Jury verdicts go big in 2023

There have been only a handful of billion-dollar verdicts in Missouri history, and it’s not clear if there have ever been two in the same year — until 2023.

Those awards — a $1.8 billion verdict targeting a standard practice of the real estate industry and a $1.56 billion verdict involving Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer — lead Missouri Lawyers Media’s list of the largest plaintiffs’ wins of last year.

The two cases are among seven plaintiffs’ verdicts, settlements or judgments of nine figures or more that appeared in our Verdicts & Settlement’s database in the previous 12 months. No year has seen more than three such outlier wins in at least 15 years, and most such cases have been achieved through settlement or a court-issued judgment, rather than a jury trial.

The last year in which a verdict of more than $1 billion topped the list of Missouri plaintiffs’ wins was in 2018, with a $4.7 billion verdict involving Johnson & Johnson brand talcum powder.

While jury wins at the extreme end of the scale certainly contributed to the higher numbers in 2023, they are only part of the story. The median million-dollar plaintiff victory tracked by Missouri Lawyers Media in 2023 was $5 million, up from $3 million in both 2022 and 2021. The previous high was in 2017, at $4.25 million. Simply put, there were more high value cases last year than in a typical year.

Naturally, those figures caught the attention of the American Tort Reform Foundation, which named St. Louis as No. 8 on its annual “Judicial Hellholes” list, which it said was due to a number of “nuclear” verdicts of $10 million or more.

There have been more verdicts that met that metric lately — 15 in 2023, up from 10 the prior year. But the city of St. Louis accounted for just three of those $10 million-plus verdicts, and just two others were in neighboring St. Louis County. Another six were in state or federal courts in the Kansas City area. The remaining four took place in counties that don’t use the Nonpartisan Court Plan, which is used to select judges in the state’s metropolitan areas.

That includes the massive verdict against Monsanto, which was brought by three individuals who claimed that they developed cancer from exposure to the company’s Roundup weed killer. The verdict occurred in Cole County, which, despite being the seat of state government, is essentially a rural venue.

Matthew Clement of Clement, Van Ronzelen & Schulte in Jefferson City, whose firm took part in the trial alongside firms from Texas, said Monsanto moved its registered agent from St. Louis County to Cole County in 2021, thereby changing where the case would be heard.

“My thought is that Monsanto believed it would be a better venue for them in this case, which is why they did that,” Clement said. “My experience with rural juries is, while they can be conservative … they’re going to listen to the evidence, and if a big corporation is doing something they shouldn’t do, they’re not going to like that.”

(Monsanto, which denies that its product is unsafe, is seeking a new trial or to have the award reduced.)

Award anomalies

Tim Dollar’s 2023 trial record illustrates how outlier verdicts crowded out trial victories that would have topped the charts in any other year. Dollar, of Dollar Burns Becker & Hershewe in Kansas City, achieved the sixth and eighth largest jury verdicts of 2023 — a $70 million verdict in Platte County and a $40 million verdict in Jackson County, both in cases involving fatal motor vehicle collisions. Had those verdicts come down in 2022, they would have been the second and fourth largest verdicts of the year; in 2021, they would have taken first and second place.

He attributed the general trends toward large verdicts to the social anxiety jurors feel from political polarization, economic uncertainty and the pandemic. It’s a counterintuitive argument, Dollar said, noting many plaintiffs’ attorneys predicted those factors would lead to smaller verdicts issued by grumpy jurors forced to sit in a courtroom to hear other people’s problems.

Instead, juries appear perfectly willing to award hefty damages, so long as the facts of the case warrant it and the plaintiffs’ lawyer frames it properly.

“If you don’t have a case or your liability isn’t strong, you’re still not going to get a verdict,” Dollar said. “But if your liability is good and your facts are good generally, then I think you have the opportunity to see increased numbers just because there’s this generalized stress.”

For the defense

On the other side of the ledger, the five defense wins that Missouri Lawyers Media judged as the largest of the year featured multi-million-dollar requests that juries shot down. Among them was a March trial in Jackson County in which the jury denied both a wrongful death claim for the family of a man killed in a collision with a train, as well as a cross-claim by the driver of the car in which he rode. The wrongful death plaintiff sought as much as $7 million, while the cross-claimant requested $11.5 million.

“I have to say, juries aren’t blanching when large numbers are proposed to them,” said Paula Brown of Scharnhorst Ast Kennard Griffin in Kansas City, who defended Kansas City Southern Railway in the case. “But I still get the sense that they want to see that number supported in some way.”

Brown has been on the receiving end of big verdicts as well, including an $11.1 million verdict in June for the death of a man in an apartment fire. Brown said the key for defense lawyers is to highlight what the defendant did correctly, while the plaintiffs’ side argues that those efforts fell short. It isn’t enough, she said, for defendants to attribute whatever happened to a mistake.

“Somebody has got to be to blame,” she said. “That may be the defendant, that may be the plaintiff in the case. I think juries want that answer and they want somebody to point to.”

It’s confidential

Of course, most cases don’t go to trial. Of the 86 $1 million-plus cases in this year’s rankings, just over half were settlements. The five largest divided in a telling way: The two biggest were nine-digit class-action settlements in federal court, including a $500 million settlement over a massive data breach at T-Mobile.

The other three, ranging in size from nearly $24 million to more than $12 million, were settled confidentially. The submitting lawyers withheld details such as the parties, the venue and most of the facts of the underlying lawsuits.

The three top-ranked cases were among 23 confidential settlements of $1 million or more that Missouri Lawyers Media published in 2023, constituting more than a quarter of the 86 cases in this year’s rankings. In comparison, just nine of 72 large cases in the 2022 rankings were confidential.

David L. Grebel of Niemeyer, Grebel & Kruse in St. Louis was part of the third-ranked settlement of the year, a $23.7 million confidential settlement for a child injured in a boating accident. He also was part of the team that won the No. 3 jury verdict — a $745 million award in St. Charles County against a nitrous oxide maker linked to a fatal car crash. He also won an $11 million verdict for a man who lost an eye to a pneumatic staple gun, though it was reduced due to the plaintiff’s fault.

While those specific results had nothing to do with one another, the prevalence of such large verdicts in general is likely to hover over settlement negotiations, making quiet and anonymous resolutions to cases increasingly attractive. That’s particularly the case, Grebel said, when the right facts can bring a huge verdict even in conservative venues.

“It’s not a surprising result, and I think juries are smart enough to get that,” Grebel said of his jury verdicts. “I guarantee it factors in for the defendants when they evaluate cases.”

Reporter Rasmus S. Jorgensen contributed to this report.