As you may have noticed, we’ve been having some technical difficulties, which resulted in some garbled text being posted.  Those posts were removed, but I’ve been unable to add any new posts for a while. I think we’ve got everything sorted now and I’ll be posting again to catch up on developments I missed while we were down.

When we first reported on this $130 million punitive damages award against Tesla, we commented that the award was not likely to survive judicial review.  As expected, Judge Orrick in the Northern District of California has reduced the total award from $137 million to $15 million.  Reuters has a report here.

Judge Orrick cut the compensatory damages to $1.5 million (from $6.9 million) and cut the punitive damages down to $13.5 million.  That’s still a big payday for the plaintiff and his lawyers, and far in excess of the $300,000 damages caps that apply to employment cases brought under Title VII.

We previously reported about an Ohio jury’s award of $33 million in punitive damages against Oberlin College.  The trial court later reduced the amount of punitive damages to $18.8 million, after litigation over how Ohio’s cap on punitive damages should apply when compensatory damages are also capped (the court ruled that the two-to-one punitive-to-compensatory damages cap should be based on the uncapped compensatory damages awarded by the jury).

Today, the Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the award as reduced, rejecting appeals by both sides.  Insider Higher Ed has coverage here.

Forbes reports here on a recent Texas jury verdict awarding $70 million, including $40 million in punitive damages, to 10 Black workers who sued their former employer, Glow Networks, for discrimination and retaliation.

Law 360 predicts that a $148 million punitive damages award, given to the widow of a smoker, won’t survive appellate review.  That’s a solid prediction, in light of the Florida Supreme Court’s November 2021 decision in Sheffield v. R.J. Reynolds.  

Sheffield interpreted a 1999 Florida law that prohibits courts from imposing punitive damages on a defendant who has already been punished for the same conduct.  The Supreme Court held that the law barred punitive damages in a case brought by the wife of a smoker who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1994 and died in 2007.  The court held that the plaintiff’s wrongful death claim did not accrue until the smoker’s death, and therefore the 1999 statute applied, prohibiting punitive damages.

The $148 million award at issue in the Law360 story seems destined for reversal on the same grounds.

Reuters reports that a jury in federal court in Florida has awarded $30 million in compensatory damages and $80 million in punitive damages against 3M Co., in a lawsuit alleging that two Army veterans suffered hearing damages as a result of 3M’s defective combat earplugs.

The plaintiffs in this case are among nearly 300,000 veterans who have sued 3M over the earplugs.  The verdict in this case is the largest so far, topping the previous record by $22.5 million.

We previously reported on Tesla’s posttrial motions seeking to overturn a $130 million punitive damages award in a hostile work environment case.  It appears that the judge is skeptical of Tesla’s bid for a new trial, but may agree that the damages are excessive, according to this Law360 story.

Mitchell Morris of Butler Snow published this piece in Law360, discussing recent decisions in Delaware and Colorado that emphasize the importance of courts ensuring that punitive damages are not imposed without fair notice.

In 2019 we reported on the $8 million punitive damages award against entrepreneur Alki David in this case, one of several lawsuits against him that resulted in punitive damages.

The California Court of Appeal (Second District, Division Four) affirmed the award in an unpublished opinion.  David argued that the Court of Appeal should reverse the punitive damages because the plaintiff failed to introduce sufficient evidence of David’s financial condition.  The court ruled that David forfeited that argument by disobeying the trial court’s order to appear as a witness in the punitive damages phase of trial.

The court further ruled that, forfeiture aside, the evidence was sufficient to support the award.  The plaintiff did not present evidence of David’s net worth, and instead presented evidence only of his income (which was negative) and certain assets.  Other courts have held that such evidence is insufficient, and that the plaintiff must present evidence of the complete financial picture, including the defendant’s expenses and liabilities.  But the court here concluded that the partial evidence was good enough, because it showed that David was a wealthy man who could afford to pay a large sum of punitive damages.  Although this analysis conflicts with the holdings of other cases, the chances of Supreme Court review seem low, due to the forfeiture problem and the fact that the opinion is unpublished.