$900 Million Nursing Home Verdict Won Against No Defense

This verdict needs its asterisk stated up front. The $900 million a Gainesville jury awarded Joseph Webb in February 2012 was returned in a courtroom with no defense lawyer in it, against companies that had already defaulted and could not pay, and less than two years later a Florida appeals court erased the judgment entirely. It remains part of the historical record of the Trans Healthcare litigation, and of how far juries were willing to go once they heard the evidence uncontested, but it was never money.

Joseph Webb was a vulnerable adult who needed round-the-clock care after a stroke. At the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center in Gainesville, according to the complaint his limited guardian Rose Webb filed in June 2006, he was so badly neglected that he developed severe infected bedsores, suffered malnutrition and dehydration, and ultimately lost a leg below the knee. The suit against Trans Healthcare Inc. and Trans Health Management Inc. pleaded ordinary negligence, exploitation of a vulnerable adult under section 415.1111 of the Florida Statutes, and punitive damages, and it was brought by the Tampa firm Wilkes & McHugh, now Wilkes & Associates, whose lawyers Bennie Lazzara Jr., Isaac Ruiz-Carus, and Joanna Greber appear as Webb's counsel in the appellate record.

By the time the case approached trial, the defendants had effectively ceased to exist as functioning companies. A Maryland court had put Trans Healthcare Inc. and its affiliates into receivership in January 2009, the receiver had discharged the companies' defense counsel, and in September 2011 the trial court entered defaults on all claims. On the morning of trial, February 6, 2012, an out-of-state attorney appeared and asked to be admitted pro hac vice to defend the companies. The trial judge said no. The three-day damages trial went forward with the plaintiff's evidence, in the appellate court's later words, unfettered, and the jury awarded $100 million in compensatory damages on the negligence claim, $100 million on the exploitation claim, and $700 million in punitive damages.

The appeal undid it. In December 2013, the First District Court of Appeal held that refusing the pro hac vice appearance was an abuse of discretion that gave Webb an exclusive three-day audience with the jury, reversed the $900 million judgment in its entirety, and sent the case back for a new trial. The defense side publicized the win, and in May 2014 the Florida Supreme Court declined to take Webb's case up, leaving the reversal final.

There was no second $900 million. The real endgame played out in Tampa's federal bankruptcy court, where the Webb estate had filed a $900 million claim alongside five other estates of Trans Healthcare residents represented by the same firm, all holding or pursuing what the Eleventh Circuit later called empty-chair verdicts against the chain's hollowed-out entities. After a twelve-day bench trial over where the chain's assets had gone, the six estates settled with the remaining defendants for a combined $23.7 million. Webb's case is best read this way: a jury put an enormous number on uncontested proof of his suffering, an appellate court threw that number out on procedural fairness grounds, and what his estate finally recovered was a modest share of a settlement that, across all six estates, came to pennies on the dollar.