Genesee County Jury Awards Amber Briolat $8.3 Million After Auto-Owners Offered $300,000

On August 12, 2014, a driver pushed into the middle of a Genesee County intersection and struck the vehicle carrying Amber Briolat. The impact totaled both cars. Briolat came away with injuries that did not heal cleanly, the kind that reshape a daily routine and a working life.

Briolat brought her claim to the Mike Morse Injury Law Firm, based in Southfield. The driver who hit her carried coverage through Auto-Owners Insurance Company. Auto-Owners did not treat the case as a routine payout. The company disputed who caused the crash and steered the matter toward a jury. Before trial, it offered Briolat $300,000 to settle.

The firm took the liability fight head on through motion practice. The trial court ruled that the other driver was at fault, which closed off the argument Auto-Owners most wanted to put in front of jurors. That left a single question for trial: the value of what Briolat had lost.

Attorneys Chris Filiatraut and Lewis Melfi tried the case over five days at Genesee County Circuit Court in Flint. Firm founder Mike Morse and attorney Eric Simpson worked alongside them, tracing every source of recovery and assigning a figure to each category of loss. Jurors heard how the 2014 crash had changed Briolat's health and her ability to live as she had before.

Nearly five years passed between the collision and the trial. In May 2019, the jury returned a verdict of $8.3 million, roughly 28 times the offer Auto-Owners had made to close the file. The firm said jurors had rejected every argument and defense the insurer raised, and it described the company's approach as a strategy to "defend, delay, deny." At the time, the firm counted the result among the largest trial verdicts in its history.

No public record shows the award being reduced after trial or reversed on appeal. Auto-Owners had valued the same claim at $300,000.