Top Individual Ohio Personal Injury Verdicts and Settlements

Ellen Relkin served as court-appointed co-lead plaintiffs counsel in the DePuy ASR hip implant MDL, helping negotiate a $2.5 billion settlement for roughly 8,000 patients who required revision surgery after the metal-on-metal device failed.

After nearly 30 years of litigation, Markovits Stock and DeMarco secured a $742 million-plus-interest settlement for approximately 23,000 Navistar retirees whose healthcare and life insurance benefits had been repeatedly reduced.

Cory Watson's Jon Conlin, a co-lead lawyer on the plaintiffs' steering committee, helped drive DuPont and Chemours to a $670.7 million global settlement resolving about 3,550 C-8 water-contamination cancer and injury claims.

A federal jury found CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart liable for creating an opioid public nuisance in northeast Ohio, leading to a $650 million abatement judgment, the first of its kind against pharmacy chains in U.S. history.

After a six-week federal trial, a jury found three of the nation's largest retail pharmacy chains created a public nuisance by flooding Lake and Trumbull Counties, Ohio with opioid pills, and a judge ordered $650 million to fund a 15-year abatement plan.

Hours before opening arguments in the first federal opioid bellwether trial, W. Mark Lanier and co-counsel secured a $260 million settlement from distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health, and McKesson, plus manufacturer Teva, on behalf of Cuyahoga and Summit counties in Ohio.

In the hours before the first federal opioid trial was to begin, Spangenberg Shibley and Liber helped secure a $260 million settlement from McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and Teva on behalf of Cuyahoga and Summit counties.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $134 million to a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and the Ohio Supreme Court later struck down a statutory damages cap as unconstitutional when applied to child victims of intentional criminal acts.

Ohio State University agreed to pay $100 million to 279 of 280 remaining plaintiffs who sued the university over decades of sexual abuse by former team physician Dr. Richard Strauss; Estey and Bomberger was among co-counsel firms representing survivors.

A seven-year civil RICO and antitrust class action against Duke Energy Ohio over a secret rebate scheme that favored roughly two dozen large industrial customers at the expense of about one million residential and small-business ratepayers settled for $80.875 million, with Bill Markovits and Paul DeMarco serving as lead co-counsel.

A 12-year-old Cleveland girl suffered a profound brain injury and partial limb loss after touching an energized, downed Cleveland Electric Illuminating power line that had been left unrepaired for days following Hurricane Sandy; her family settled all claims for $60.7 million, the largest individual personal injury settlement in Ohio history.

A federal jury in Columbus found that DuPont's C-8 contamination caused Travis Abbott's testicular cancer and awarded him and his wife $50 million. After the trial court applied Ohio's cap on his wife's loss-of-consortium damages, the enforceable judgment came to about $40.3 million, which the Sixth Circuit later affirmed.

After the U.S. Supreme Court's 2009 Wyeth v. Levine decision cleared the way for pharmaceutical failure-to-warn suits, Tim Misny assembled a second large block of Ohio plaintiffs harmed by a drug whose labeling omitted warnings about increased cancer risk, and secured a $50 million settlement in October 2012 as co-counsel in the related coordinated litigation.

After a 2009 Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for pharmaceutical failure-to-warn suits, Tim Misny built a roughly 1,000-case pharmaceutical tort campaign around a drug whose labeling omitted warnings about elevated heart attack and stroke risk, and one block of those cases settled for $42.5 million in 2011, with Misny working alongside co-counsel.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $39 million to the widow of a highway paving inspector struck and killed on Interstate 271 after the paving contractor failed to follow its court-approved safety plan.

David Paris and Kathleen St. John won Ohio Supreme Court certification of a 1.4-million-member class and secured a $31 million court-approved settlement after proving State Farm concealed a 1994 high-court ruling that would have entitled policyholders to enhanced uninsured-motorist coverage.

A Hamilton County jury returned a verdict of nearly $28 million against Utilimap Corp. after the firm's inspectors skipped a rotted utility pole that collapsed and killed Duke Energy lineman Keith Jester in 2014.

A Franklin County jury awarded $27 million to the estate of Gregory Coleman Jr., a 37-year-old bartender beaten to death by security workers outside the Julep bar in Columbus's Short North, finding the bar's ownership 80 percent at fault for negligent hiring and supervision.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $14.5 million to a boy born at 25 weeks with cerebral palsy and developmental delays after MetroHealth Medical Center's staff refused his mother's repeated requests for a C-section and watched the baby's condition deteriorate for more than three hours before performing an emergency delivery.

A Columbus federal jury awarded Kenneth Vigneron Sr. $2 million in compensatory and $10.5 million in punitive damages after finding DuPont's C-8 contamination caused his testicular cancer.

A Summit County jury awarded $11.35 million to a family whose son sustained permanent brain damage after their obstetrician used forceps rather than performing a cesarean section, and the verdict survived four years of appeals.

A Cincinnati jury awarded $10 million on May 1, 2026, after finding that TriHealth's Good Samaritan Hospital placed 69-year-old Terri Price in a psychiatric unit instead of a medical unit, leaving her without the nursing care and IV antibiotics needed to treat her advancing sepsis.

Cincinnati's Metro transit agency paid $10 million to the estate of Beverly Kinney, an 87-year-old struck and killed in a marked crosswalk by a bus driver with a suspended license, and agreed to overhaul its driver training.

A legal team led by Ben Crump negotiated a $10 million settlement between the City of Columbus and the family of Andre Hill, an unarmed 47-year-old Black man fatally shot by officer Adam Coy while walking out of a garage holding his cellphone. The city council's May 2021 approval made it the largest settlement in Columbus history.