Largest verdicts in Ohio

After nearly 30 years of litigation, Markovits Stock and DeMarco secured a $742 million-plus-interest settlement for approximately 23,000 Navistar retirees whose healthcare and life insurance benefits had been repeatedly reduced.

A federal jury found CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart liable for creating an opioid public nuisance in northeast Ohio, leading to a $650 million abatement judgment, the first of its kind against pharmacy chains in U.S. history.

A 26-year class action brought by thousands of property owners near Colorado's Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant resulted in a $375 million settlement against Rockwell International and Dow Chemical in 2016, with Paul DeMarco of MSD serving as co-counsel from the litigation's earliest years.

Jamie Lebovitz served on the federal MDL Plaintiff's Steering Committee for the Alaska Airlines Flight 261 disaster, representing 18 families in confidential individual settlements as part of a broader litigation that recovered more than $300 million for surviving relatives of the 88 people killed.

In the hours before the first federal opioid trial was to begin, Spangenberg Shibley and Liber helped secure a $260 million settlement from McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, and Teva on behalf of Cuyahoga and Summit counties.

A nearly decade-long securities fraud class action against Fannie Mae and its former auditor KPMG, brought on behalf of Ohio pension funds holding millions in Fannie Mae stock, settled for $153 million after Bill Markovits served as lead counsel for the class.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $134 million to a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, and the Ohio Supreme Court later struck down a statutory damages cap as unconstitutional when applied to child victims of intentional criminal acts.

A seven-year civil RICO and antitrust class action against Duke Energy Ohio over a secret rebate scheme that favored roughly two dozen large industrial customers at the expense of about one million residential and small-business ratepayers settled for $80.875 million, with Bill Markovits and Paul DeMarco serving as lead co-counsel.

A 12-year-old Cleveland girl suffered a profound brain injury and partial limb loss after touching an energized, downed Cleveland Electric Illuminating power line that had been left unrepaired for days following Hurricane Sandy; her family settled all claims for $60.7 million, the largest individual personal injury settlement in Ohio history.

After the U.S. Supreme Court's 2009 Wyeth v. Levine decision cleared the way for pharmaceutical failure-to-warn suits, Tim Misny assembled a second large block of Ohio plaintiffs harmed by a drug whose labeling omitted warnings about increased cancer risk, and secured a $50 million settlement in October 2012 as co-counsel in the related coordinated litigation.

After a 2009 Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for pharmaceutical failure-to-warn suits, Tim Misny built a roughly 1,000-case pharmaceutical tort campaign around a drug whose labeling omitted warnings about elevated heart attack and stroke risk, and one block of those cases settled for $42.5 million in 2011, with Misny working alongside co-counsel.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $39 million to the widow of a highway paving inspector struck and killed on Interstate 271 after the paving contractor failed to follow its court-approved safety plan.

David Paris and Kathleen St. John won Ohio Supreme Court certification of a 1.4-million-member class and secured a $31 million court-approved settlement after proving State Farm concealed a 1994 high-court ruling that would have entitled policyholders to enhanced uninsured-motorist coverage.

A Hamilton County jury returned a verdict of nearly $28 million against Utilimap Corp. after the firm's inspectors skipped a rotted utility pole that collapsed and killed Duke Energy lineman Keith Jester in 2014.

A Franklin County jury awarded $27 million to the estate of Gregory Coleman Jr., a 37-year-old bartender beaten to death by security workers outside the Julep bar in Columbus's Short North, finding the bar's ownership 80 percent at fault for negligent hiring and supervision.

A New Jersey court entered a $20 million judgment for Keziah Lewis, half of it punitive, against ride maker KMG for the 2017 Ohio State Fair Fire Ball failure that left her with catastrophic injuries.

A Cuyahoga County jury awarded $14.5 million to a boy born at 25 weeks with cerebral palsy and developmental delays after MetroHealth Medical Center's staff refused his mother's repeated requests for a C-section and watched the baby's condition deteriorate for more than three hours before performing an emergency delivery.

A consolidated federal class action alleging that Advocate Aurora Health secretly shared sensitive patient data with Meta and Google through hidden tracking pixels settled for $12.225 million, with Terence Coates and Dylan Gould of Markovits Stock and DeMarco serving as co-lead class counsel.

A federal jury in Minnesota found Toyota 60 percent at fault for a 2006 crash in which a Camry accelerated without driver input and struck a stopped vehicle, killing several occupants, and awarded the Trice and Adams families $11.4 million.

