Clifford Horwitz
CHICAGO - Energy company ExxonMobil has pledged to appeal what it calls an "irrational verdict" delivered by a Chicago jury this week, which awarded $32 million to a woman who slipped on spilled oil at an ExxonMobil facility while working as a truck driver.
The jury delivered the verdict on Sept. 22 in Cook County Circuit Court at the close of a trial to decide the outcome of a lawsuit lodged by plaintiff Stephanie Johnson against the oil and energy company.
According to online court records, the trial began Sept. 10.
Johnson was represented in the case by attorneys from the personal injury firm of Horwitz Horwitz & Associates, of Chicago.
According to a release from the Horwitz firm, Johnson claimed in the lawsuit that she slipped on oil on the floor "at one of ExxonMobil's facilities due to the company's failure to properly maintain safe working conditions."
According to the Horwitz firm, when Johnson fell, she allegedly landed on her left hand, allegedly resulting in a condition known as "complex regional pain syndrome."
CRPS is defined by the International Association for the Study of Pain as a chronic medical condition in which someone who suffers an injury continues to suffer pain, sometimes including allegedly severe pain, potentially long after the underlying injury is healed and without any clear indication of the cause of the continued pain.
The condition is also recognized and defined by other medical organizations.
Lawsuits seeking damages for CRPS are often challenged in court by defendants, who may assert the plaintiff is exaggerating their claims of continued pain to extract a larger judgment or settlement payout from the target of their lawsuit.
According to the Horwitz firm, Johnson allegedly has suffered "lifelong, debilitating pain" from the CRPS that has allegedly followed her injury in the slip-and-fall incident.
ExxonMobil contested her claims at trial.
The jury, however, sided with Johnson, finding the company completely at fault for allegedly failing to maintain a safe workplace.
In a statement included in the release touting the verdict, attorney Clifford Horwitz, of the Horwitz firm, said: “This verdict sends a powerful message: no corporation is above accountability when it puts workers at risk. ExxonMobil failed to maintain a safe workplace, and a jury has now made clear that workers will not pay the price for corporate negligence.”
Following the verdict, ExxonMobil pledged to attempt to reverse the verdict.
In a statement included in published reports, an ExxonMobil spokesperson said: “This is an irrational verdict that is completely untethered to the evidence presented at trial. We will pursue all appellate relief available."
The verdict ranks as yet another so-called "nuclear verdict" delivered by a jury in Cook County's famously plaintiff-friendly courts.
The term "nuclear verdict" has been coined by legal reform advocates to describe verdicts delivered by juries awarding $10 million or more to plaintiffs.
Courts in Illinois - and in Cook County, specifically - have played a leading role in the rise of such "nuclear verdicts" in U.S. courtrooms in the past 15 years.
According to a recent report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform, for instance, Illinois ranked fifth in the country for producing "nuclear verdicts" from 2013-2022. And nearly all of Illinois' "nuclear verdicts" came from juries in Cook County courts, the report said.
Cook County's legal system has also routinely ranked high on the list of the country's worst so-called "Judicial Hellholes" - or court systems described as being so friendly to plaintiffs that businesses and other defendants targeted by potentially costly lawsuits struggle to obtain a level playing field on which to defend themselves.
Such lawsuit friendliness also carries real-world costs to everyone, legal reformers say, costing consumers billions of dollars every year to cover the costs of the so-called "tort tax" exacted by the politically powerful trial lawyers who bring such suits.
In their release, the Horwitz firm trumpeted the amount awarded by the jury to Johnson, noting it is the largest ever awarded to a plaintiff bringing such a CRPS claim, allowing them to use the alleged severity of her CRPS to multiply the payout received under a relatively straightforward slip-and-fall workplace injury claim.
