Largest Premises Liability Personal Injury Recoveries Confirmed Paid
Personal injury results for premises liability cases where the record shows the money was paid, or the defendant is an insurer or institution that pays, ranked by amount.
- $125 millionSettlementPaidNJ
$125 Million Settlement for Lawyer Paralyzed by Falling Utility Pole at a Union City Bus Stop
A 43-year-old utility pole that Verizon had been told to remove in 1999 snapped and fell on attorney Maria Moser Meister at a Union City bus stop in 2017, leaving her with a severe brain injury and paralysis. In May 2020 a New Jersey judge approved a $125 million settlement, reported as the largest personal injury settlement in state history.
After trial: This was a pre-trial settlement, not a jury verdict. Verizon agreed to pay $125 million total, $118,275,000 to Maria Meister and $7 million to her husband, before the case went to trial, and an Essex County Superior Court judge approved it at a friendly hearing in May 2020.
Mazie Slater Katz & Freeman, LLC2020 · Superior Court of New Jersey, Essex CountyRead the full story → - $60 millionVerdictReduced from $109.5 millionPaidTX
Bexar County Jury Finds CPS Energy Liable for 2021 San Antonio Home Explosion
A Bexar County jury found CPS Energy responsible for a May 2021 natural gas explosion that destroyed a rental home on San Antonio's southeast side and badly injured a mother and her adult son. The jury returned a $109.5 million verdict, but a pretrial high-low agreement between the parties capped CPS Energy's actual payment at $60 million regardless of the jury's number. Jurors cleared two contractor companies of fault and found the utility solely responsible for failing to maintain aging gas infrastructure. Michael Lyons, Chris Simmons, Chris Carr and Michael Wozniak of Lyons & Simmons represented the family at trial.
After trial: The jury's $109.5 million verdict does not control what CPS Energy pays. A high-low agreement the parties signed before trial capped the utility's exposure at $60 million, and CPS Energy, a city-owned utility, confirmed the agreement publicly after the verdict.
Lyons & Simmons, LLP2025 · Bexar County District Court, San Antonio, Texas (Case No. 2021-CI-18484)Read the full story → - $35 millionSettlementPaidIL
Violinist Dragged by Metra Train Recovers $35 Million After Her Leg Was Lost in Closing Doors
In January 1995 a Metra commuter train pulled away from the Winnetka station with a 20-year-old violinist's case strap caught in the doors and dragged her about 366 feet, costing her a leg. A Cook County jury found the railroad and Metra at fault in 1999, and the verdict was affirmed on appeal in 2001. The railroads paid $35 million in March 2002, which included interest on the judgment.
After trial: The First District Appellate Court affirmed the 1999 verdict on September 14, 2001, and the railroads paid $35 million in March 2002, including interest on the judgment. The jury had assigned 4.5 percent of the fault to the plaintiff, which reduced the original award before interest.
- $16 millionVerdictReduced from $40.7 millionPaidWA
Seattle Cyclist Awarded $16 Million After Brain Injury at UW Speed Bump
A King County jury found that a speed bump the University of Washington had known for years was dangerous to cyclists caused a 2020 crash that left finance executive Jonathan Spencer with a severe traumatic brain injury. The jury set total damages at $40.7 million and assigned 60 percent of the fault to Spencer and 40 percent to the university, leaving the state liable for about $16.3 million. Five earlier cyclist crashes at the same speed bump, including one that had already produced a jury verdict against the university, had put UW on notice before Spencer's crash. UW removed the speed bump two years after Spencer was hurt. Todd Gardner represented Spencer at trial.
After trial: Reduced and paid. The $16.3 million is the university's share of the jury's $40.7 million damages finding, cut after the jury assigned 60 percent of fault to Spencer.
- $6.8 millionVerdictPaidCA
Los Angeles Jury Finds City Grossly Negligent After Shelter Volunteer's Arm Is Mauled by Dog With Undocumented Bite History
Kelly Kaneko, then 36, was volunteering at a Los Angeles Animal Services shelter in Lincoln Heights in October 2019 when a 100-pound German Shepherd mix named Jaxx bit her arm and held on for more than five minutes. The dog's kennel card said nothing of his history, including a prior bite to his previous owner. At the end of May 2023, a Los Angeles jury found the City grossly negligent and awarded her $6.8 million.
