If the definition of a nuclear verdict in trucking is more than $10 million, there is a new entry on the list of court actions topping that amount.
A jury in DeKalb County State Court in Georgia awarded Avnish Dalal $16.6 million on Dec. 14 in a case filed against Brown Trucking.
Romi Jayswal of the firm of Deochand & Jayswal told FreightWaves the move to a jury trial came after a “disputed liability, where the offer from the trucking company was about $2 million.” Jayswal said the $2 million offer was not received until the trial was about to begin.
He said Dalal was 21 at the time of the accident in August 2021. It left him with physical injuries and limited mobility even after “several” surgeries. Dalal also suffered a traumatic brain injury “which has affected his life,” Jayswal said.
“I think the insurers and the trucking company pretty much took a stance where they saw basically no fault on the part of their own truck driver,” Jayswal said. “They took the stance that they did nothing wrong, which is why it ended up at trial.”
Reporting by the Courtroom View Network (CVN) from the courtroom trial site in Decatur, Georgia, said jurors assigned 60% liability to Brown and 40% to Dalal.
The CVN reporting described the incident as beginning with truck driver Ebans Tshongwe of Brown stopping his truck on I-285 to avoid a van that was moving through Tshongwe’s lane. Dalal was riding behind the truck. He said he swerved to avoid the Brown truck but did collide with it, hit another truck and then went under the Brown truck.
Reporting on the closing statement from Brown’s lawyer, John Dixon, the CVN article said Dixon presented video and data evidence “that he said showed Tshongwe acted appropriately under the circumstances to avoid striking the van.”
Dixon did not respond to an email sent by FreightWaves.
“Dixon added that Tshongwe did not have time to safely evaluate other potential alternative maneuvers as the van passed through his lane,” according to the CVN article. “Meanwhile, Dixon argued, Dalal was following trailing traffic too closely.”
The counterargument presented by attorneys from the firm of Fried Goldberg, according to the CVN reporting, was that “Tshongwe broke industry standards in failing to apply his brakes as soon as the truck’s acoustic warning system indicated the van passing into his lane. And Goldberg added Tshongwe compounded that error by failing to accelerate once the van left the lane.” Fried Goldberg represented Dalal along with Deochand & Jayswal.
Andy Marquis, a partner with the trucking-focused Scopelitis law firm, said while the $10 million number is an accepted definition of a nuclear verdict, the reality is “$15 million doesn’t even bat an eye too much.”
A more important guideline, Marquis said, is the relationship between the medical costs of a plaintiff in a trucking accident and the legal payout. A payout of $1 million in a case with medical costs that might top out at $10,000 would be a nuclear verdict to Marquis’ way of thinking.
And while the immediate medical costs with Dalal were estimated to be about $900,000, Marquis said the fact that there are brain injuries to a 21-year-old does portend a lifetime of significant medical expenses. “I’m not even sure that anybody would try real hard to say, ‘Gosh, that’s excessive,’” Marquis said.
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