There was almost nothing to see on the back of the car, since it was a low-speed rear-end crash with no crumpled metal and nothing that would make a stranger walking past the parking lot look twice. In a lot of cases that is where the story ends, because the photograph becomes the defense and the photograph is very persuasive to people who have never been hurt.
Two people were in that car, and one of them ended up with a lumbar spine injury that required a transforaminal lumbar interbody fusion, then a revision of that fusion, and he will need more surgery. The other tore her rotator cuff and the labrum in her shoulder, and both were repaired surgically.
Before trial, the carrier offered $45,000 to the woman with the shoulder injury and $5,000 to the man with the fused spine, which comes to fifty thousand dollars for the pair of them.
A Will County jury returned $925,523.01 for her and $2,685,957.64 for him for a combined $3,611,480.65 verdict. They deliberated for less than two and a half hours after a week of trial. Following the verdict, the Court entered judgment on the verdict with statutory prejudgment interest.
The defense in a case like this usually concedes the collision and argues that a collision this minor could not have done this much damage, so the property damage photographs get enlarged, the repair estimates get read to the jury, and somebody says the words "fender bender." The implication is left hanging rather than argued directly, which is that the injuries came from somewhere else, or that they are not as bad as the plaintiff says, or that a person who needed a spinal fusion after a parking-lot tap must have needed it anyway.
It is a good defense in the sense that it works often, and in this case it was an argument a jury rejected in under two and a half hours.
About three months after the crash the defendant died, for reasons that had nothing to do with the collision, and his estate was substituted in and the case was tried against the estate.
That changes a trial in ways that are worth thinking about if you handle these cases, because there is no defendant in the chair and nobody for the jury to look at, to size up, or to like or dislike, and there is no apology and no denial from the person who actually caused it. The human being at the center of the event is simply absent, and what is left is a caption, an insurance policy, and two injured people describing what happened to them.
Some lawyers assume that helps the defense, because there is no bad conduct to point at and no defendant to hold responsible in a personal way. In practice it cuts the other way as often as not, because a jury that cannot look at the defendant looks harder at the plaintiffs.
The verdict forms were itemized, and the itemization is the part worth studying. Juries do not always separate two plaintiffs cleanly, especially when they were injured in the same crash and heard about it in the same trial, and this one did.
| Category | Award |
|---|---|
| Past medical expenses | $215,523.01 |
| Future medical care | $10,000 |
| Past pain and suffering | $100,000 |
| Future pain and suffering | $200,000 |
| Past loss of a normal life | $250,000 |
| Future loss of a normal life | $150,000 |
| Category | Award |
|---|---|
| Past medical expenses | $735,957.64 |
| Future medical care | $200,000 |
| Past pain and suffering | $500,000 |
| Future pain and suffering | $500,000 |
| Past loss of a normal life | $500,000 |
| Future loss of a normal life | $250,000 |
Read the future medical line first, which was ten thousand dollars for the shoulder and two hundred thousand for the spine, because it shows the jury understood that one of these people was finished with surgery and the other one was not. That is a jury that followed the medicine rather than splitting the difference between two plaintiffs sitting at the same table.
Then read the non-economic categories. The shoulder plaintiff received $700,000 in pain, suffering, and loss of a normal life against $225,523.01 in economic damages. The spine plaintiff received $1,750,000 against $935,957.64. In both cases the jury valued what the injury took out of the person's life at more than it valued the bills, which is what a jury does when it believes someone.
The $45,000 offer to the shoulder plaintiff was 4.9% of what the jury awarded her. The $5,000 offer to the spine plaintiff was 0.2% of what the jury awarded him.
Looked at another way, the spine plaintiff was offered $5,000 at a point when his past medical expenses alone were $735,957.64.
When a defendant dies, Illinois's Dead Man's Act becomes the most valuable thing the defense owns. Broadly, it bars an interested party from testifying about conversations with the deceased or about events that took place in the deceased's presence. In a two-car collision where the only other person who saw what happened is gone, that rule can hollow out a plaintiff's case before the jury hears a word of it.
We took it off the table before trial with time-limited demands and steady pressure applied from a bad-faith posture, and that produced an agreement from the defense that it would not invoke the Act.
Roughly 36 hours before trial, the defense tried to take that agreement back.
It did not work, and the reason it did not work is the least glamorous habit in litigation, because every one of those conversations had been confirmed in writing in an email that went out after each call, summarizing what had been agreed at the time it was agreed. When the defense changed its position, there was no factual dispute left to have about what had been said. The court enforced the agreement as a stipulation, and the Dead Man's Act never came into the case.
The one thing in this case worth copying is that habit, because an oral agreement between lawyers is worth exactly what you can prove about it later, so send the confirming email the same day, every time.
Low-speed impact cases get undervalued because the photograph is the first thing anyone sees and the medicine is the last. The carrier's file gets built around the property damage and the offer follows the file, so by the time anybody looks closely at a fusion and a revision and a future surgery, the number has already been set by a picture of an undamaged bumper.
The answer is to try the case about the person instead of the bumper, put the treating surgeons in front of the jury, and let twelve people decide whether a human spine is more fragile than sheet metal, which jurors generally know the answer to because they have bodies too.
Two and a half hours of deliberation says they did not find it a close question.
John Risvold was brought in as trial counsel and tried this case to verdict. He handles car and motor vehicle crash cases and catastrophic injury and wrongful death matters throughout Illinois, and works with referring lawyers and co-counsel on cases that need to be tried.
On October 21, 2026, the court denied the defense's motion for a new trial and granted the plaintiffs' motion for prejudgment interest, costs, and interest on the judgment.
Verdicts are subject to post-trial motions and appeal, nothing here is legal advice, and the plaintiffs are not named at their request.
