Maui is one of my favorite vacation spots. I go to enjoy the island’s natural beauty and balmy tropical weather. But this report from the Maui News suggests that other mainlanders visit Maui’s sunny shores in search of something else: punitive damages. A jury there has awarded $43 million in punitive damages (on top of $10 million in compensatory damages) to a group of investors who claim they were defrauded in connection with their investments in a lakeside development in Tennessee. The defendant is a Chicago banker who resides part-time on Maui. The story says that locals cannot remember a larger civil verdict in Maui.

Bloomberg is reporting that a trial judge in Florida has reduced a $300 million verdict against Philip Morris to $38.9 million. The jury’s original award consisted of $56.6 million in compensatory damages and $244 in punitive damages. I haven’t yet seen any breakdown of the reduced award in terms of compensatory damages versus punitive damages.

Related posts:

Florida Judge Says $244M Punitive Damages Award Will Be Overturned

Bloomberg reports that a Philadelphia jury has awarded $6 million in punitive damages against Wyeth (which is now owned by Pfizer) for injuries allegedly caused by its hormone replacement drugs. For those of you scoring at home, this is the fifth punitive damages award against Pfizer/Wyeth/Upjohn arising out of hormone replacement drugs. Three of those have been in Philadelphia, and a fourth Philadelphia lawsuit on the same issue is already underway.

Related posts:

Trial Judge Reduces $75M Punitive Damages Award to $5.6M in Pfizer Litigation

More Punitive Damages Against Pfizer in Prempro Litigation: Philadelphia Jury Awards $28 million

A Mixed Bag For Pfizer On Prempro Punitive Damages

Jury Awards Undisclosed Amount of Punitive Damages Against Pfizer in Prempro Litigation

Arkansas District Court Vacates $27 Million Punitive Damages Award Against Wyeth and UpJohn

Nevada Judge Cuts $99 Million Punitive Damages Award Against Wyeth

The Daily Business Review (via Law.com) reports that a Florida trial judge has stated his intention to overturn a $244 million punitive damages award to an individual smoker. The judge said the award was “shocking” and was the result of passion and anger by the jury. He did not issue a formal ruling, nor did he say what amount of punitive damages he would allow.

Related posts:

Florida Jury Awards $244 Million in Punitive Damages to Smoker

In the past two years Pfizer has been whacked with a series of large punitive damages awards in lawsuits claiming that its hormone replacement drugs cause breast cancer. One of the largest of those punitive damages awards was a $75 million award against Wyeth (which Pfizer acquired in October 2009) in a Philadelphia case involving $3.7 million in compensatory damages.

The Legal Intelligencer reports that the trial judge reduced that punitive damages award to $5.6 million, roughly 1.5 times the amount of the compensatory damages award. The plaintiffs plan to appeal.

So far, Pfizer’s lawyers have been pretty successful in reducing the big punitive damages awards in these cases, but they haven’t been able to knock them out entirely. They got a $27 million punitive damages award in Arkansas vacated and remanded for a new trial, and a $99 million award cut down to $35 million in Nevada.

Related posts:

More Punitive Damages Against Pfizer in Prempro Litigation: Philadelphia Jury Awards $28 million

A Mixed Bag For Pfizer On Prempro Punitive Damages

Jury Awards Undisclosed Amount of Punitive Damages Against Pfizer in Prempro Litigation

Arkansas District Court Vacates $27 Million Punitive Damages Award Against Wyeth and UpJohn

Nevada Judge Cuts $99 Million Punitive Damages Award Against Wyeth

Those of you with an online subscription to the Los Angeles & San Francisco Daily Journal can check out an article entitled “Blockbuster Punitive Awards Fell Off in 2009” in the Jan. 27 edition.

The article refers to a paper we blogged about last year, showing that California leads the nation in “blockbuster” punitive damages awards (awards over $100 million). The DJ article notes we had no blockbuster awards last year. In fact, the largest punitive damages award in California last year was “only” $50 million, in Auerbach v. Daily. As I noted in this post, however, we average about one blockbuster award per year, so a single year without such an award does not seem statistically significant. It hasn’t even been a year and half since our last blockbuster (a $237 million punitive damages award in October 2008), so we can’t declare the blockbuster dead just yet.

Law.com reports here on an oral argument before the 11th Circuit in yet another case addressing the fallout of the Florida Supreme Court’s Engle decision. As we have noted in prior posts, Engle reversed a $145 billion punitive damages award in a class action brought by smokers, but determined that certain factual findings could be “retained” for future litigation. Now the 11th Circuit is trying to figure out what effect that decision has in federal court.

Related posts:

Florida Jury Awards $244 Million in Punitive Damages to SmokerFlorida Jury Awards $25 Million in Punitive Damages to Smoker’s Widow

“Smokers, tobacco, both winners in early Engle cases”

Jury Rules For Plaintiff in First Phase of Retrial After Reversal of $145 Billion Punitive Damages Award

After Reversal of $145 Billion Class Action Punitive Damages Award, Florida Smokers Seek Punitive Damages in Individual Suits

Plaintiffs’ Attorneys Win $218 Million Fee Award for Helping Obtain a Punitive Damages Verdict that Was Reversed on Appeal

This appears to be the first significant California punitive damages award of 2010. According to Los Angeles Lawyer Talk, a jury in Ventura county has awarded $5 million in punitive damages (and $2.7 million in compensatory damages) in an elder abuse case against the Fillmore Convalescent Center.

This Bloomberg article reports that the biggest products liability verdicts got even bigger in 2009, with the top 5 verdicts totalling 52 percent more than the previous year. The article reports, however, that the incidence of huge punitive damages verdicts actually declined:

Last year did reveal some bright spots for corporate defendants with a continued decline in the size of punitive damage awards. Punitives, assessed in addition to compensatory damages, are meant to punish the company for bad conduct and serve as a warning to others. The 10 biggest punitive damages verdicts against corporations totaled less than $1 billion for the second straight year.

That’s consistent with the trend in California, which also saw a decline in the largest punitive damages awards.

Bruce Nye at Cal Biz Lit has prepared a chart showing a breakdown of the compensatory damages and punitive damages awarded in the top ten verdicts in California in 2009 (as reported by the Recorder’s Legal Pad). As Bruce notes, only three of the top 10 verdicts included punitive damages, and none of them include a “blockbuster” award (i.e., an award in excess of $100 million).

As we observed in this post, a recent study shows that California leads the nation with 25 blockbuster punitive damages verdicts since 1985. That works out to roughly one per year, so a single year without such an award isn’t all that surprising. We’ll have to see what the next few years bring. Even if turns out that California juries have stopped dishing out blockbuster punitive awards, we’ll still have those “garden variety” 8-digit punitive damages awards to blog about. (Though we won’t be blogging much about the $50 million punitive damages award on top of the 2009 list, since our firm is representing the defendant in that case.)