Evening rush hour traffic accumulated along a Los Angeles Freeway. A city bus driver approached the standstill. As he approached the standstill, he maintained his 50 mile-per-hour speed, failing to slow down. Like a runaway freight train, he crashed into the back of Kimberlee Watkin’s Chevy Volt. Stunned by the pain, Kimberlee sat in her car until paramedics arrived. Ultimately, she suffered post-concussive syndrome, a traumatic brain injury. While the agency admitted fault, they contested the severity of her injuries and described it as a mild concussion. Kevin Boyle and Matthew Stumpf of Panish | Shea | Boyle | Ravipudi LLP secured a $6,000,000 settlement for Kimberlee by enhancing her medical imagery to better visualize the gravity of her brain injury.
Kimberlee was rushed to a hospital, experiencing a painful and lingering headache. Radiologists located hemorrhaging in her frontal lobe, the area responsible for managing executive functioning, behavior, and emotions. She was released, but she checked herself back into a local emergency room days later with new symptoms: difficulty reading, memory problems, and fatigue. Doctors attributed her symptoms to a mere concussion. She knew something was wrong. As months went by, Kimberlee’s issues worsened, and she experienced ongoing signs of a traumatic brain injury.
Kevin Boyle and Matthew Stumpf of Panish | Shea | Boyle | Ravipudi LLP were referred to help Kimberlee attain compensation and prove her injury was dire. As Kevin and Matthew litigated, they urged Kimberlee to continue her medical examinations and return to work at her own pace. Eventually, she began working full-time again and earned herself two pay raises.
Simultaneously, Kevin and Matthew discussed Kimberlee’s condition with the opposing counsel. They asserted that despite her positive impact at work, her difficulties from the collision remained. Kevin and Matthew retained several experts, including a neuropsychologist who opined Kimberlee’s difficulties stemmed from her injury. Additional medical imagery found more hemorrhaging and cerebral atrophy in Kimberlee’s brain – the loss of brain cells and their neural connections.
Still, with Kimberlee’s success at work, the Defense contended her damages were minor and overstated. To combat those assertions, Kevin and Matthew worked with DK Global to augment their medical imagery and explain Kimberlee’s cognitive difficulties. Using Kimberlee’s post-incident CT scans and MRIs, four enhanced illustrations were overlaid onto a 3D model of Kimberlee’s likeness to clearly identify the damage.
During mediation, Kevin and Matthew shared the enhanced illustrations of Kimberlee’s brain injuries with the opposing counsel. After reviewing her damages and deliberating, the opposition agreed to settle the matter for $6,000,000.
Matthew Stumpf is a trial lawyer at Panish | Shea | Boyle | Ravipudi LLP and specializes in representing the survivors of complex injuries. Matthew has obtained numerous multimillion-dollar awards for his clients and prides himself on his dedication to attaining justice. Notably, he was on the trial team that obtained a monumental $41,864,102 jury verdict for a veteran who suffered catastrophic damages.
A founding partner of Panish | Shea | Boyle | Ravipudi LLP, Kevin Boyle specializes in representing plaintiffs in high-profile cases. Recently, Kevin obtained an $800 million settlement for the 4,400 families and victims impacted by the 2017 shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kevin received a Martindale Hubbell Peer Review Rating of “AV Preeminent” and is consistently named one of the “Top 100 Lawyers in California” by the Daily Journal.
