About Ben Crump
Widely known as Black America's Attorney General, Ben Crump founded the firm and has become one of the country's most recognizable civil rights and personal injury lawyers. He has represented the families of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and helped secure landmark recoveries including a $411 million truck-accident verdict for Duane Washington, a $641 million settlement for the children of Flint, Michigan, and a $27 million settlement for George Floyd's family. A Florida State University College of Law graduate, he serves as president of the National Civil Rights Trial Lawyers Association, and in 2023 St. Thomas University renamed its law school the Benjamin L. Crump College of Law in his honor.
Notable case results
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.
Ben Crump, with co-counsel Antonio Romanucci and L. Chris Stewart, negotiated a $27 million settlement between the family of George Floyd and the City of Minneapolis, announced by the family's lawyers as the largest pretrial settlement of a civil rights wrongful-death claim in American history. The city council approved the payment unanimously in March 2021, while jury selection in Derek Chauvin's murder trial was underway blocks away.
Ben Crump, alongside Louisville co-counsel Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker, settled the wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Breonna Taylor's mother against the City of Louisville for $12 million, the largest police-misconduct payout in the city's history, paired with a package of policing reforms the family made a non-negotiable condition of the deal.
A legal team led by Ben Crump negotiated a $10 million settlement between the City of Columbus and the family of Andre Hill, an unarmed 47-year-old Black man fatally shot by officer Adam Coy while walking out of a garage holding his cellphone. The city council's May 2021 approval made it the largest settlement in Columbus history.
Ben Crump and Antonio Romanucci, representing the family of Sonya Massey, secured a $10 million wrongful-death settlement with Sangamon County, Illinois, after sheriff's deputy Sean Grayson shot the 36-year-old mother in her own kitchen when she called 911 to report a possible prowler. Crump called it by far the largest settlement of any kind in the county's history.
Ben Crump and Richmond attorney Mark Krudys, representing the family of Irvo Otieno, negotiated an $8.5 million settlement with the Commonwealth of Virginia, Henrico County, and the county sheriff after the 28-year-old died of asphyxiation while being pinned to the floor by deputies and hospital staff during his admission to a state psychiatric hospital. A Henrico Circuit Court judge approved the settlement in September 2023.
Ben Crump and co-counsel representing the family of Daunte Wright reached a $3.25 million settlement with the City of Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, over the 2021 traffic-stop shooting in which officer Kim Potter fired her handgun after shouting "Taser." The agreement, announced in June 2022, also called for changes to the department's policing practices and ranked among the largest civil rights wrongful-death settlements in Minnesota history.
Ben Crump, together with Chris Seeger and Chris Ayers of Seeger Weiss, settled the Lacks estate's unjust-enrichment lawsuit against biotech giant Thermo Fisher Scientific over its commercialization of the HeLa cell line, grown from cells taken from Henrietta Lacks without her knowledge or consent in 1951. The confidential settlement, announced on what would have been her 103rd birthday, was the first time her family ever received compensation connected to her cells.
Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Each case is unique and depends on its own facts.
