Largest Michigan Personal Injury Settlements

An Oakland County jury awarded $896.5 million to a young boy who was struck by a prototype test car during a student field trip at a Continental test track, reported as the largest verdict in Michigan history. The award is pre-appeal: post-trial motions are pending, Continental never made a settlement offer, and the amount could still be reduced.

Hunter Shkolnik of Napoli Shkolnik served as court-appointed co-liaison counsel for individual plaintiffs in the consolidated federal Flint water litigation, which produced a $600 million settlement from the State of Michigan in 2020.

A Detroit federal jury awarded former Michigan inmate Kohchise Jackson $307.6 million after the state's for-profit prison health contractor refused to pay for the $919 surgery that would have reversed his colostomy.

After spinal surgery at the Detroit Medical Center's Children's Hospital of Michigan left a 10-year-old girl partially paralyzed and permanently incontinent, and her surgeon took two vacations before the hardware came out, a Wayne County jury awarded $135 million.

An Oakland County jury awarded the Tran family $130,571,897 in 2018 after finding that Beaumont Hospital technicians failed to call a code blue or provide chest compressions when a two-month-old infant suffered a breath-hold spell during a renal scan, leaving him with permanent brain damage and cerebral palsy.

A Wayne County jury found Henry Ford Hospital negligent for a delay of over two hours in executing an ordered emergency C-section, awarding $120.9 million to a Detroit mother and her son, who was left with severe cerebral palsy and requires full-time care.

In April 2023 a Wayne County jury awarded $96 million to the widow and mother of Jude and Zachary Attianese, a New Jersey father and son killed when a Challenger Motor Freight tractor-trailer rear-ended their car in an I-75 construction zone in 2018. The company had acknowledged responsibility, so the trial addressed damages. The driver was taking medications for Parkinson's disease, and the company had known of his diagnosis since 2015.

An Oakland County jury found Kroger solely liable and awarded HVAC technician Brian Mierendorf and his wife $76.7 million after a failed R-22 refrigerant line at a Bloomfield Township store burned and destroyed most of both his hands.

A Wayne County jury awarded $75 million against Nicholas Remington, who gave 21-year-old Denis Preka a fatal dose of MDMA disguised as Adderall, in what reporters described as Michigan's largest verdict for a single death.

An Oakland County jury awarded $144.5 million after a delayed cesarean left a Macomb Township girl with a permanent brain injury, a verdict the Michigan Court of Appeals later upheld before it was reduced to roughly $42 million.

A Wayne County jury found the Detroit Medical Center liable for the death of 26-year-old Terrea Holly, whose pulmonary embolism was treated as a virus and sent home from the emergency room.

On September 11, 2026, an Oakland County jury awarded about $32.7 million to a child who suffered a traumatic brain injury and back and leg injuries when a prototype Ford Mustang crashed into spectators at a Continental Automotive Systems test track in Auburn Hills in 2023. Continental admitted liability, so the trial decided damages only. It was the third trial from the same crash, and the company made no settlement offer in any of them.

An Oakland County jury awarded Brian Iminski $32,375,683 after a First Student school bus ran a red light and T-boned his work pickup, leaving him with brain and back injuries.

A Midland County jury awarded $31.6 million to the family of a girl left with cerebral palsy, spastic quadriplegia, and a seizure disorder after staff at MyMichigan Medical Center-Midland failed to stop Pitocin or deliver her by emergency cesarean despite fetal monitor strips showing distress, in what local coverage described as the first courtroom win for a medical malpractice plaintiff in the county's history.

An Oakland County jury found Warner Bros. and The Jenny Jones Show liable for the wrongful death of Scott Amedure and assessed $25 million, an award the Michigan Court of Appeals later reversed.

A Wayne County jury awarded $22.6 million to port truck driver Burt Holt, who suffered a traumatic brain injury and permanent disability when a negligent driver struck him while he inspected his trailer at a Detroit shipping terminal in 2011.

A Wayne County jury awarded $20,595,570 to Terry Novak after a van driver for FSS Technologies lost control, crossed the center line, and struck Novak while he was clearing snow from his own driveway in Romulus.

A Wayne County, Michigan jury awarded roughly $55.5 million, among the largest medical malpractice verdicts in the state at the time, against Henry Ford Health System after an emergency room physician sent home a child in respiratory distress who suffered a respiratory arrest the next morning and permanent brain damage. The trial court reduced the gross award to present value and applied Michigan's statutory cap on noneconomic damages, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in 2005.

A federal jury in Detroit held Crossfire, LLC and its driver Logan Goodrich responsible for the April 2018 crash that killed 21-year-old Dillon Montie at a US-23 exit ramp intersection in Monroe County, Michigan, and the court entered judgment on May 24, 2023. Law360 reported that Montie's parents were awarded more than $15.7 million; the plaintiff's firm and the news service of a trucking-lawyer membership group put the total verdict at $18.5 million, and the verdict form is not in the free public record. The defense had blamed Montie for speeding, but the trial judge had already struck its cell phone and roadway design defenses as unsupported and ruled that Crossfire would answer for Goodrich's negligence. Crossfire and Goodrich then moved for a new trial, remittitur, or a present cash value reduction, and Law360 reported in January 2024 that the parties resolved that dispute on terms that are not public, and the next docket entry, on February 7, 2024, is an order docketed as a vacatur, so no judgment figure from this case is confirmed to stand and the result is published unranked. No appeal was taken.

A federal jury in Detroit found that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan illegally fired longtime IT employee Lisa Domski after denying her Catholic religious objection to its COVID-19 vaccine mandate, awarding her $12.7 million.

A class settlement with Michigan Pain Specialists resolved claims of 311 patients and survivors of the 2012 fungal meningitis outbreak traced to contaminated steroid injections. It was reached in Livingston County Circuit Court in March 2016. The $10.5 million is a single class figure that the sources do not itemise by patient. Robert B. Sickels of Sommers Schwartz PC sat on the three-attorney plaintiffs' steering committee for Michigan.

A Wayne County jury found the City of Detroit negligent after a tire came off a city transit van and struck a 59-year-old veteran in the head, returning an $8.3 million verdict that reached about $10.2 million with interest.

Michigan State University agreed to pay $5 million each to the families of Arielle Anderson and Brian Fraser, two of the three students shot and killed on campus on February 13, 2023, with Ven Johnson negotiating both settlements before any lawsuit was filed.

Cannon & Dunphy recovered $10 million for the husband and two children of a 37-year-old woman who was killed when a Waste Management truck ran a stop sign and struck her van in Kent County, Michigan.