After trial: The court docket records an amended judgment in November 2023 and an acknowledgment of full satisfaction of judgment filed in May 2024, followed by dismissal of the case. We found no appeal.
Greene Broillet & Wheeler2023 · Superior Court of Los Angeles County, Los AngelesRead the full story → - $4.88 millionSettlementPaidCA
Football Player's Brain Injury Case Against School District and Helmet Maker Settles for $4.88 Million
Scott Eveland, a 17-year-old Mission Hills High School linebacker, collapsed with bleeding on the brain during a Sept. 14, 2007 game and was left severely disabled. His family sued the San Marcos Unified School District, alleging the head coach played him over the athletic trainer's advice after he reported a severe headache. The district's $4.375 million settlement was finalized in March 2012, following a $500,000 settlement with helmet maker Riddell.
After trial: The case settled with no trial and no appeal, and the district admitted no fault. The total combines $4.375 million from San Marcos Unified, backed in part by the county's joint powers insurance authority and its excess carrier, and $500,000 from Riddell, before fees and costs.
- $1.25 millionVerdictPaidNY
Broken JFK Escalator Traps Boy's Foot, Jury Returns $1.25 Million Verdict
On October 11, 1985, a nine-year-old boy's foot was trapped where broken comb sections left a gap at the top of an escalator in the Aer Lingus and Lufthansa arrivals area at John F. Kennedy Airport. The escalator kept running after his sneaker caught, and by the time the power was cut and he was freed, his right foot was crushed and permanently damaged. A federal jury found Aer Lingus Irish Airlines and Westinghouse Elevator Company, which maintained the escalator, responsible and returned a $1,250,000 verdict, $1,200,000 for pain and suffering and $50,000 for medical expenses; the claim against Lufthansa German Airlines was tried to the judge, who found that airline negligent as well. The court refused to set the pain and suffering award aside as excessive. Alan B. Leibowitz of the firm's predecessor, Simonson Hess & Leibowitz, P.C., was of counsel for the plaintiff.
After trial: Affirmed. The judge declined to set aside the jury's $1,200,000 pain and suffering award, so the $1,250,000 verdict stood in full.
Hess & Leibowitz, PLLC1987 · U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New YorkRead the full story → - $775,000VerdictReduced from $2.4 millionPaidNY
Bronx Jury Finds Landlords Liable for Courtyard Hole That Broke a Tenant's Ankle
Howard Menifield, 44, tripped in a hole in the paved courtyard of his Bronx apartment building in May 2011 and fractured and dislocated his right ankle. After a three-week trial in March 2018, a Bronx jury found the building's owners liable and assessed damages at $2,375,000. A high/low agreement made before the verdict set the recovery at $775,000, which Menifield received.
After trial: The jury assessed damages at $2,375,000, but a high/low agreement signed before the verdict set the recovery at its $775,000 maximum. The defendants were insured, and no appeal has been found.
297 results, largest first
Anapol Weiss shareholder Kristen Gibbons Feden helped secure $1.6 billion in default verdicts for 104 women sexually abused as children by former Long Island pediatrician Stuart Copperman, one of the largest cumulative civil awards against a single individual in U.S. history.
A Dallas jury awarded $1.1 billion against a trust fund heir who beat a 2-year-old into a permanent vegetative state in 2021, a verdict the firm calls the largest child-assault award in U.S. history.
A Clayton County jury awarded $1 billion to a woman who was raped at age 14 by an armed security guard her employer hired without verifying he was licensed to carry a weapon.
Joseph Bruno and Bruno & Bruno served as lead plaintiffs' counsel in a landmark class action brought by more than 8,000 Gentilly residents exposed to a butadiene tank-car fire in 1987, securing a jury verdict that included $2.5 billion in punitive damages against CSX Transportation alone, later reduced to $850 million on appeal and affirmed by Louisiana's Fourth Circuit.
Kevin Boyle of the firm served as one of three plaintiffs' co-lead counsel in the $800 million settlement with MGM Resorts for victims of the 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival mass shooting at Mandalay Bay.
A jury found the owners of the Park Social bar liable for a 2017 staircase fall that left a 57-year-old patron a partial quadriplegic, returning a $644,751,855 premises-liability verdict that the defendants have appealed to Florida's Sixth District Court of Appeal.
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.
Acadia Healthcare agreed to pay $400 million to resolve three civil cases arising from its Desert Hills and Familyworks foster care program in New Mexico, where licensed foster parent Clarence Garcia sexually abused multiple children in his care.
