Largest Group Settlements and Injury Recovery Funds of 2025

A Clark County jury awarded $3.8 billion against Real Water on March 21, 2025, after finding the Las Vegas alkaline water company liable for poisoning consumers with hydrazine-contaminated product that caused acute liver failure, autoimmune disease, and death.

Aaron Podhurst served on the Plaintiffs' Steering Committee in the 13-year antitrust class action against the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, which ended in a $2.8 billion settlement for more than 3.3 million healthcare providers.

A federal jury in Columbus, Georgia awarded $30.5 million in compensatory damages and $2.5 billion in punitive damages against Ford Motor Company for the deaths of Herman and Debra Mills, killed when the roof of their 2015 F-250 Super Duty crushed down on them in a rollover. Butler Prather LLP tried the case, with James E. Butler Jr., Ramsey Prather, Daniel Philyaw, and Allison Bailey on the trial team. The honest frame: Ford called the verdict impermissibly extreme, moved for a new trial, and in September 2025 settled this case and the related $1.7 billion Hill case on confidential terms, so the verdict was never collected as awarded.

A Cobb County, Georgia jury found that Monsanto's Roundup caused John Barnes's non-Hodgkin lymphoma and awarded him $2.065 billion, with Arnold & Itkin's Kyle Findley serving as lead trial lawyer.

Anapol Weiss shareholder Kristen Gibbons Feden helped secure $1.6 billion in default verdicts for 104 women sexually abused as children by former Long Island pediatrician Stuart Copperman, one of the largest cumulative civil awards against a single individual in U.S. history.

On October 6, 2025, a Los Angeles County jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $966 million to the family of Mae K. Moore, a mother of three who died of mesothelioma in December 2021 at age 88 after decades of using the company's talc-based Baby Powder and Shower to Shower. The award comprised $16 million in compensatory damages and $950 million in punitive damages, reported at the time as the largest talc-mesothelioma verdict ever returned against Johnson & Johnson. The honest frame: on March 13, 2026, the trial judge, Ruth Ann Kwan, vacated the entire $950 million punitive award, finding the malice showing insufficient, while leaving the $16 million compensatory judgment intact. Both sides have said they will appeal. Dean Omar Branham Shirley tried the case for the Moore family, and this page documents it as part of the public record.

A Bexar County jury awarded roughly $831 million to Blas Mendez Jr., a longtime Seguin ISD special education behavior specialist left partially paralyzed after his motorcycle hit wreckage left in the road by an 18-year-old drunk driver who had been served at Koozies Icehouse & Grill in New Braunfels. Todd A. Hunter of Hunter Trial Law tried the dram shop case with E. Chevo Pastrano and Ginna G. Pastrano of The Pastrano Law Firm. The honest frame: the award was reported as the largest verdict ever returned by a San Antonio jury, and the bar had already closed by the time it came in, so the family is not expected to collect most, if any, of it.

After proving through 12.5 million internal company documents that Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi hid for twelve years that Plavix was ineffective in patients with a common genetic variant, the State of Hawaii secured a $700 million settlement in 2025, the largest pharmaceutical recovery in the state's history.

A Harris County jury awarded $640 million to the family of David Lester Loree II, a journeyman pipefitter fatally crushed when a top-heavy HVAC unit being lifted by TNT Crane and Rigging overturned in high winds at a Texas A&M University-San Antonio construction site in September 2021.

A Miami federal jury found Tesla 33% liable for a 2019 Key Largo crash that killed a 22-year-old woman and severely injured her boyfriend, awarding $243 million including $200 million in punitive damages in the first federal trial over a fatal Autopilot accident.

Representing more clergy abuse survivors in the Archdiocese of New Orleans bankruptcy than any other firm, Herman, Katz, Gisleson and Cain helped push a five-year Chapter 11 proceeding to a $230 million settlement confirmed in December 2025, with additional recovery against Travelers Insurance still pending.

