Missouri Injury Law Blog

Every year Missouri Lawyers Weekly comes out with their Missouri Top Settlements and Verdicts Issue espousing the largest Missouri personal injury settlements and verdicts for the previous year. According to the January 28, 2008 issue of Missouri Lawyer's Weekly, the largest Missouri medical malpractice settlement for 2007 was 2 million dollars. Due to confidentiality agreements with our 2007 medical malpractice settlement, we did not submit our settlement to Lawyers Weekly; however, our 2007 Medical malpractice settlement was 4.5 million dollars, more than double the highest reported Missouri medical malpractice settlement reported in 2007. This was a Missouri wrongful death case as a result of the alleged negligent medical treatment of post gastric bypass complications. This entry and the other entry discussing this case disclose limited information allowed by the confidentiality agreement.

Co-counsel with me was St Louis injury lawyer Robert Pedroli of Pedroli and Gauthier, we worked side by side on this case from the beginning. Often personal injury lawyers will bring in co-counsel after approval by the client based on the size, complexity, and time commitment required on these multi million dollar medical malpractice and wrongful death injury cases.

Recently, a client asked me what is the difference between a personal injury judgment and a settlement and which is better? Clearly, a settlement is an agreement between the parties often prior to a trial or judgment to resolve the case. A judgment is entered by the court after a bench trial or as in injury case more often a jury verdict. However, the more important distinction is that a personal injury settlement is usually paid out immediately in a lump sum or as part of a structured settlement. A Judgment may be subject to significant reduction to bring it within the Missouri statutory damage caps or because the judge rules it was excessive, a judgment is often appealed by the losing party, especially if it is a large judgment, which usually stays collection during the pendency of the appeal and may even result in overturning the judgment and thus no collection, and, most importantly, a judgment must be collected as it is not always voluntarily paid by the defendant. The judgment may exceed the defendant's insurance limits, it may exceed their assets, or they may even declare bankruptcy. Therefore, a large settlement is worth more than a large judgment.