His brother and conservator sued the state in 2018, and in June 2022, after the legislature signed off, Superior Court Judge Barbara Bellis approved a $9 million settlement that his lawyer said was the largest the state had ever paid a single person. The state also waived more than $8 million in custody charges and agreed to keep him under constant video monitoring.
After trial: The $9,000,000 was approved by the legislature's Judiciary Committee in April 2022 and by Judge Barbara Bellis on June 28, 2022, and is paid by the State of Connecticut. The settlement also waived more than $8,000,000 in state custody charges and imposed ongoing video monitoring.
Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, P.C.2022 · Connecticut Superior Court, Bridgeport (Judge Barbara Bellis)Read the full story → - $8 millionSettlementPaid
$8 Million Settlement After Clinic Documented Signs of Abuse on Infant and Never Reported Them
Alexandria Orduna brought her son to a Brewer clinic repeatedly from the time he was four days old. Staff saw and documented red-flag signs of physical abuse and never told her and never reported it to the state, as Maine law requires. At about six and a half months old he was beaten so badly he nearly died. He is permanently blind and brain-injured.
After trial: Approved by the court and final at $8,000,000. A tentative $10,000,000 figure was announced in February 2022, but the settlement approved in August 2022 was $8,000,000.
- ~$5 millionVerdictReduced from $10.1 millionPaid
Dallas Jury Awards $10.1 Million After Hospital Delay Left Woman Paralyzed
A Dallas County jury found Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Flower Mound willfully and wantonly negligent for delaying treatment of a spinal epidural hemorrhage that left Judy 'Jessie' Adams a paraplegic, returning a verdict of $10,125,000 for Adams and her husband Richard on December 9, 2022. Jurors split fault 69 percent to the hospital, 30 percent to the physician who gave the steroid injection that triggered the bleeding, and 1 percent to his practice. Texas's cap on non-economic damages in health care liability claims cut the couple's non-economic recovery to $500,000, leaving a collectible total of roughly $5 million. The hospital appealed, and its own filing in the court of appeals says the parties reached a full and final settlement on May 31, 2023 and funded it before the appeal was dismissed on July 11, 2023, so the amount Adams ultimately received is not public. Michael Lyons, Christopher Carr, Michael Fechner and Stephen Higdon of Lyons & Simmons represented the Adamses at trial.
After trial: Reduced and settled. The trial court signed judgment on May 1, 2023, the hospital appealed, and the parties settled and funded the settlement on May 31, 2023; the appeal was dismissed July 11, 2023.
Lyons & Simmons, LLP2022 · 68th Judicial District Court, Dallas County, Texas (Case No. DC-20-17490)Read the full story → - $3 millionSettlementPaid
$3 Million Settlement for Unarmed 13-Year-Old With Autism Shot by Salt Lake City Officer After 911 Call
A Salt Lake City mother called 911 asking for help getting her autistic 13-year-old son to a hospital during a separation-anxiety crisis. An officer chased the unarmed boy over a fence and fired eleven shots from 15 to 20 feet away. Six hit him. The city paid $3 million, the largest such settlement in its history.
After trial: Settled and paid; final. This was a federal claim under 42 U.S.C.
- $2.4 millionVerdictPaid
$2.4 Million Verdict for Bowling Alley Worker Whose Hand Was Crushed by a Resort Employee's Ball
Amy Herzog worked at Jupiter Bowl in Kimball Junction. During a Park City Mountain Resort employee party in April 2019, a resort employee performed a 360-degree spin and released his ball into her lane while she was freeing a stuck ball from the gutter, crushing her left hand. Three surgeries left her with a permanently deformed hand that cannot form a fist. A Summit County jury found Vail Resorts 80 percent at fault and its employee 20 percent, awarded $2,402,000, and found the employee was acting within the scope of his employment. The trial judge later vacated the employer-liability finding and cut the award by 20 percent, but the Utah Court of Appeals reversed that ruling in 2025 and reinstated the full judgment.
