Then-Record $3.3 Million Wisconsin Verdict Against GM Over a Defective Rear-Axle Differential

In the 1970s, Ted Warshafsky and his Milwaukee firm sued General Motors over a defect they traced to the rear-axle differential in one of the company's cars. The firm argued that the part could throw a vehicle into a spin and pull it out of the driver's control. One of those spins ended in a crash that badly injured a young passenger.

The passenger was a teenage girl. The wreck left her with brain damage, a permanent injury with no path back to the life she had before. She had done nothing to cause the crash. The failure sat in the machinery beneath her, and the harm would shape every year that followed: ongoing medical care, lost independence, and limits on the ordinary milestones most children reach without a second thought.

Warshafsky did not stop at arguing the differential was flawed. He set out to prove that General Motors already knew about the problem and kept selling the cars anyway. "We found out GM knew all about this problem," he said years later. Much of his career ran on finding what large companies preferred to keep quiet, and this case followed that pattern.

These were hard cases to win in that era. Suing an automaker meant facing a defendant with deep resources and a long bench of experts, and it meant proving that one specific component, not driver error, caused the wreck. Warshafsky's team carried that burden through trial. They traced the spinout to the differential and laid the defect at the manufacturer's door rather than the road or the people in the car.

The Wisconsin jury sided with the girl and her family and returned a verdict of $3.3 million. At the time it was the largest personal injury award the state had seen, and one of the larger product-liability results in the country. General Motors appealed the judgment.

Rather than spend years fighting the appeal, Warshafsky accepted a settlement of about $3 million. The reduced figure still stood, for that period, as the biggest personal injury recovery Wisconsin had recorded.

The case did not end with the money. After the differential litigation, Warshafsky said, calls came in from around the country and more lawsuits followed. General Motors adopted the limited-slip differential.