How to Win $10M+ Verdicts

Whether you're a solo PI with your face on a billboard or a managing partner running mass tort cases across six states: if you fight for plaintiffs, you belong here.

I'm Adam Ramirez, former managing editor at Bloomberg Law and Forbes. I covered trials at the Miami Herald and the Dallas Morning News and clerked for a federal judge after law school. The plaintiff bar is my beat.

Every week I sit down with plaintiff attorneys around the country. The thing standing between most of them and bigger verdicts isn't the other side. It's themselves.

Most plaintiff lawyers anchor on medical bills, multiply by three, and hit send. The lawyers winning eight-figure verdicts are doing something completely different.

$20 million verdict on a packet of Neosporin

Three law firms turned the case away before Sharif Gray's firm took it.

No expert. No lost wages. No medical bills. The entire course of treatment was a single packet of Neosporin. The defense's last offer, made during trial, was $250,000. Most plaintiff lawyers would have priced the case at $5,000.

The jury came back at $20 million. Several of the jurors told the team afterward they had wanted to give more. They had to negotiate down to $20 million.

Sharif's client was a 13-year-old boy named Charlie, a patient at a Virginia psychiatric facility. Surveillance video showed a residential manager dragging him across a dormitory floor by his clothing, which wrapped around his head and neck, and shoving him alone into a hallway. He was left there for at least 42 seconds, screaming, trying to strangle himself with his own shirt. Charlie walked away with bruising and scrapes. That was the entire physical case.

Sharif and his team stopped thinking like personal injury lawyers and started asking what the case was actually about. Their answer: trust. Institutional betrayal. Accountability.

To land on a dollar figure, Sharif used a test he'd learned from Joe Fried, the trucking lawyer and trial coach. Fried has a phrase for what most plaintiff lawyers do to themselves: we are our own caps.

His test for what a case is worth isn't what you find on a listserv. It isn't the last local verdict. It's what you'd accept if it happened to the most vulnerable person in your life.

So he told the jury the case was worth every penny of $38.4 million, looking them in the eye. He believed it. The jury did too.

Read how Sharif won $20M →

$15.2 million verdict on $161,000 in medical bills

Casey Geiger had $161,000 in medical bills to work with. He barely used them.

Julia Reidy was 22 and just graduated from Villanova when a drunk driver named Vincent Cellini crossed the median and hit her head-on. Concussion. Postconcussive syndrome. Permanent brain damage. The defense rejected the $250,000 policy limits. They rejected $1 million before trial. The jury came back at $15.2 million.

"We didn't really focus on the meds," Casey told me. "The only time we actually touched on them was in closing. We said, hey, look, her medical expenses are $161,000. You're going to get a copy. That's what it is. And then we moved on."

For damages, they built what Casey called a pain wage. What would Julia pay for one hour without the brain fog and the back pain? They asked the jury to multiply that hourly figure across her 58.2 remaining years on the actuarial table. Casey wasn't asking them to pay for medical care. He was asking them to pay for the life Julia was no longer living.

After the compensatory verdict, the trial bifurcated into a punitive phase. Casey trusted the jury and didn't ask for a number.

"We thought the jury was so with us, we said, you know what, we trust you. We're not going to ask you for a number."

The jury awarded $180,000 in punitives.

"In hindsight, we should have said now's the time to really hammer it home."

Read how Casey won $15.2M →

Put that next to Sharif's $38.4 million ask. Sharif asked for every penny and got $20 million. Casey trusted the jury and got $180,000. Same lesson, two directions:

Ask for the number you actually believe.

After the verdict, nine of the twelve jurors went straight to Julia. One sat with her for ten minutes, holding her hands while both of them cried.

"Your life is going to be fine," she told her. "You're going to get through this."

Three firms turned away Sharif's case. Two insurance carriers walked away from settlement offers on Julia's. Both attorneys refused to anchor on what was missing. They built the case on what was there. The bills, in both cases, were the smallest part of the story.

If you wouldn't accept the number yourself, the number is wrong.

One more thing.

I think about PI attorneys, probably too much. I read their website bios and blogs. I watch their commercials. Oh man, the commercials. I watched probably a hundred PI ads this year. So many that we made an award for them. The Torties.

And because I'm a Seinfeld junkie, I rewatched this one over and over again:

The pitchman introduces himself as "your favorite attorney." Collision. Calamity. Catastrophe.

He is not a lawyer. He's a 30-year veteran standup comedian playing a character loosely modeled on Jackie Chiles, himself a parody of Johnnie Cochran. Allied Injury Group is a lawyer referral service, not a law firm, which creates a kind of legal-advertising Inception: an actor playing a fake lawyer, advertising real lawyers, who aren't in the ad. It is, against all odds, working.

My law school friends and I quote this guy in our text thread. Finding an attorney? Laborious. Strenuous. Stupefying. If you have somehow never seen the original:

Outrageous. Egregious. Preposterous.

That's our first issue. Got a verdict worth featuring, a story nobody's covering, or a PI ad you can't believe is on television? Hit reply and send it.

~ Adam

Quote of the week:

“We didn't really focus on the meds.”

- Casey Geiger (left) on his $15.2M verdict the defense called a rash.