Largest Premises Liability Personal Injury Verdicts Never Collected

Appointed by the court as Plaintiffs Liaison Counsel and Co-Lead Class Counsel, Stephen Herman of Herman Herman and Katz helped negotiate a $7.8 billion economic and property-damage class settlement with BP covering more than 100,000 Gulf Coast businesses and individuals harmed by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

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.

Saltz Mongeluzzi and Bendesky joined the plaintiffs' leadership team that secured a $1.2 billion settlement for the families and survivors of 98 people killed when Champlain Towers South collapsed in Surfside, Florida on June 24, 2021 -- the largest construction-disaster settlement 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.

Hugh Lambert served on the Plaintiffs Steering Committee in MDL 2047, the sprawling federal litigation against Knauf Plasterboard Tianjin that produced a landmark settlement valued at up to $1 billion to remediate roughly 4,500 sulfur-contaminated homes across Florida, Louisiana, and dozens of other states.

A grade-school boy suffered a traumatic brain injury, a fractured skull and broken bones in July 2023 when a prototype Ford Mustang Dark Horse spun out during a demonstration at Continental Automotive Systems' Auburn Hills, Michigan test track and struck children watching from behind a guardrail. Continental conceded liability for the child's injuries but made no settlement offer, so the case was tried to an Oakland County jury on damages alone. At the end of a three-week trial in July 2026 the jury returned $896,467,970, reported by Courtroom View Network as the largest single-plaintiff personal injury verdict in Michigan history. Separate juries later heard the father's own bystander claim and the claim of the second boy hurt at the guardrail.

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.

Frantz Law Group secured a share of an up-to-$800 million settlement with MGM Resorts International on behalf of 199 victims of the October 2017 Route 91 Harvest festival shooting, one of the largest mass-casualty compensation funds in U.S. history.

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 26-year class action brought by thousands of property owners near Colorado's Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant resulted in a $375 million settlement against Rockwell International and Dow Chemical in 2016, with Paul DeMarco of MSD serving as co-counsel from the litigation's earliest years.

Hugh Lambert served on the court-appointed Plaintiffs Steering Committee that secured a $330 million class action settlement for roughly 6,000 St. Bernard Parish homeowners whose properties were contaminated when Hurricane Katrina dislodged a crude oil storage tank at Murphy Oil's Meraux, Louisiana refinery.

Hugh Lambert, a court-appointed member of the Plaintiffs Steering Committee in MDL 2047, helped negotiate a $248 million settlement against Taishan Gypsum and affiliated manufacturers, resolving the second major tranche of a decade-long federal litigation over sulfur-contaminated Chinese drywall installed in thousands of American homes.

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 Rio Arriba County jury awarded $485 million to a child known as G.S. who was repeatedly sexually assaulted by a foster parent licensed through Acadia Healthcare's New Mexico subsidiaries, despite documented abuse allegations against that foster parent dating to 2000.

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 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.