A class action filed in 2002 on behalf of roughly 400,000 residents across six north Alabama counties ended in a court-approved $300 million cleanup settlement requiring 3M and co-defendants to remediate PFAS contamination throughout the Tennessee River watershed.
A Richmond Circuit Court jury awarded $360 million to three former adolescent patients who were sexually abused by Dr. Daniel Davidow, the medical director of Cumberland Hospital for Children, during what he called routine femoral pulse exams.
Representing more clergy abuse survivors in the Archdiocese of New Orleans bankruptcy than any other firm, Herman, Katz, Gisleson and Cain helped push a five-year Chapter 11 proceeding to a $230 million settlement confirmed in December 2025, with additional recovery against Travelers Insurance still pending.
A Pennsylvania-record $227 million settlement resolved claims brought by 19 victims of the June 2013 Center City building collapse, in which an improperly braced wall fell during demolition and crushed the adjoining Salvation Army thrift store, killing seven people.
A San Patricio County jury awarded $198.2 million to Kristene Chapa, who was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and shot in the head at a public park in 2012, with the verdict holding her convicted attacker, his father, and their family pharmacy jointly liable.
A Champaign County jury returned a $535 million verdict, the largest known single-plaintiff verdict in Illinois history, against a psychiatric facility that failed to prevent the rape of a 13-year-old female patient by another adolescent resident.
Joseph Bruno served on the eight-member Plaintiffs' Legal Committee in a federal class action covering more than 17,000 people harmed when a corrosion failure triggered a catastrophic pre-dawn explosion at Shell's Norco, Louisiana refinery in May 1988, ultimately settling for nearly $172 million.
A Las Vegas jury awarded hedge fund manager David Moradi $160.5 million after Cosmopolitan security personnel beat him at the Marquee nightclub and left him with a traumatic brain injury, and a confidential settlement followed during deliberations on punitive damages.
A DeKalb County jury awarded $160 million to the families of Ewell Ynoa and Giovan Diaz, two young men shot and killed at a 2017 rap concert at the Masquerade venue in Underground Atlanta, finding Sony Music Holdings failed to protect patrons at the show.
A Cook County jury awarded Tierney Darden $148 million after a 750-pound pedestrian shelter toppled onto her at O'Hare and severed her spine, a record the city later settled for $115 million.
A DeKalb County State Court jury awarded $140 million on December 20, 2023 to the estate of George Hughes, a 63-year-old tenant who burned to death in a March 2017 fire at the Venetian Hills Apartments in southwest Atlanta, finding the landlord's fire safety failures caused his death, but the judgment did not stand: on October 31, 2025 the Georgia Court of Appeals vacated it, holding that the jury was wrongly instructed under general premises liability law in addition to Georgia's narrower landlord-tenant statute, and the case was remanded for a full retrial that remains pending.
A 6-year-old girl was killed in the parking lot of a Slidell Catholic school. The school's after-school Run Club sent children as young as six along a route that crossed the afternoon carpool lane while cars were moving. Her 10-year-old brother watched it happen.
A 43-year-old utility pole that Verizon had been told to remove in 1999 snapped and fell on attorney Maria Moser Meister at a Union City bus stop in 2017, leaving her with a severe brain injury and paralysis. In May 2020 a New Jersey judge approved a $125 million settlement, reported as the largest personal injury settlement in state history.
McGee Lerer Ogrin represented 14 of the 124 survivors whose claims were resolved in a $122.5 million settlement with the City of Santa Monica over decades of child sexual abuse by a PAL volunteer the city failed to stop.
A Bibb County State Court jury awarded $118 million, including $90 million in punitive damages, to Joseph Cason Jr. and his mother Betty Gill after surveillance video showed care home employees striking the severely disabled man at least 69 times. The December 2022 verdict against the Total Care defendants was the largest in the court's history.
On February 16, 2016 Daniel Ryals dropped his healthy 9-month-old son at Wendy Jo Strother's unlicensed in-home daycare in Mena, Arkansas. That afternoon Strother's daughter carried the baby into the local hospital with multiple skull fractures and bleeding in his brain. He is permanently blind and brain-damaged. Strother pleaded no contest to permitting child abuse and got probation. In November 2025 a Polk County jury awarded the family $110,000,000 plus $40,000 in punitive damages.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.