Diane K. Watkins

San Francisco Unified School District's case was the first JUUL bellwether trial against Altria; after the plaintiffs rested, Altria agreed to pay $235 million to resolve roughly 6,000 pending e-vapor claims nationwide.

A federal jury in Hammond, Indiana found that Ethicon's Prolift transvaginal mesh was defectively designed and inadequately warned against, awarding Barbara and Anton Kaiser $35 million. A judge reduced the punitive damages, leaving a $20 million verdict that the Seventh Circuit affirmed in full in 2020.

Kathryn Gant died at the scene of a head-on crash on K-58 in Kansas on June 10, 2011, after a driver crossed the center line in a no-passing zone. Her husband sued the driver, the driver's parents and the family oil company. After a five-day bench trial in June 2015, a Coffey County judge found all of them liable and awarded $6,723,021. Under a pretrial agreement, none of the judgment could be collected from the defendants themselves.

A Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google's YouTube negligent in designing platforms that harmed a young woman identified as K.G.M., who began watching YouTube at age 6 and joined Instagram at 9. On March 25, 2026, it awarded $3 million in compensatory damages, split 70 percent to Meta and 30 percent to YouTube, plus $3 million in punitive damages. It was the first bellwether trial in the coordinated California social media addiction cases.

A Kern County jury handed Coleen Perry a $5.7 million verdict against Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon unit on March 5, 2015, in the first trial ever to reach a jury over Ethicon's TVT-Abbrevo polypropylene mesh sling.