A $1.2 Million Medical Malpractice Verdict Among Ted Warshafsky's Career Trial Wins

In 1985, a Wisconsin jury returned a $1.2 million medical malpractice verdict in a case tried by Ted Warshafsky, the Milwaukee plaintiffs' lawyer whose firm grew into one of the largest in the area. The award sits on the short list of results that independent press profiles point to when they recount his decades in front of juries.

Warshafsky (1926 to 2012) helped shape personal injury and medical malpractice practice in Wisconsin. Born in St. Louis to immigrant parents, he served in the Marines and went to the University of Wisconsin Law School on the GI Bill before founding the firm that still carries his name. Other lawyers ranked him at the top of his craft, and one colleague who watched him work called him, bar none, the greatest he had ever seen in cross-examination.

The detailed file on this particular case is thin. When a magazine writer later spread his old clippings across a table, Warshafsky stopped at the 1985 medical malpractice award, shook his head, and said, "I don't remember that one." He had tried so many cases by then that a seven-figure malpractice verdict, a large number for its year, had become one entry among hundreds.

What the record does preserve is how he built cases like it. He treated cross-examination as the moment a defense theory either held together or came apart, folksy on the surface and exact underneath. In a malpractice trial that meant fixing what a physician knew, when the physician knew it, and what the standard of care required, then putting the distance between those facts in front of the jury.

That method ran through the cases that are better documented. Two years after the 1985 verdict, he won $15 million against Wyeth Laboratories for the parents of a girl left with brain damage after a DPT vaccination, a result he called one of his proudest. It came after a fight that ran roughly a decade and forced the company's internal documents into the open for other families. Years later his firm reported a $2.9 million malpractice payout and pushed for release of the medical records behind it.

The contemporary profiles log the 1985 figure and the year, not the patient's name or the nature of the injury, and no public record shows the verdict reduced or reversed on appeal. In the press accounts of his work it appears plainly: a $1.2 million medical malpractice verdict, returned by a Wisconsin jury in 1985.