A Summit County jury awarded $11.35 million to a family whose son sustained permanent brain damage after their obstetrician used forceps rather than performing a cesarean section, and the verdict survived four years of appeals.

A Cincinnati jury awarded $10 million on May 1, 2026, after finding that TriHealth's Good Samaritan Hospital placed 69-year-old Terri Price in a psychiatric unit instead of a medical unit, leaving her without the nursing care and IV antibiotics needed to treat her advancing sepsis.

Cincinnati's Metro transit agency paid $10 million to the estate of Beverly Kinney, an 87-year-old struck and killed in a marked crosswalk by a bus driver with a suspended license, and agreed to overhaul its driver training.

Jamie Lebovitz threatened to take Boeing to trial in the Flight 427 wrongful-death MDL and, on the scheduled trial date, accepted a settlement of approximately $7 million for his client's family, a figure reported as far above what most other victims' families received.

Cooper Elliott won a $6.525 million judgment against the former Pi Kappa Alpha president whose chapter hazed Bowling Green State University student Stone Foltz to death in 2021.

A Franklin County jury found World Harvest Church and a daycare worker liable for beating Michael and Lacey Faieta's 2-year-old son, returning a verdict of nearly $6 million that was later capped and settled for $3.1 million.

A Delaware County jury awarded more than $3.6 million to a teenager who was raped by a pastor at Grace Brethren Church of Delaware, Ohio, whose leadership had ignored prior documented warnings about the man's conduct with minors.

Jeffrey Friedman won a $3.5 million jury verdict for a Cleveland kettle operator who suffered third-degree burns to 23 percent of his body when a formic acid drum ruptured at an Ashland Chemical plant, a result described at the time as Ohio's largest employer intentional-tort verdict.

A Hamilton County jury found JACK Cincinnati Casino 100% liable after a 69-year-old patron tripped over a collapsed wet-floor sign that a casino employee had walked past seconds before the fall, fracturing her kneecap and requiring surgery.

Bowling Green State University agreed to pay $2.9 million to the family of Stone Foltz, a 20-year-old fraternity pledge who died after being made to drink a full liter of bourbon during an initiation, in what the family's attorneys called the largest hazing settlement paid by an Ohio public university.

A Fulton County jury awarded $2,761,228 to the widow and estate of James Worman after a fabricated axle shaft sold by Hart's Machine Service fractured beneath the couple's 1973 Honda trike, killing James and severely injuring his wife Pamela.

A federal jury found two Columbus police officers used excessive force and unlawfully detained ATF agent James Burk during a 2020 call, awarding him and his wife $1.6 million.

Friedman, Domiano and Smith secured a $1.6 million verdict in Hillyer v. Painesville Township on behalf of the family of Christina Hillyer, a passenger who was fatally injured in a November 1994 accident in Lake County, Ohio.

A federal RICO class action filed on behalf of hundreds of Ohio and Kentucky real estate investors who lost tens of thousands of dollars each in a deceptive house-flipping scheme run by Blue Ash-based Build Realty settled for $1.3 million in 2023.

Marshall Nurenberg argued before the U.S. Supreme Court and won reinstatement of a Cuyahoga County jury's $625,000 verdict for a railroad worker who lost both legs after an insect bite on railroad property.

Cooper Elliott's Rex Elliott represented the parents of Ohio University freshman Collin Wiant, who died after months of Sigma Pi hazing, reaching a confidential settlement with the fraternity in a case that helped drive Ohio's 'Collin's Law.'

A Warren County jury acquitted Brooke Skylar Richardson on all serious charges, including aggravated murder and involuntary manslaughter, after Charles H. Rittgers and Charles M. Rittgers convinced jurors the newborn had been stillborn.

The Donahey Law Firm served as Ohio counsel for a mother whose seven-year-old daughter died after alleged medical negligence by a physician and staff at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, and secured an appellate ruling preserving the family's choice of nationally prominent trial co-counsel over the hospital's objection.

After a semi-truck jackknifed on black ice and killed Ronald Alleman in 2008, Tim Misny negotiated a settlement with the trucking company that included both financial compensation for the family and mandatory procedural changes to prevent similar crashes.

A certified class of Nevada insurance beneficiaries alleged that Humana secretly pocketed hospital discounts while forcing members to overpay their 20% co-share, and after a decade of litigation that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the co-payor class recovered $11.9 million as part of a larger settlement resolving the claims.