After trial: Reinstated and final. The jury returned $2,402,000 in November 2022, the district court reduced the judgment in May 2023, and the Utah Court of Appeals reversed on May 15, 2025 and ordered the original judgment reinstated in full.
Christensen & Jensen, P.C.2022 · Third District Court, Summit County, UT (reinstated in full by the Utah Court of Appeals)Read the full story → - $1.25 millionSettlementPaid
$1.25 Million Settlement for Foster Child Assaulted While Unsupervised in Kansas Contractor's Office
A 13-year-old girl in Kansas foster care was sexually assaulted in 2018 while left unattended in the office of state contractor KVC Kansas, where an 18-year-old with a known history of sexually abusing others had also been placed. The Kansas Department for Children and Families and KVC each pointed at the other. A Wyandotte County District Court settlement requires the Kansas foster care system to pay $1.25 million.
After trial: The settlement was approved by the court on June 30, 2022, and no appeal was found. The sources describe the payment as owed by the state of Kansas.
All 2022 verdicts and settlements
145 results, largest first
A Gwinnett County jury awarded roughly $24 million in compensatory damages and $1.7 billion in punitive damages against Ford Motor Company for the 2014 rollover deaths of Melvin and Voncile Hill in a 2002 F-250, with James E. Butler Jr. of Butler Prather LLP as lead trial counsel; the Georgia Court of Appeals vacated the judgment in November 2024 and ordered a new trial, and Ford settled the case on confidential terms in September 2025 before a third trial could begin.
The families of 98 people killed in the June 2021 Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside, Florida, recovered over $1 billion through a class settlement run by a court-appointed Plaintiffs' Steering Committee, with final approval reached in under a year.
After nearly 30 years of litigation, Markovits Stock and DeMarco secured a $742 million-plus-interest settlement for approximately 23,000 Navistar retirees whose healthcare and life insurance benefits had been repeatedly reduced.
A federal jury found CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart liable for creating an opioid public nuisance in northeast Ohio, leading to a $650 million abatement judgment, the first of its kind against pharmacy chains in U.S. history.
A Miami federal court entered a roughly $440 million judgment against Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, and MSC for using port terminals Cuba confiscated in 1960, a result the Supreme Court reinstated by a vote of 8 to 1 in 2026.
A Cook County jury found Sterigenics and its corporate owners liable for Sue Kamuda's breast cancer from ethylene oxide emissions and awarded $363 million, then the largest individual-plaintiff verdict in Illinois history.
A class action filed in 2002 on behalf of roughly 400,000 residents across six north Alabama counties ended in a court-approved $300 million cleanup settlement requiring 3M and co-defendants to remediate PFAS contamination throughout the Tennessee River watershed.
A King County jury awarded $275 million to thirteen Sky Valley Education Center students and families who suffered neurological injuries from PCB-contaminated light fixtures manufactured by Monsanto.
A Dallas jury found Charter Communications liable for the December 2019 murder of 83-year-old customer Betty Jo McClain Thomas by Roy Holden Jr., a Spectrum field technician who had serviced her home the day before, and for forging her signature on an arbitration agreement after her death. The jury awarded $375 million in actual damages and $7 billion in punitive damages. The family then remitted the punitive award down to twice the compensatory damages, in line with the due-process ratio limits the U.S. Supreme Court set in State Farm v. Campbell, and the trial court entered judgment for $1.147 billion. The family later agreed to a further remittitur to $262 million rather than keep defending the larger figure on appeal. Charter then settled confidentially for less than that, funded by its liability insurance, while its appeal to the Fifth Court of Appeals was still pending, and the appeal was dismissed at Charter's own request.
In February 2022, a federal judge ordered the United States to pay $230 million to survivors and families of the 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooting after finding the Air Force 60 percent liable for failing to report the gunman's criminal history to the federal background check system.
Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis served as court-appointed co-lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation over Capital One's 2019 data breach, which exposed the personal information of roughly 98 million U.S. customers. The $190 million settlement won final approval in 2022 as one of the largest data breach recoveries in U.S. history.
