Largest Arkansas Group Settlements and Injury Recovery Funds

Rainwater, Holt and Sexton was one of the founding firms on the coalition legal team that brought 72 Arkansas counties and 210 cities together to sue 65 opioid manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, part of the litigation that produced a $216 million statewide share of the national settlement announced in 2021.

Dr. Trent Pierce, then chairman of the Arkansas State Medical Board, found a spare tire propped against his car on the morning of 4 February 2009. A hand grenade was duct-taped to it, rigged to fire when the tire was moved. He lost the sight in his left eye and the hearing in his left ear. The man who sent him there was a physician whose prescribing authority the board had revoked.

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.

Margaretha Sauer, a 93-year-old resident of Rich Mountain Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Mena, Arkansas, died in July 1998 after five and a half years in the facility's care. Her estate sued the nursing home's corporate owners for negligence, medical malpractice, breach of contract, and wrongful death, presenting evidence of chronic understaffing, untreated weight loss and dehydration, and unaddressed pressure sores. A Polk County jury returned combined judgments of $78,425,000, reported at the time as the largest verdict against an Arkansas nursing home. The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed liability on condition of remittitur, cutting the negligence and malpractice damages to $5,000,000 and the punitive award to $21,000,000, and the United States Supreme Court denied review in November 2003, leaving the reduced judgment final.

A Benton County judge awarded $25.4 million, including more than $19 million in punitive damages, against the owner of a Springdale motel after finding it knowingly facilitated the repeated sex trafficking of a girl beginning when she was 14 years old.

A Pulaski County circuit judge entered a $17.6 million default judgment against a former Little Rock 911 dispatcher who failed to relay a drowning-in-progress call to police and fire water rescue, resulting in the deaths of a mother and her young son over the following two years.

Ariel Anderson, 23, was driving home from work on U.S. 67/167 near Jacksonville when a highway contractor's dump truck merged into her lane at about 30 mph. It had entered at an angle to get around a road grader, so neither driver could see the other. The jury found the contractor had not posted the warning signs the project required.

Zelma Grissom was wholly dependent on staff at Hillview Post Acute and Rehabilitation Center to turn her in bed, which has to happen about every two hours to prevent pressure injury. Staff did not. She developed a bedsore, it became infected, and she died of sepsis in May 2018 at 81. Her family won $15,706,166. Not a dollar of it has been paid.

A 15-year-old boy went into Arkansas Children's Hospital for surgery to remove the brain tissue causing his seizures. The surgeon opened the wrong side of his head and removed healthy tissue before turning to the correct side. His parents were not told, and learned of it more than a year later during an unrelated examination.

A grocery company's van ran a stop sign onto Arkansas 412 and broadsided Kerry Hogland's car, launching it across three lanes with her three sons inside. She needed brain surgery and has permanent cognitive injury. The company admitted liability, so the nine-day federal trial was about damages alone.

A Jefferson County, Arkansas jury awarded a widow and her family $7,152,125 against Ford Motor Company after her husband died when his 1994 Explorer rolled over in Pine Bluff. The award was $4,652,125 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages. The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed the amount in 2013 and changed only when post-judgment interest begins.

Lillie Whitney, 77, lived at Ouachita Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Camden from January 2015 until her death in August 2016. Certified nursing assistants testified that chronic short staffing made adequate care physically impossible, and that the operators had been warned repeatedly by staff, by residents and by the State and did nothing.

Larry Price Jr. spent just over a year in the Sebastian County, Arkansas jail awaiting trial on a terroristic threatening charge he could not make $1,000 bail on, and was found dead in his cell on August 29, 2021. He weighed 185 pounds when he was booked, and paramedics who responded to his death estimated his weight at about 90 pounds; the Arkansas State Crime Laboratory listed the cause of death as acute dehydration and malnutrition. His family's federal lawsuit alleged that Sebastian County and its jail medical contractor, Turn Key Health Clinics, LLC, ignored his deteriorating mental and physical condition, including discontinuing his psychiatric medication and failing to intervene as he ate and drank less over months in custody. Represented by Erik Heipt and Edwin Budge of Budge & Heipt, the family settled with both defendants in 2024 for $6 million, split evenly between the county and Turn Key. The county prosecutor filed no criminal charges over the death, and the case settled before trial with no ruling on liability.

A mother and her two toddler daughters, each diagnosed with PTSD after surviving the American Airlines Flight 1420 runway crash in Little Rock, won a $3.35 million jury verdict that the Eighth Circuit affirmed in full.

On December 10, 2013, Aisha Siddiqui, a 22-year-old aspiring surgeon visiting from New York, had her right big toe torn off when her foot was pulled into an escalator at Park Plaza Mall in Little Rock. Park Plaza and the escalator maker Kone admitted fault before trial and contested only the amount. After a three-day trial, a Pulaski County jury awarded $3 million in December 2018.

A retired Marine had spinal surgery at the Little Rock VA hospital in October 2018 and suffered a permanent brain injury after a surgeon left a drain near a dural tear without confirming the repair was sealed. After a bench trial under the Federal Tort Claims Act, Judge Lee P. Rudofsky entered a $3,122,538.09 judgment for Craig and Eileen Dobbs. On reconsideration it was amended to $2,972,658.09, which is what the court's final judgment stood at.

A Phillips County, Arkansas jury awarded $2.5 million to tire shop owner Michael Snyder after a Chinese-made tire with an antiquated weftless bead design exploded during mounting, causing a serious head injury.

A federal jury held maintenance contractor Shaw Group liable under Arkansas law after U.S. Army Private Van Ryan Marcum was fatally electrocuted by an abandoned, improperly wired latrine at Fort Benning, returning a $6.5 million verdict affirmed by the Eighth Circuit.

An oiler paralyzed below the neck after a fuel-supply pontoon vessel capsized in dangerous lock-gate currents on the Arkansas River near Pine Bluff received a $1 million jury award in 1969, reported at the time as the first such verdict in Arkansas federal courts.

A Pulaski County jury awarded a 53-year-old woman $600,000 after finding a North Little Rock massage therapist and the spa that employed him liable for sexually assaulting her during a June 2024 appointment. Jurors held massage therapist Nikkolas Lee Huerta liable for $500,000 and Trinity Massage LLC liable for a separate $100,000 for negligent hiring and training. The woman had testified that the stress of the attack forced her to give up a 17-year nursing career. Circuit Judge Shawn Johnson presided over the one-day trial in Pulaski County Circuit Court, and the 12-member jury was unanimous even though Arkansas civil verdicts require only nine jurors to agree. No appeal of the civil judgment has been reported.

A Pulaski County jury ordered the owners of the America's Best Value Inn in west Little Rock to pay a sex-trafficking survivor $477,000 after finding they ignored clear signs of ongoing trafficking on their property from August through December 2019.

A federal jury in Little Rock awarded $18.5 million after finding Honeywell liable for the mesothelioma death of a central Arkansas brake shop worker who spent years handling Bendix asbestos-containing brake products; Honeywell settled with the family for an undisclosed amount before the verdict was read.