Price Waicukauski Joven and Catlin, LLC obtained a $3 million settlement of a federal civil rights lawsuit brought by Jan and Chris Marten of Carmel, Indiana. The Martens claimed that State employees had wrongfully accused the Martens of withholding sales taxes...
A Hammond, Indiana family’s lengthy legal battle ended in triumph as the State paid $25 million to the family falsely accused of causing their 14-year old daughter’s death. Roman and Lynnette Finnegan and their children had sued several Indiana Department of Child...
On August 28 and 29, a Missouri federal court jury rendered verdicts of $129,211,337 for compensatory damages and $1,300,000 for punitive damages ($130,511,337) in favor of a class of Missouri landowners and against a telecommunications company and its parent company. For more than 12 years the companies used fiber optic cable on almost 800 miles of private property for commercial telecommunications without obtaining proper easements from the landowners.
The $129 million damages award compensates the landowners for trespass on 3,560 parcels of land in Missouri. The award equals $2.44 per foot per year for 796 miles of trespass for 12.6 years, which is the exact amount the landowners requested based on data from fiber optic easements across the country. When the unauthorized use of the fiber optic cables was discovered by the landowners, the defendants, Sho-Me Technologies, LLC and Sho-Me Power Electric Cooperative, refused to pay them anything even though they have received hundreds of millions of dollars of revenues from their fiber optic network and paid thousands of dollars to railroads and other parties for similar usage rights.
Ron Waicukauski, lead counsel for the landowners said, “This has been a hard-fought battle to defend landowners’ rights.