Top Wisconsin Personal Injury Verdicts and Settlements

Power Rogers LLP recovered $100 million for Rev. Scott and Janet Willis after six of their nine children were killed when a mudflap assembly fell from a tractor-trailer on I-94 and ignited their minivan, a case that ultimately exposed an Illinois license-bribery scheme and sent Governor George Ryan to federal prison.

Robert Habush won a $99.25 million Milwaukee County jury verdict for the widows of three ironworkers killed when the Big Blue crane collapsed at Miller Park, though the $94 million punitive portion was later vacated and the case settled for about $30 million.

A Racine County jury found Hyundai's driver-seat and head-restraint design defective and awarded Edward and Susan Vanderventer $38.1 million, the largest single-plaintiff compensatory verdict in Wisconsin history, later upheld on appeal.

A Walworth County jury found Waukesha Memorial Hospital liable after a nurse pushed air into a two-week-old premature infant's IV line during a blood transfusion, sending emboli to his brain and leaving him with permanent quadriplegia and no usable speech.

A St. Croix County jury awarded $29 million to a Wisconsin boy born with cerebral palsy after a certified nurse-midwife failed to call the on-call obstetrician when his fetal heart rate collapsed during labor.

A Milwaukee County jury awarded $25.3 million after emergency room providers failed to tell Ascaris Mayo that her symptoms could mean a Strep A infection, an omission that cost her all four limbs, though the Wisconsin Supreme Court later reinstated the state's $750,000 cap on noneconomic damages.

A Milwaukee jury verdict and a related settlement delivered $25.24 million to a family after an unlicensed first-year resident spent 11 hours treating their teenage daughter for constipation while a twisted bowel killed the tissue it fed.

A six-year-old girl suffered cardiac arrest and permanent brain damage when a surgeon used a morcellator he had never operated during a routine spleen removal, and the case settled for $17.3 million, the largest sum reported to the Wisconsin Law Journal in 2009.

The family of a three-year-old girl who died of E. coli traced to contaminated beef at a South Milwaukee Sizzler reached a $13.5 million settlement, among the largest food-borne-illness recoveries in the country.

A consolidated federal class action alleging that Advocate Aurora Health secretly shared sensitive patient data with Meta and Google through hidden tracking pixels settled for $12.225 million, with Terence Coates and Dylan Gould of Markovits Stock and DeMarco serving as co-lead class counsel.

Cannon & Dunphy recovered $12 million for two families after an illegally overloaded cement truck ran a red light in Waukesha County, killing a van's driver and leaving a passenger with permanent brain injuries.

A physician's morphine overdose left an 8-month-old boy at a La Crosse County, Wisconsin hospital with permanent brain damage, and the family's medical-malpractice claim resolved in a $10 million settlement handled by Cannon & Dunphy.

A 10-year-old boy was left with severe brain damage after the arterial and venous lines of a heart-lung machine were connected in reverse during open-heart surgery, and Cannon & Dunphy resolved the case for $10 million, reported as the first eight-figure personal injury settlement in Wisconsin history.

An 11-year-old boy lost his left arm in a commercial Laundromat washer whose door could be opened mid-cycle, and Cannon & Dunphy reached a multimillion-dollar product-liability recovery against the Belgian manufacturer and the machine's suppliers.

A federal jury in Milwaukee awarded three men poisoned by lead paint as children $6 million against Sherwin-Williams, DuPont, and Armstrong, a verdict the Seventh Circuit later reversed.

Ted Warshafsky won a $4,983,966 award for a 9-year-old boy left with brain damage after a near-fatal car crash, the largest personal injury recovery in Wisconsin history at the time.

Habush Habush & Rottier recovered $4.5 million for a Green Bay woman whose left leg was amputated after a Veolia Solid Waste Midwest garbage truck ran her over in a downtown crosswalk while she had the walk signal.

A Milwaukee County jury awarded a sexual assault survivor $4.1 million, including $1 million in punitive damages, against Karlos Soriano-Cabrera, the former C-Viche restaurateur already convicted and imprisoned for assaulting multiple women.

Benjamin Wagner and Molly Lavin of Habush Habush & Rottier won a $4 million punitive damages verdict in Kenosha County after Helen Ende, an 89-year-old dementia patient, wandered out of a short-staffed assisted living facility and died of hypothermia.

Daniel A. Rottier and Christopher Rogers of Habush Habush & Rottier reached a $4 million settlement for a Wisconsin excavating worker whose legs were crushed when a defective Hendrix quick coupler let a bucket fall on him.

A Wisconsin jury returned a then-record $3.3 million verdict in 1976 for a teenage girl left brain damaged when a defective rear-axle differential in a General Motors car caused a crash, and GM settled for about $3 million after appealing.

A Milwaukee spine surgeon was set to operate on the right side of Ken Plants's spine in 2004 and cut the left instead; Ted Warshafsky's firm settled the case for $2.9 million in 2009.

Ted Warshafsky argued that a farm grinding machine's emergency shutoff was defectively designed, and recovered $2 million for the man it maimed.

A 1985 Wisconsin jury returned a $1.2 million medical malpractice verdict for Ted Warshafsky, one of the career results that independent press profiles of his Milwaukee firm point to.