Largest Hawaii Personal Injury Settlements

Leavitt, Yamane and Soldner represented Maui wildfire survivors and victims' families in the $4.037 billion global settlement resolving approximately 450 lawsuits arising from the August 2023 Lahaina fire.

Thirty-two male survivors of a school-contracted psychiatrist who abused students across more than two decades reached an $80 million settlement with Kamehameha Schools, described at the time as the largest personal-injury settlement in Hawaii history.

A Hawaii circuit court awarded $40 million to a survivor who was raped and sexually assaulted by a Jehovah's Witnesses elder at the Makaha congregation when she was 12 years old.

A Honolulu jury found that Key Principal Partners LLC used a Houston investor's partnership access to study Honsador Lumber's financials, then quietly acquired the company for itself and cut him out of the $50 million deal entirely.

A federal bench trial found that Tripler Army Medical Center's 19-hour failure to treat a one-month-old's midgut volvulus destroyed 90 to 95 percent of her small intestine, leaving her with lifelong disability; U.S. District Judge Michael Seabright awarded the Warren family $29,479,308.

After a Chevron-USA tank-farm explosion at Honolulu Harbor burned two Shell Oil employees who later died of their injuries, a Hawaii Circuit Court jury awarded their families a combined $27.7 million in January 1983, then the largest civil verdict in state history.

The State of Hawaii settled for $26 million with Jimmy Braddock, who suffered catastrophic and permanent brain injuries when a Pinky Tows flatbed lost its brakes on Likelike Highway in 2019 while the state had left the road's only runaway-truck ramp blocked and unrepaired for 46 days.

A federal bench trial awarded $24.7 million to a Navy family after Tripler Army Medical Center physicians failed to administer IV antibiotics for roughly 48 hours following a post-delivery infection, leaving the patient with permanent kidney failure.

A federal judge awarded $16.5 million to the family of a newborn who suffered permanent brain damage after an Army pediatrician at Tripler Army Medical Center administered carbon dioxide instead of oxygen for 42 minutes following his birth. It was the largest single personal-injury judgment for an individual in Hawaii history at the time.

A Kauai judge found Hawaii totally at fault after a state-posted warning sign at the left trail entrance near Opaeka'a Falls left the right-hand path, which ended at a sheer 300-foot cliff, completely unmarked, sending two visiting women to their deaths.

A Hawaii jury awarded $12.1 million to a Waipahu family after labor-induction negligence at Kapiolani Medical Center cut off a newborn's oxygen for 26 minutes, causing permanent brain damage and cerebral palsy.

A 38-year-old man paralyzed at a Waipio crosswalk in April 2015 settled for $11.4 million after attorney Woodruff Soldner proved the City of Honolulu repaved the road in 2014 without completing the safety checklist its own laws required.

Davis Levin Livingston secured an $11 million federal settlement, requiring U.S. Attorney General approval, after Tripler Army Medical Center's cascading delivery-room errors, including a misplaced oxygen tube left in place for more than forty minutes, caused a newborn to develop spastic quadriplegia and cerebral palsy.

The City and County of Honolulu agreed in October 2021 to pay $10 million to settle a wrongful-death claim brought by the family of cardiothoracic anesthesiologist William Travis Lau, who was struck and killed on a Kakaako sidewalk when a drunk driver fleeing an HPD high-speed pursuit veered off Ala Moana Boulevard in January 2019.

A 31-year-old Army wife died from sepsis six weeks after surgeons at Tripler Army Medical Center reattached her small intestine backward during a gastric bypass, and the U.S. government agreed to pay her family $9.5 million.

In August 2007, U.S. District Judge David Ezra found Tripler Army Medical Center negligent in monitoring a hospitalized infant whose breathing failed in May 2004, leaving him with severe, permanent brain damage. After a nonjury trial under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the court entered judgment of more than $9.4 million for the boy and his parents. Attorney L. Richard Fried, Jr. represented the family.

A Honolulu jury awarded $5.62 million to Jeff Kim, a Mililani flight attendant whose oral tumor grew from lima-bean to fist size over three years because Straub Clinic & Hospital physicians failed to order a readily available diagnostic test.

A Hawaii County jury in 2006 awarded the family of a 73-year-old patient about $5.6 million after surgeon Robert Ricketson implanted a cut screwdriver shaft in his spine at Hilo Medical Center. The jury put 65 percent of the fault on Ricketson and 35 percent on the hospital for credentialing him, with $3.4 million in punitive damages against Ricketson. The trial judge cut the hospital's share, the appeals court largely upheld that cut while keeping the hospital jointly liable, and the judgment against Ricketson was $5,517,500.

A teenager vacationing in Hawaii developed steroid-induced paralysis after her lupus was treated with high-dose IV pulse therapy; Philip Russotti obtained a $4.25 million retrial verdict after the original $6.15 million award was vacated on appeal.

A federal judge found Tripler Army Medical Center negligent in supervising a nurse who sexually assaulted a sedated intensive care patient in March 2001. After a six-day bench trial, the court awarded $906,000 under the Federal Tort Claims Act: $816,000 to the patient and $90,000 to her husband for loss of consortium.

Leavitt, Yamane & Soldner, alongside two co-counsel firms, secured a confidential settlement for families of the four people killed in the July 2017 Marco Polo condominium fire in Honolulu, the costliest fire in Hawaii history.

Michael Slack and Ladd Sanger of Slack and Davis secured a confidential settlement in March 2014 for the family of Stuart Robertson, one of five people killed when a Blue Hawaiian Helicopters tour flight crashed into a mountain ridge on Molokai, Hawaii, on November 10, 2011.