A $1.2 Million Medical Malpractice Verdict Among Ted Warshafsky's Career Trial Wins
Won by Warshafsky Law Firm.
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.
What happened
In 1985, a Wisconsin jury returned a $1.2 million medical malpractice verdict in a case tried by Ted Warshafsky, the Milwaukee plaintiffs' lawyer whose firm grew into one of the largest in the area. The award sits on the short list of results that independent press profiles point to when they recount his decades in front of juries.
Warshafsky (1926 to 2012) helped shape personal injury and medical malpractice practice in Wisconsin. Born in St. Louis to immigrant parents, he served in the Marines and went to the University of Wisconsin Law School on the GI Bill before founding the firm that still carries his name. Other lawyers ranked him at the top of his craft, and one colleague who watched him work called him, bar none, the greatest he had ever seen in cross-examination.
The detailed file on this particular case is thin. When a magazine writer later spread his old clippings across a table, Warshafsky stopped at the 1985 medical malpractice award, shook his head, and said, "I don't remember that one." He had tried so many cases by then that a seven-figure malpractice verdict, a large number for its year, had become one entry among hundreds.
What the record does preserve is how he built cases like it. He treated cross-examination as the moment a defense theory either held together or came apart, folksy on the surface and exact underneath. In a malpractice trial that meant fixing what a physician knew, when the physician knew it, and what the standard of care required, then putting the distance between those facts in front of the jury.
That method ran through the cases that are better documented. Two years after the 1985 verdict, he won $15 million against Wyeth Laboratories for the parents of a girl left with brain damage after a DPT vaccination, a result he called one of his proudest. It came after a fight that ran roughly a decade and forced the company's internal documents into the open for other families. Years later his firm reported a $2.9 million malpractice payout and pushed for release of the medical records behind it.
The contemporary profiles log the 1985 figure and the year, not the patient's name or the nature of the injury, and no public record shows the verdict reduced or reversed on appeal. In the press accounts of his work it appears plainly: a $1.2 million medical malpractice verdict, returned by a Wisconsin jury in 1985.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Warshafsky Law Firm
All Warshafsky Law Firm proven verdicts →A federal jury in Wichita awarded $15 million to a couple whose infant daughter was left with permanent brain damage after Wyeth's DPT vaccine, a 1987 verdict the Tenth Circuit later reversed and sent back for a new trial.
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.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
Georgia Hayes, a Kansas City area ovarian cancer patient, sued pharmacist Robert Courtney after learning he had diluted the chemotherapy drugs used in her treatment. A Jackson County jury found Courtney liable and awarded Hayes $225,571,439 in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages, the first of hundreds of similar suits against Courtney to reach trial. The trial judge later found the award excessive and cut it by remittitur to $330,071,439, and that reduced judgment stood. Hayes herself and the case reporter covering the verdict both said she was unlikely to ever collect a significant portion of it.