Civil Rights Verdicts and Settlements

Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis served as court-appointed co-lead counsel in the multidistrict litigation over Capital One's 2019 data breach, which exposed the personal information of roughly 98 million U.S. customers. The $190 million settlement won final approval in 2022 as one of the largest data breach recoveries in U.S. history.

As court-appointed lead plaintiffs' counsel, Morgan & Morgan's John Yanchunis negotiated the $117.5 million settlement resolving claims from Yahoo's 2013-2016 data breaches, the largest theft of personal data in history, touching roughly 3 billion accounts worldwide. Judge Lucy Koh approved the fund in 2020 after rejecting an earlier version as inadequate.

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.

A Haitian-American urological surgeon was subjected to a felony-level takedown on the Santa Monica Freeway after LAPD ran the plates on his rental car and received a stolen-vehicle alert caused by Budget Rent-A-Car's own plate error.

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.

Gregory Gross, an Army veteran, was left paralyzed after Yuba City officers slammed him to the ground during a 2020 traffic stop, breaking his neck; Moseley Collins secured a $20 million settlement in July 2023.

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.

Stritmatter Kessler Koehler Moore secured a $10 million settlement from the City of Seattle on behalf of more than 50 protesters who were struck by blast balls, tear gas, and other crowd-control weapons deployed by Seattle Police Department officers during the May and June 2020 George Floyd demonstrations.

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.

E. Spencer Parris and G. Christopher Olson of Martin and Jones secured a $7.52 million settlement for Dwayne Allen Dail, who spent 18 years in a North Carolina prison before DNA evidence identified the actual perpetrator and cleared his name.

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.

Louisville agreed to pay $375,000 to resolve a federal civil rights lawsuit after a judge found that LMPD Detective Kevin Crawford unlawfully detained and searched 18-year-old Tae-Ahn Lea during a 2018 traffic stop that was captured on video and spread widely online.

A federal jury awarded Edward Nance $350,000 after Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke violently handcuffed him during a 2007 traffic stop, tearing both rotator cuffs and ending his ability to work.

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.