Community

Conrad & Scherer Listed as the Top Florida Verdict of 2025

2025 was another year of eye-popping verdicts and settlements in the Sunshine State.

According to Law.com verdict search, the average outcome in Florida last year was roughly $23.9 million; the most common venue for resolution was Orange County; and roughly two-thirds of verdicts in the state favored the plaintiff.

Here are five of the largest outcomes that the Daily Business Review covered last year.

$826M: Meet the Lawyers Behind Largest Award Ever in Broward

Broward County jurors awarded the largest verdict in the county’s history: a whopping $826 million to be paid by Wells Fargo to the Seminole Tribe of Florida for mismanagement of a trust set up for the tribe’s children.

An amended version of the verdict—which came after nearly a decade of litigation—showed that those damages rose to more than $1.25 billion with interest.

Fort Lauderdale attorney William “Bill” Scherer, founding partner of Conrad Scherer, was part of the Seminole Tribe’s winning legal team. He told the Daily Business Review when the verdict came down in March that the decision was a “wake-up call for all financial institutions that think they are above the law and can take advantage of their clients.”

Ben Crump Behind Florida Jury’s ‘Record’ $779M Award

Prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump was one of the lawyers who secured one of the largest compensatory verdicts awarded in a single wrongful death case when Gadsden County jurors handed down $779 million to the widow of security guard Lewis Butler, who was killed during an armed robbery at an illicit internet cafe.

Butler was shot eight times by a gun that had been stolen from the cafe in one of several previous robberies, none of which were reported to police. Crump and his team argued that the Havana, Florida, cafe’s owner and manager never reported the robberies so they could keep the illegal gambling business running.

In a December press conference, Crump called to announce the verdict, Butler’s widow and state Rep. Michele Rayner, D-St. Petersburg, vowed to pass a bill in Butler’s honor targeting internet cafes.

“This was wrong on every level. It was a terrible wrong, it was an astonishing wrong, it was a monumental wrong,” Crump said at the time. “And the jury returned a monumental verdict.”

Florida Jury Returns $535M Verdict

A Palm Beach County jury returned a $535 million verdict in an estate and conversion battle tied to the $3 billion fortune of Turkish billionaire and former Boca Raton resident.

The verdict ended 16 years of transnational litigation that spanned from Florida to Turkey, and found that some heirs to the billionaire’s fortune had illegally converted hundreds of millions of dollars from Swiss accounts that was supposed to be used to pay out the will. A significant portion of that money was transferred to Palm Beach County through real estate transactions, cash and commercial assets that were placed in the defendants’ names.

In 2022, a jury awarded the estate more than $620,000 on a fraudulent transfer claim, but the trial court entered a directed verdict against the estate for conversion and dismissed the contribution claims entirely. A 2025 trial focused solely on damages saw the jury award $525 million in conversion damages, plus $10 million in contribution damages.

The complex case was heightened by its international scope, and, though tried under Florida law, required jurors to consider Turkish inheritance obligations.

“The case illustrates how foreign law may be imported into U.S. litigation when international estates are involved,” Jeremy Friedman, partner at Downs Law Group and co-counsel for the plaintiffs, told the Daily Business Review earlier this year.

$200 Million in Punitive Damages: Miami Jurors Hit Tesla

A Miami federal jury returned $329 million in damages, including $200 million in punitive damages, after finding Tesla was partially liable for a fatal 2019 crash involving an autopiloted vehicle.

It was the first verdict in a third-party wrongful death suit involving Tesla’s autopilot technology. The automaker was found responsible for one-third of the blame in the wreck and left on the hook for $243 million. The driver of the vehicle that caused the crash settled with the family of the victim killed, Nabiel Benavides Leon, and her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, who was severely injured in the Key Largo collision.

Tesla enlisted powerhouse firms Gibson Dunn and Clement & Murphy to spearhead its appeal of the verdict, which argues Florida’s statutory caps limit the company’s liability.

Florida Jury Returns $117.6M Against Expedia Over Confiscated Cuban Island

A Florida man was awarded over $117 million after a federal jury in South Florida agreed he was the rightful owner of a Cuban island that had been confiscated by the government and profited from by the travel company Expedia without any compensation to him.

The Cuban government confiscated the land from the plaintiff, Mario Echevarria, in 1960. Once untouched, the island was developed for tourism and is now marketed through vacation packages on travel sites such as Expedia and Booking.com. Echevarria was never compensated, a violation of the Helms-Burton Act, a U.S. law that allows Cuban Americans to seek damages from entities that have trafficked in property seized by Fidel Castro’s regime.

“This is a major victory not only for our client, but also for the broader community of Cuban Americans whose property was wrongfully taken and has been exploited by U.S. companies in partnership with the Cuban communist dictatorship,” Andres Rivero, partner at Rivero Mestre and attorney for Echevarria, told the Daily Business Review earlier this year.

Full Article: https://www.law.com/dailybusinessreview/2026/01/05/top-florida-verdicts-of-2025/?slreturn=20260105085134