A St. Louis jury awarded $28 million in compensatory damages and $149 million in punitive damages to Shannon Dugan, a New Jersey sheriff's deputy who was sexually assaulted by a Hyatt security guard who used his master key to enter her hotel room while she slept. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the full award in December 2024.
A DeKalb County jury awarded $160 million to the families of Ewell Ynoa and Giovan Diaz, two young men shot and killed at a 2017 rap concert at the Masquerade venue in Underground Atlanta, finding Sony Music Holdings failed to protect patrons at the show.
Before dawn on May 24, 2020, a Werner Enterprises tractor-trailer struck the rear of a passenger car stopped in a live lane of Interstate 30 near Sulphur Springs, Texas, with two children, ages 7 and 9, inside. The car caught fire and both children died. Their parents sued Werner and its driver, alleging negligent and grossly negligent operation of the tractor-trailer, negligent hiring, training, and supervision of the driver, and negligent entrustment of the truck. In July 2022, Werner announced it had agreed to pay $150 million to resolve the case without a trial, funded by the company and its insurance carriers. Goudarzi & Young, through founding partner Brent Goudarzi, represented the family.
Stuart Grossman, Neal Roth, and Alex Arteaga-Gomez of Grossman Roth Yaffa Cohen represented families in the $127.5 million federal settlement arising from the FBI's failure to follow up on a tip warning that Nikolas Cruz was planning a school shooting five weeks before the February 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre.
A Bibb County State Court jury awarded $118 million, including $90 million in punitive damages, to Joseph Cason Jr. and his mother Betty Gill after surveillance video showed care home employees striking the severely disabled man at least 69 times. The December 2022 verdict against the Total Care defendants was the largest in the court's history.
Walkup shareholder Michael A. Kelly served on the plaintiffs' leadership team that secured a $117 million settlement from former PG&E officers and directors over wildfires that ranked among the deadliest in California history.
A King County jury returned a $150 million verdict against two crane subcontractors whose safety failures caused the April 2019 South Lake Union crane collapse, which killed four people and injured three others.
A federal jury found General Motors liable for defective piston rings in its 5.3-liter Vortec V8 engines and awarded $102.6 million to a class of roughly 38,000 truck and SUV owners across three states.
A Johnson County, Iowa jury awarded the family of an infant identified in court records by the initials S.K. $97.4 million in March 2022, finding an OB-GYN clinic and a hospital equally responsible for a delivery gone wrong at Mercy Hospital in Iowa City in August 2018. The verdict, then the largest medical malpractice award in Iowa history, followed a 14-day trial before Judge Kevin McKeever of the Sixth Judicial District. Mercy Hospital's share was capped at $7 million under a pretrial agreement, which the hospital paid; court filings put the clinic's share of the judgment at more than $75.6 million. The clinic, Obstetric & Gynecologic Associates of Iowa City and Coralville, P.C., did not pay, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2022, saw that case dismissed the following April, and appealed. On November 8, 2024, the Iowa Supreme Court reversed the judgment against the clinic over an evidentiary error and ordered a new trial. Nothing currently stands against the clinic, and no new trial date has been reported.
A Miami-Dade jury returned a $95 million verdict, among the largest motor-vehicle awards in the history of the Eleventh Judicial Circuit, for the family of a young woman killed and her brother catastrophically injured when a drunk driver traveled the wrong way on I-95 in December 2015 after being overserved at a Miami bar.
Gallagher & Kennedy's Kevin Neal and Kenneth Ralston served as Arizona's outside counsel and secured an $85 million settlement from Google over the deceptive collection of smartphone users' location data.
Peter Merrigan of Sweeney Merrigan Personal Injury Lawyers represented 125 Massachusetts cities and towns in claims against Johnson and Johnson and the three largest opioid distributors, recovering $84.1 million in aggregate from the national opioid settlements.
A King County jury returned an $82 million verdict against Monsanto in December 2022 for a family exposed to PCBs at the Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe, Washington, awarding $20.5 million in compensatory damages and $61.5 million in punitive damages to one member of the family. The firm described it as the largest verdict against Monsanto for an individual plaintiff in any PCB case.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.