Largest Alabama Group Settlements and Injury Recovery Funds

Monsanto and its chemical spinoff Solutia agreed in August 2003 to pay $700 million to resolve claims from more than 21,000 Anniston, Alabama residents who were exposed to polychlorinated biphenyls the company manufactured and dumped near their homes for nearly four decades.

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.

Beasley Allen, representing Alabama on contingency, secured $220 million from opioid distributors Cardinal Health and Cencora after roughly 18 months of litigation, with every dollar directed to statewide opioid abatement programs.

A Clarke County jury awarded Leonard Street $150 million and his wife Tracy $10 million after finding that Daimler Truck North America and Western Star had defectively designed the cab of the 2023 Western Star he was driving, using a roof structure dating to 1995 and a suspension seat that did not hold him in place when the truck rolled.

A Dallas County, Alabama jury awarded Travaris Smith $151.8 million after a 1998 Ford Explorer rolled twice and severed his spinal cord, finding Ford failed its own safety standards and destroyed test data to conceal the defect.

In 2019 a rented temporary pipe system failed at a Tyson Farms chicken rendering plant in Hanceville, and roughly 220,000 gallons of rendering wastewater went into the Mulberry Fork of the Black Warrior River. Mark Griffin, a boat repairman working on the water downriver in Dora, fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with necrotizing fasciitis.

A federal jury in Montgomery awarded $64.1 million to Lucky Palace LLC and 15 Macon County charities after finding VictoryLand owner Milton McGregor conspired to freeze out a competing electronic bingo operation.

A Mobile County jury awarded the family of Dan Haas $50 million after a 13-day trial, finding that cardiologist Dr. John Galla and his practice mismanaged Haas's cardiac symptoms and sent him home the night he died rather than admitting him to the hospital.

The widow of Derric Rush, a church music minister killed in a 2009 Birmingham crash by an off-duty police officer, won a default judgment against Club Volcano for serving the officer while intoxicated, after a trial on damages in 2013. The same judgment included $3.25 million against the officer, James Kendrick. The Alabama Supreme Court voided the club's judgment in 2014 because service by publication had not been shown to be justified.

A Tuscaloosa County jury awarded the family of Johnny Terrell Sledge $30 million after finding that the on-call trauma surgeon at DCH Regional Medical Center started a second elective operation instead of treating a gunshot wound, leaving Sledge to bleed to death in the emergency room over roughly two and a half hours.

Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys took U.S. Army veteran Zachary Lucas's case to trial after Progressive offered $12,500 for a crash that fractured his skull and left him with permanent brain damage. On November 7, 2019, a Jefferson County jury unanimously awarded $18 million.

A Jefferson County jury awarded Caroline and J.T. Malatesta $16 million, finding that Brookwood Medical Center committed medical negligence and reckless fraud when the natural-birth experience its advertising promised gave way to a delivery in which Caroline was physically restrained, leaving her with permanent nerve damage.

A Limestone County jury awarded Gloria Owen $15 million after finding that a HEMSI ambulance crew, including a paramedic with an undisclosed history of drug use who fell asleep instead of monitoring her husband, failed to respond as Robert Owen suffered a heart attack during a routine hospital-to-hospital transfer.

Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys' Andrew Moak, with co-counsel from Turnbull, Holcomb & LeMoine, won a unanimous $15 million wrongful death verdict on August 5, 2022, for the estate of a nine-year-old boy with sickle cell anemia who died in 2013 while in the custody of the Alabama Department of Human Resources. The Montgomery County jury found the boy's DHR caseworker and foster caregiver responsible for delaying the medical care that could have saved him.

A Bessemer jury returned a $15 million verdict against the owners of a BP convenience store that sold beer to an underage driver whose vehicle struck a tree, killing a 13-year-old passenger and injuring three others in May 2007.

Alexander Shunnarah Trial Attorneys represented ten of the fifteen passengers who sued the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority after a MAX Transit bus driver lost consciousness and overturned a loaded bus into a ravine in Fairfield, Alabama. On December 11, 2017, a Jefferson County jury awarded $12 million, including $6 million in punitive damages, after hearing that the authority had kept the driver behind the wheel despite two prior fainting episodes.

A Jefferson County jury awarded $10 million to Sheriff's Deputy Aimee Jo Brasher after Hueytown Police Officer David McIntosh allowed his narcotics dog, Rocco, to run uncontrolled and unmuzzled during a May 2021 training exercise, mauling her face and body.

A Mobile County jury awarded the estate of John West Jr. $35 million in punitive damages after Springhill Memorial Hospital gave him two doses of the opioid Dilaudid following minor thumb surgery and failed to monitor him; the trial court reduced the award to $10 million, and the Alabama Supreme Court affirmed it in 2023 as the largest wrongful death award the court has ever upheld.

Margaret Green was killed on July 15, 2015, when a tractor-trailer struck her SUV as she pulled out of her driveway onto Alabama Highway 64. Her husband, Herschel Green, sued the road contractor, Joe Keenum Excavation & Construction Inc., over a movable construction sign it had placed beside the driveway. In February 2022 a Lauderdale County jury found the company responsible and awarded $9 million.

A Lee County jury awarded the family of 20-year-old Auburn University student Hope Johnson $9 million, a county record, after urgent care doctors missed the blood clots that killed her.

A Mobile County jury found in June 2023 that the passenger airbag in a 1998 Infiniti QX4 was defective and awarded $8.5 million in compensatory damages to a girl who lost the sight of her left eye in a low-speed crash at age 15. Nissan challenged the verdict on appeal. In October 2025 the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the finding of a safer alternative design but sent the new-trial motion back to the trial court, so the verdict is not yet final.

A federal jury in Birmingham awarded Elaine Adams $7.5 million in punitive damages after her 18-year-old son, Reginald Adams, drowned on a pool slide at Riverchase Country Club, finding that the club's operator, Heritage Golf Club, LLC, had deliberately skipped a required second lifeguard.

A Mobile jury awarded $7 million, $3 million compensatory and $4 million punitive, against AltaPointe Health Systems after a mentally incapacitated 19-year-old patient at its BayPointe Children's Psychiatric Hospital was sexually assaulted by another, unsupervised patient and staff did not report it for roughly a day.

A Houston County, Alabama jury awarded $6 million on September 17, 2024, to the family of Christa Anne Davis, 71, of Headland, who died of sepsis in September 2017 after gallbladder surgery. The family said a surgeon at the practice, filling in for her own surgeon, sent her home without checking her vital signs. The five-day trial was reported as the largest medical malpractice verdict in Houston County history.