Client Success Story: $13 Million Jury Verdict for a Victim of Medical Malpractice

When this client came to me, she had been rejected by numerous other law firms. A lot of people had preconceived ideas about whether a jury would really appreciate the harm that she suffered. What that really meant was that they didn’t think juries would see the harm she went through as compensable. I guess because the case involved plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery, they thought, “Oh well, the jury might think that she’s vain for having pursued this, and they won’t want to compensate her even though she’s been incredibly harmed.”

What I saw was a client who was extremely brave to come forward. When you come forward with a claim like that, you’re saying, “I’m going to show my whole body to somebody else that I don’t even know because I know what happened to me was wrong.” I met this client and her husband, and I was so moved by what she had been through at the hands of this physician. The evidence showed that this doctor had not performed the surgeries properly and had not even treated her in the way that we expect doctors to treat their patients.

So we had a wrongdoer, and we had a person brave enough to come forward and tell her story. Those are the two things that I need to see in a case before I’ll take it all the way to verdict. That’s what we did in this case. We worked it up as if we were going to go to verdict, even though we assumed at some point the doctor would settle the case. She never did, and her lawyers asked the jury to award $0. The jury disagreed with the doctor and awarded her over $13 million.