$4.9 Million Verdict for a Brain-Injured Boy Set a Wisconsin Record in 1979

In 1979, the family of a 9-year-old boy from Hartford, Wisconsin, came to Ted Warshafsky and his Milwaukee firm after a car crash nearly killed him. The wreck left the child in a coma that ran for seven weeks. With her son fighting first to survive and then to relearn the basics of daily life, his mother gave up her own job to care for him full time.

When he finally came out of the coma, the harm proved permanent. He had brain damage, partial loss of vision and hearing, and paralysis down his left side that took away the use of his left arm. He spent most of his days in a wheelchair, faced more surgery, and was left with learning difficulties that made steady work unlikely for the rest of his life.

Warshafsky spent his career taking on insurance companies and manufacturers, and he tried cases like this one for five decades. Profiled long after he retired, he had forgotten some of his own large results, including a verdict from the 1980s. This case he remembered. "At the time it was the largest award ever granted in Wisconsin," the profile notes.

For the Hartford boy, the trial turned on the full cost of an injury suffered in childhood that would follow him for life. Warshafsky's team laid out the decades of medical treatment ahead, the wages the boy would never earn, and the constant care his condition demanded. The firm's own summary of the case describes a child facing recurring operations and daily supervision well into adulthood, with little prospect of living or working on his own.

The award came to $4,983,966, structured to pay out over a period of 60 years. A recovery approaching $5 million was well beyond anything a Wisconsin jury had returned in a personal injury case before then. Milwaukee Magazine and Super Lawyers, both profiling Warshafsky decades later, describe the 1979 result as a verdict and the largest personal injury award granted in the state up to that point. No source records any appeal or reduction of the figure. By the firm's own reckoning, those payments would be worth close to $16 million in current dollars.