Largest verdicts in Utah
8 independently-sourced personal-injury results from Utah firms, largest first. Each links to the full story — the firm, the attorneys, and the record behind the number.
A New Mexico jury awarded $58.5 million, believed at the time to be the state's largest truck verdict, to the family of Kevin Udy, a mechanical engineer killed in 2010 when a tanker truck turned into his path on a highway near Carlsbad.
A federal jury in Utah awarded $52.2 million to the survivors of Rulon Allred, believed at the time to be the largest wrongful death verdict in state history, against the woman who confessed in print to killing him 15 years earlier.
Siegfried and Jensen attorneys, led by Joseph Steele, were appointed Special Assistant Attorneys General in the Utah Attorney General's action against Eli Lilly, securing a $24 million settlement over the company's decade-long campaign to push its antipsychotic Zyprexa to Medicaid patients for conditions the FDA had never approved.
Parker and McConkie secured a $13.5 million settlement for the family of Lauren McCluskey, a University of Utah track athlete murdered on campus after police failed to act on her repeated stalking reports.
The University of Utah agreed to pay $5 million to the parents of Zhifan Dong, a 19-year-old international student killed by her boyfriend at a Salt Lake City hotel in February 2022, after an internal review confirmed university staff missed repeated warning signs that she was in danger.
A Weber County jury awarded $2.5 million in non-economic damages ($1.875 million after a 25 percent comparative-fault reduction) to the widow of a Utah man fatally struck by a New Prime semi-truck near his broken-down vehicle on the I-15 shoulder. The Utah Court of Appeals later reversed the verdict and remanded for a new trial.
Salt Lake County paid $1.5 million to the mother of a 25-year-old woman who died of methamphetamine toxicity at the county jail after nursing staff dismissed her overdose symptoms as a panic attack and left her unmonitored in a prone position.
Utah's Department of Transportation paid $1.45 million to resolve wrongful-death and injury claims brought by survivors and families of four Chinese tourists killed when a tour bus rolled over on a freshly resurfaced section of State Road 12 near Bryce Canyon in September 2019.