Top Individual North Carolina Personal Injury Verdicts and Settlements

A Henderson County jury awarded $101 million to two masonry workers and one worker's wife after a 12-foot retaining wall, rebuilt under Hajoca's direction without an engineer or a permit, collapsed onto their crew.

Whitley Law Firm and co-counsel resolved negligence and nuisance claims over a fire for $42.44 million, among the larger personal-injury recoveries reported in the state that year.

A Franklin County jury returned $40 million against an intoxicated driver and the owner who let her drive, and the Court of Appeals affirmed every dollar in 2024 as the largest drunk driving verdict in state history.

Hoyt Tessener of Martin and Jones, joined by co-counsel Kent Emison, secured a $31 million settlement for a boy left paraplegic when a two-point rear lap belt in a 1999 Ford Escort jackknifed him during a crash, while other occupants of the same car came away with comparatively minor injuries.

North Carolina Lawyers Weekly reported that Meredith Hinton of Ricci Law Firm resolved a motor vehicle injury claim for $21 million in 2023, one of the larger auto settlements recorded in the state that year.

A Forsyth County jury awarded $16 million to a woman sexually assaulted in her Winston-Salem Residence Inn room after a hotel night clerk who had not been properly trained handed a visibly intoxicated stranger a keycard to her room.

A federal jury awarded $15.1 million to a quadriplegic railroad worker and his wife after a CSX train struck his vehicle at a blind crossing in 1985, making it the largest personal injury verdict in North Carolina history at the time, though the Fourth Circuit later vacated the judgment and remanded for retrial.

Lanier Law Group secured a $12.5 million settlement for 65 UNC School of the Arts alumni who alleged sexual abuse by faculty spanning from the late 1960s through the early 2010s.

Behzad "Al" Abedi was killed when stacked marble slabs fell on him at a Charlotte stone warehouse in 2019, and DeMayo Law Offices resolved his family's premises- and products-liability claims for $12 million.

Ricci Law Firm and co-counsel recovered $9.5 million for the family of an 84-year-old woman killed when a driver fleeing police ran a stop sign, with the case built on the negligent entrustment of the car to a man whose license was suspended over repeat DWI charges.

Three people died and a child was seriously injured when a 20-year-old drove the wrong way on Interstate 85 after a night of underage drinking supplied by bars and a fraternity; Maginnis Howard's Shawn Howard helped secure an $8.62 million settlement against 18 of the 19 defendants one month before trial.

Farrin co-lead counsel Gary Jackson won an $8 million class settlement for roughly 6,500 residents forced from their homes by the 2022 ammonium nitrate fire at the Winston Weaver fertilizer plant, with a separate $4.5 million for affected businesses.

Rachel Fuerst of Henson Fuerst helped a North Carolina family reach a confidential $7.95 million settlement after a hospital's mismanaged labor and delayed delivery left their newborn with a permanent hypoxic brain injury.

E. Spencer Parris and G. Christopher Olson of Martin and Jones secured a $7.52 million settlement for Dwayne Allen Dail, who spent 18 years in a North Carolina prison before DNA evidence identified the actual perpetrator and cleared his name.

Forest Horne secured a $7.5 million jury verdict for a retired CSX railroad worker whose decades of on-the-job asbestos exposure caused malignant mesothelioma, a verdict the North Carolina Court of Appeals unanimously upheld in 2006.

A class of North Carolina apartment tenants who were charged eviction-related fees that state law prohibited reached a $7,029,000 settlement with Southwood Realty Company in April 2020, part of a broader $8 million resolution against three property managers.

A jury awarded $6.13 million to the family of a 53-year-old man who died of a heart attack hours after CMC-Northeast discharged him, finding the hospital's reckless disregard of his safety eliminated the NC statutory noneconomic damages cap.

An 8-year-old girl was left paraplegic by a spinal cord infarction after a recreation center failed to spot her backbend and waited about two hours to get her emergency care; the claim settled for $6 million, the largest personal injury settlement in North Carolina that year.

A federal jury in Raleigh awarded $5.2 million for three residents who died at the Blue Ridge Health Care Center after its operators cut staffing and supplies, an award later limited to about $3 million once North Carolina's punitive cap was applied.

A Johnston County jury awarded $5.1 million to the family of Joan Drake, killed when a driver going 98 mph struck her car as she turned into a Clayton Walmart, after Farrin attorneys Coleman Cowan and Donald Clack tried the case without putting on a single medical bill.

A North Carolina nursing home placed an 89-year-old man in a room with a resident it knew to be violent, and within three days the roommate beat him to death.

A driver in a 1980s sports car suffered a dozen fractures in a clear-day head-on collision with a truck on a 45-mph business road, and the case settled for $4.75 million.

A North Carolina woman died after a series of falls during a roughly two-month nursing home stay, and her family settled wrongful-death claims against the facility's corporate operators for $4.25 million.

A 73-year-old man admitted to a North Carolina nursing home for ankle-fracture rehabilitation developed untreated Stage 4 pressure ulcers within 27 days and died, and Henson Fuerst resolved the wrongful-death claim for $4 million.