A disabled young woman who claimed her injuries resulted from contracting a rare disease, most probably from a parrot in a pet store, has secured a multimillion-euro structured settlement likely to well exceed the highest award ever in a High Court personal injuries action.

The previous highest award was €7.5 million for a child with cerebral palsy. The structured settlement agreed yesterday for Patricia Ingle, now aged 22, will pay for the costs of her lifetime care.

It involves an interim payment now of more than €3 million with further payments to follow under a structured agreement to be provided for under new legislation.

Maryland's highest court says an asbestos award should only be reduced to reflect prior settlements with bankrupt companies if those companies admitted liability. Scapa Dryer Fabrics wanted a $1,684,415 verdict in favor of Carl Saville reduced, and the Maryland Court of Appeals complied - to an extent - in its March 23 opinion. Companies that have gone through bankruptcy but are frequent defendants in asbestos lawsuits have set up trusts to pay claimants.

"The substance of the settlement agreements between Mr. Saville and any and all (bankruptcy) trusts will determine the amount of the reduction of the judgment," Judge Clayton Greene wrote. We... direct that on remand to the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, the court should: 1 permit discovery for all settlement agreements between Mr. Saville and (bankruptcy) trusts; (2) and reduce the judgment... noting that denials of liability with no provisions for treatment of the trust as a joint tortfeasor will result in no offset for that particular trust...

We're sorry to rain on the parade of the ten contract workers who won a $100 million verdict against energy company BP in a Galveston federal district court on Friday, but the chances of that verdict surviving intact are pretty slim. That's because all but $300,000 of that amount represents punitive damages. If you compute the ratio of punitive to actual damages, you get 333 to 1, which is not a ratio that many courts will look favorably on. In addition, Texas caps punitive damages in most cases at $200,000 per plaintiff.

Still, that verdict should get the attention of BP, which faces similar claims by an additional 133 workers. All claim to have been injured by a toxic chemical release at BP's troubled Texas City oil refinery in 2007. Click here for an account of the verdict by the Houston Chronicle.

We talked on Monday to plaintiffs lawyer Anthony Buzbee of Galveston's Buzbee Law Firm, who represents the 10 workers who won the verdict, as well as the other 133. "The whole purpose of the case was to punish BP," said Buzbee. "I was very upfront [with the jury] that this was a punitive damages case." He admits that his clients' injuries were minor: All were released from the hospital the same day they were admitted. But, he contended, BP has a history of safety violations at this plant that it refuses to remedy. The Texas City refinery is the same facility where 15 workers were killed in a 2005 explosion, leading the company to pay $2 billion in private damages and a $50 million criminal fine (see third item). Federal and state regulators, he contended, are unwilling or unable to force the company to improve the safety of its working conditions. (The company is fighting an $87 million fine imposed this year by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.)

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http://www.law.com/jsp/tal/digestTAL.jsp?id=1202437108572&BPs__Million_Personal_Injury_Verdict_Nearly_All_Punitives