Largest Tennessee Personal Injury Settlements

A Davidson County jury awarded Fox Sports reporter Erin Andrews $55 million after finding that the Nashville Marriott at Vanderbilt negligently disclosed her room location to a stalker who altered a peephole to film her without consent.

A Shelby County jury found two Regional One obstetric physicians negligently delayed a C-section through a prolonged labor, leaving a first-time mother's newborn with a brain injury and lifelong disability, and returned a $38,816,500 verdict.

A federal jury in Chattanooga awarded $22.2 million to a Franklin County couple after an epidural catheter placed for post-surgical pain control triggered a spinal bleed that left 62-year-old Bette Donathan permanently paralyzed from the waist down.

After a Spirit Truck Lines semi killed TDOT field supervisor David Younger and injured several of his crew on Interstate 40, Rocky McElhaney filed a wrongful-death and injury suit publicly seeking $18 million; the final outcome was not reported.

A Davidson County jury awarded $16,111,643 to Justin Bing, a 26-year-old Nashville marketing manager who suffered cardiac arrest, strokes, and permanent hypoxic brain damage after two physicians failed to recognize and treat a bile leak that developed following routine gallbladder surgery.

After a bench trial in November 2007, a federal court found that a Navy clinic physician in Millington, Tennessee, breached the standard of care by not recommending prenatal vitamins to a patient planning a pregnancy, and held that the lapse caused her daughter's spina bifida. The court entered a $13,690,648.17 judgment on March 31, 2008. The government appealed, and the judgment was set aside on October 9, 2008, when the parties' compromise settlement and a trust for the child were approved.

A Marion County jury awarded $9.4 million after a Cracker Barrel waitress refilled a customer's glass with a mix of water and commercial bleach instead of ice water.

Nathan Ling was handcuffed in the intake room of the Campbell County jail when officers beat him, breaking bones in his face and an arm, collapsing a lung and causing permanent brain damage. He was left on a concrete floor for about seven hours without treatment. A federal jury found the county liable for failing to train its jailers to intervene.

A Shelby County jury found Norfolk Southern 100 percent at fault after veteran conductor Thomas David Jordan was struck by a passing BNSF train while working between dangerously close tracks in South Memphis, awarding $5 million under the Federal Employers' Liability Act. Wettermark Keith co-founder Chris Keith was counsel of record for Jordan, and the Tennessee Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment entered on the verdict in 2009.

A Davidson County jury awarded Charles Ray Peterson Jr. $12 million after a two-vehicle chain-reaction crash on Christmas Day 2017 cost him both legs, but the signed judgment entered against the defendants totals $4,203,547 once Tennessee's statutory damages cap was applied to the verdict.

A Shelby County jury awarded tanker driver Donriel Borne $3,705,000 after a Celadon tractor-trailer rear-ended him in stopped construction-zone traffic on Interstate 55, and the case later set the standard Tennessee appellate courts use to review a reduced verdict.

After State Farm denied uninsured-motorist coverage and defended the driver who caused the crash, a Memphis jury held him 85 percent at fault for the collision that killed Kathryn Sadowski and injured her 90-year-old husband, Emil.

Tia Fitzpatrick-Young's $2 million wrongful-death suit accused Nashville's housing agency of letting crime build at the Edgehill complex, where a stray bullet from a dice-game dispute killed her husband, Glen Young Jr.; the outcome was not publicly reported.

A Shelby County jury awarded Julius Malone and his wife $2,519,772 after an ASF Intermodal semi-truck merged into his lane on I-240 in Memphis, and Tennessee's noneconomic-damages cap later reduced the judgment to $1,529,772.

Eddie Gentry, 54, a vice president of lending at Educators Credit Union, was struck in a Nashville crosswalk on November 20, 2001 and died eight days later. A Davidson County jury found driver Dereck Cook 75 percent at fault and set damages at $1,638,561. The court directed a verdict for Metro on the failed 'Don't Walk' bulb claim. Judgment after Gentry's 25 percent share of fault was $1,228,921.

Part of a surgical retractor was left in Cynthia Yebuah's abdomen during a 2005 kidney removal and stayed there for eight years, looping around her small bowel. A Nashville jury awarded her family $4.5 million. Tennessee's cap on noneconomic damages cut it to $750,000, and the Supreme Court held that the cap is one limit shared by an injured patient and her spouse rather than one each.

A Davidson County jury awarded $703,105 to a Nashville handyman who sustained a cervical injury when a vehicle operated by Acer Landscape Services collided with his, leaving him unable to perform basic tasks at the pace and volume his livelihood required.

A woman attending an event in the grand ballroom of the Crowne Plaza hotel in Knoxville was struck on the head by a falling ceiling tile and suffered a mild traumatic brain injury. A Knox County jury returned $600,000, of which $500,000 was economic loss.

A Nashville jury awarded $347,134 after a nursing home admitted it never administered insulin to an elderly diabetic woman during her five-day respite stay, leaving her in a hypoglycemic crisis when her family came to pick her up.

A Davidson County jury awarded Cinda Haddon $320,000 after an uninsured driver ran her right-of-way and left her with a patellar fracture that progressed to a full knee replacement.

A commercial truck rolled into a driver stopped at a Nashville red light, and a Davidson County jury awarded $277,966, including $165,000 in non-economic damages, for the rotator cuff tear that followed.

A trailer hauling a hot tub broke loose on U.S. 31W and struck an oncoming Nashville driver head-on, and a Davidson County jury awarded $125,143 for soft-tissue injuries and the aggravation of pre-existing conditions.

A Williamson County jury awarded a crash victim $111,502 after a rear-end collision caused a herniated disc requiring surgery, rejecting the defense argument that the injury was pre-existing degeneration.

A Memphis jury sided with in-house attorney Andrea Mosby-Meachem after her employer refused a physician-ordered telecommuting accommodation during a high-risk pregnancy, and the Sixth Circuit later affirmed the verdict in a nationally cited ADA ruling on remote work.