A Philadelphia jury found the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania liable for the brain injury a newborn suffered when staff delayed a cesarean section, a $182.7 million verdict that grew to a molded judgment of about $207.6 million, the largest medical malpractice award in Pennsylvania history. Kline & Specter argued and won the appeal, where the Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the full $207.6 million judgment in July 2025.

A New York County jury awarded $117 million to William Durbec and his wife Victoria in May 2025, the largest single-plaintiff asbestos verdict in New York State history, after Durbec developed pleural mesothelioma from asbestos-containing fireproofing he breathed during years of sheet metal work at the original World Trade Center.

A Garfield County jury returned a $205 million verdict against Glenwood Caverns Adventure Park and ride manufacturer Soaring Eagle after finding that operators launched the Haunted Mine Drop with a six-year-old girl sitting on top of an unsecured seatbelt, overriding a warning alarm that should have stopped the ride.

On September 16, 2025, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Joseph Ruffalo, an 85-year-old former music manager and 1980s film producer, liable for sexual battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress against his former stepdaughter, A.Z., who testified that he abused her from 1991, when she was six, until 2007, when she was 22. The unanimous jury deliberated two hours and forty minutes and awarded $85 million in compensatory damages and $30 million in punitive damages. A.Z. had reported the abuse to police in the United States and Britain without result; Ruffalo was never charged. Her mother was a co-defendant and resolved the claims against her before trial. Ruffalo told the jury he could not pay.

A Clark County jury awarded Timothy Kuhn $114 million after USAA spent years stonewalling his claim from a 2018 rear-end collision it had originally conceded was not his fault.

A Travis County jury found a Wings 'N More restaurant liable for overserving a drunk driver who crashed into a family's car, awarding $112.9 million after a six-year-old girl suffered a traumatic brain injury, cardiac arrest, and the loss of vision in one eye.

On February 16, 2016 Daniel Ryals dropped his healthy 9-month-old son at Wendy Jo Strother's unlicensed in-home daycare in Mena, Arkansas. That afternoon Strother's daughter carried the baby into the local hospital with multiple skull fractures and bleeding in his brain. He is permanently blind and brain-damaged. Strother pleaded no contest to permitting child abuse and got probation. In November 2025 a Polk County jury awarded the family $110,000,000 plus $40,000 in punitive damages.

On February 16, 2016 Daniel Ryals dropped his healthy 9-month-old son at Wendy Jo Strother's unlicensed in-home daycare in Mena, Arkansas. That afternoon Strother's daughter carried the baby into the local hospital with multiple skull fractures and bleeding in his brain. He is permanently blind and brain-damaged. Strother pleaded no contest to permitting child abuse and got probation. In November 2025 a Polk County jury awarded the family $110,000,000 plus $40,000 in punitive damages.

A four-day trial ended with a $109.2 million verdict against LaFarge North America after Simon Law proved the supplier knowingly sold Gleeson Asphalt base rock that did not meet the grade it was labeled and paid for.

A Cook County jury found the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority negligent for a 2016 construction zone crash on I-90 that killed one limousine passenger and left Rob Rosá paralyzed from the neck down, awarding Rosá and his spouse just over $104 million on October 9, 2025.

A Miami-Dade jury awarded $100 million to former Florida state senator Daphne Campbell for the death of her son Jason, shot while sleeping at the Monte Carlo Condominium after an intruder walked in through failed security. Morgan & Morgan attorneys Thomas Hasty, Grant Gillenwater, Chuck Fernandez, and Patrick Chucri tried the negligent security case with co-counsel from Ver Ploeg & Marino.

A King County jury awarded $100 million to four plaintiffs who suffered neurological, hormonal, and cancer-related illnesses after years of exposure to PCBs from defective fluorescent light fixtures at a Monroe, Washington school.

After winning a $26.6 million jury verdict for a union mason who fell through defective scaffolding on the Longfellow Bridge, Andrew Abraham of Keches Law Group returned to court and proved that Liberty Mutual's insurers willfully refused to investigate or settle a clear liability case, prompting a judge to double the compensatory judgment to over $91 million under Chapter 93A and 176D.