Largest Montana Group Settlements and Injury Recovery Funds

Ralph Hutt worked 18 months at W.R. Grace's asbestos-contaminated vermiculite mill in Libby, Montana in the late 1960s and developed asbestosis decades later. A Cascade County jury found the mill's workers' compensation insurer, Maryland Casualty Company, breached an independent duty to warn him about hazards it tracked through undisclosed chest X-rays, and awarded $36.5 million in February 2022. The trial judge completed Montana's mandatory review of the punitive portion in January 2023 and declined to reduce it, calling the insurer's conduct reprehensible. Maryland Casualty appealed, but the appeal ended in a confidential settlement in 2024, so the verdict itself, not any later court reduction, is what stood.

At CoreCivic's Crossroads Correctional Center in Shelby, Montana, an inmate serving a double life sentence let himself out of his own locked pod and into Nathaniel Lake's, then beat and choked him for more than three and a half minutes with no staff intervention. Lake was in a coma for 33 days and has a permanent brain injury.

Jeremy Vangsnes, a 21-year-old cross-country athlete who was left quadriplegic and brain-injured after a 2009 rollover on Interstate 90 near Belgrade, Montana, settled for $26 million against the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention after a judge ruled the driver was acting within the scope of his agency with the organization.

A federal jury awarded $15 million to two families whose loved ones died at Canyon Creek Memory Care during a 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, finding the Billings facility and its parent company Koelsch Senior Communities liable for neglect through chronic understaffing.

A Gallatin County jury awarded $15 million to Catharine Hudgens after her husband Lew died from carbon monoxide poisoning in their honeymoon cabin at Rainbow Ranch Lodge in Big Sky, Montana, returning what the plaintiff's firm described as more than double the county's previous largest verdict.

Lew and Catharine Hudgens of Alabama were poisoned by carbon monoxide that seeped into their room from an adjacent boiler room during their honeymoon at Rainbow Ranch Lodge in Big Sky, Montana, and were not found for four days, after Catharine's sister twice asked lodge staff to check on them. Lew died and Catharine was left with permanent brain damage. A Gallatin County jury heard the case against Rainbow Ranch Holdings and related defendants over close to two weeks and returned a combined $15 million verdict on April 10, 2024, assigning 65 percent of the fault to the lodge and the rest to parties that had already settled confidentially, which leaves the lodge answerable for $9.75 million of it under Montana's apportionment statute. Local reporters described it as more than double the largest jury award previously recorded in the county. No appeal has been located.

Heenan and Cook secured a $9 million settlement from Custer County District High School on behalf of 32 former student athletes who were sexually abused over decades by longtime school athletic trainer James 'Doc' Jensen.

A Missoula County jury awarded $8.2 million, including $5.2 million in punitive damages, after Les Schwab sold a retread tire installed on the front steer axle of a cement truck that blew out on US-93 near Ronan, killing two women.

John Amsden served as co-lead counsel for hospital employees whose employers secretly accepted $26 million from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Montana in exchange for six years of exclusive coverage, inflating the workers' health-plan premiums.

Allen Ginn, a log truck driver, was injured in July 2008 when logs fell on him at a Smurfit-Stone mill near Missoula. Smurfit-Stone defaulted on liability, and a Missoula County jury set damages at $3,470,899.56 for Ginn and $500,000 for his wife Laurie. The Montana Supreme Court affirmed in 2015, but a bankruptcy stipulation the Ginns had to accept to bring the suit capped their recovery at $2.5 million.

A Butte federal jury returned a $2.5 million verdict for the families of two women killed when a Patrol Helicopters fuel-truck driver failed to signal before turning on a Park County road, and the Ninth Circuit unanimously affirmed the award.

Robert Dannels, a BNSF railroad trackman, suffered a permanently disabling back and spine injury in 2010 when a skid-steer loader he was operating struck a buried steel wellhead. A Cascade County jury in 2013 found BNSF 100 percent at fault and awarded $1.7 million under the Federal Employers' Liability Act. The court denied BNSF's motion for a new trial, and BNSF paid the full verdict amount.

In 2015 a woman on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation called authorities because she was worried someone might be drinking and driving. The Bureau of Indian Affairs officer who responded assaulted her. A federal judge fixed damages at $1.6 million in 2020, and after nearly a decade of litigation over whether the United States was responsible, ordered it to pay in 2025.

The Montana Supreme Court reversed a 50% contributory-negligence deduction and restored the full $969,797 jury verdict for the widow of welding supervisor Andre Woods, who was killed when a hy-rail vehicle traveled more than four miles past its authorized track warrant limits and collided with an oncoming train.

A federal jury found that a North Dakota debt-collection law firm violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by filing and pursuing a credit card lawsuit it knew was barred by Montana's statute of limitations, awarding Timothy McCollough $311,000 in statutory, emotional distress, and punitive damages.

Beck, Amsden and Stalpes co-counseled 98 Opportunity, Montana landowners through 13 years of litigation against ARCO over arsenic deposited by Anaconda's copper smelter, ultimately settling the case in 2021 after it twice reached the Montana Supreme Court and once reached the U.S. Supreme Court.