Largest California Personal Injury Verdicts Never Collected

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.

Acting as outside trial counsel for Los Angeles County, the firm then known as Greene, Broillet, Taylor, Wheeler and Panish helped recover approximately $3.3 billion for the county through the 1998 nationwide Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

A Riverside County jury awarded $2.28 billion on April 25, 2023, to a woman identified as Jane Doe who was sexually abused by her stepfather from age 5 until she was 14, at the family's Lake Elsinore home and at events and property of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stepfather, who had pleaded guilty in 1997 to lewd acts with a child under 14 and served three years in state prison, admitted the abuse at deposition, then skipped the first day of jury selection and withdrew his answer rather than face a bench warrant. The church settled for $1 million and the mother for $200,000 before trial. The verdict, $836 million in compensatory damages and $1.44 billion in punitive damages after three days of deliberation, is one of the largest ever returned for a single survivor of childhood sexual abuse.

Frantz Law Group, led by attorneys James Frantz and William Shinoff, represented nearly 1,000 public school districts across 38 states in multidistrict litigation against JUUL Labs, reaching a $1.7 billion settlement in 2023 that covered approximately 1,600 school districts, local governments, tribal entities, and individual consumers.

A Los Angeles jury ordered General Motors to pay $4.9 billion after a 1979 Chevrolet Malibu's rear-mounted fuel tank ruptured and burned six occupants in a rear-end crash, the largest US personal-injury verdict at the time.

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. 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 federal jury in San Francisco found Google liable for invasion of privacy and intrusion upon seclusion after the company kept collecting data from third-party apps for users who had switched off the Web & App Activity setting. On September 3, 2025, the jury awarded $425,651,947 in compensatory damages and declined to award punitive damages. The award is a single class-wide figure shared by two nationwide classes of about 98 million users, not one person's recovery. The judge refused to set the verdict aside in August 2026, and Google has appealed to the Ninth Circuit.

An L.A. jury awarded Eva Echeverria $417 million after finding that decades of Johnson & Johnson Baby Powder use caused her ovarian cancer, though the trial judge later vacated the verdict and the Court of Appeal affirmed the vacatur.

In multidistrict litigation before Judge Andrew J. Guilford, CaseyGerry served as class counsel in a $393.5 million settlement resolving allegations that Wells Fargo secretly loaded unnecessary collateral protection insurance onto auto loan accounts, pushing hundreds of thousands of borrowers into delinquency and causing roughly 27,000 wrongful vehicle repossessions.

Mary Alexander & Associates served as co-counsel for seven California counties and three cities in a landmark public-nuisance action that secured a $1.15 billion trial judgment (later reduced on appeal to pre-1951 homes) and ultimately resolved in 2019 for $305 million to fund lead paint abatement across California residences.

Jamie Lebovitz served on the federal MDL Plaintiff's Steering Committee for the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 disaster, representing 18 families in confidential individual settlements as part of a broader litigation that recovered more than $300 million for surviving relatives of the 88 people killed.

San Francisco Unified School District's case was the first JUUL bellwether trial against Altria; after the plaintiffs rested, Altria agreed to pay $235 million to resolve roughly 6,000 pending e-vapor claims nationwide.

A Los Angeles jury awarded $208,821,015 to Rhoda Evans, who developed mesothelioma after decades of washing the asbestos-laden work clothes of her husband, a Los Angeles DWP pipe cutter, with $200 million in punitive damages assessed against pipe maker CertainTeed. William Levin and Laurel Simes tried the case for the plaintiffs. The full number did not stand: months later the trial judge struck the punitive award as unconstitutional and ordered a new trial on all issues, and the Court of Appeal affirmed that order in 2012. No retrial result or settlement was ever reported.

A Los Angeles County jury ordered Rebecca Grossman and former Major League pitcher Scott Erickson to pay $198.17 million for the deaths of two brothers, ages 11 and 8, struck in a marked crosswalk near their home.

A Los Angeles County jury awarded $150,750,000 against truck driver Rudolph Ortiz and Bhandal Bros. Trucking for a girl who was orphaned when her family's SUV struck an 18-wheeler parked without lights on the shoulder of the 210 Freeway and caught fire, killing her parents and eldest brother. Brian Brandt tried the case for the plaintiff. The verdict did not stand: on February 3, 2014, Judge Marc Marmaro granted the defense a new trial, finding the award excessive, and the case then settled in April 2014 on confidential terms before any retrial.

McGee Lerer Ogrin represented 14 of the 124 survivors whose claims were resolved in a $122.5 million settlement with the City of Santa Monica over decades of child sexual abuse by a PAL volunteer the city failed to stop.

A Riverside County jury found Moreno Valley Unified School District 90 percent at fault for keeping teacher Thomas Lee West in the classroom for two decades despite molestation complaints, awarding $135 million to two former students he abused.

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.

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.

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.

Gillin, Jacobson, Ellis and Larsen recovered $111.7 million for 186 patients who underwent medically unjustified cardiac procedures at Tenet Healthcare's Redding Medical Center, the largest single-firm share of a $395 million mass settlement.

In July 2023, after a two-phase trial before Judge Cary Nishimoto in Los Angeles County Superior Court, a jury awarded roughly $107 million, $32 million compensatory and $75 million punitive, to the family of Joel Hernandezcueva, a janitor who died of pleural mesothelioma in 2014 in his mid-40s after asbestos exposure at the Park Place complex in Irvine. The jury found raw-asbestos supplier Union Carbide acted with malice and assigned it the largest share of fault. On December 12, 2023, Judge Nishimoto set the verdict aside in its entirety, granting judgment notwithstanding the verdict and a new trial on findings of juror misconduct, misconduct by plaintiffs' counsel, insufficient evidence, and excessive damages. Plaintiffs' counsel said they would appeal, and no published decision reinstating the verdict appears in the public record as of this writing. Dean Omar Branham Shirley tried the 2023 case, and this page documents it as part of the public record.

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.