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When Paul Gill worked as a mechanic for an oil company in the 1970s, he would use gasoline as a cleaning material and came into contact with it a lot.
Unfortunately, as a result of his exposure to the benzene in the gasoline, as well as from other sources, he developed a blood cancer, according to one of his attorneys, Patrick Wigle. Gill had to get a stem cell transplant and go on immunosuppressant drugs. "He developed a secondary colon cancer as a result of the immunosuppressive treatment, and he’s currently undergoing chemotherapy," Wigle said. Gill sued the oil company — now known as Exxon — and won. The jury awarded him $725 million, which Exxon is appealing. Verdicts of this magnitude often fall on insurers, who have a term to describe them: "nuclear."
"Nuclear verdicts are typically defined by those in the insurance industry as verdicts which exceed $10 million," said Chad Marzen, a professor of business law at Penn State's Smeal College of Business. "There's also a related term known as a thermonuclear verdict, which involves jury verdicts in excess of $100 million."
The frequency of large verdicts has arguably been increasing over the past decade or so, though it depends on how you slice the data. Different analyses give
different results.
Their size, however, has clearly been growing. The average personal injury compensation awarded by juries increased around 250% between 2009 and 2019, according to the Swiss Re Institute. In 2023, there were 89 verdicts of more than $10 million in the United States, 27 of them over $100 million — a record
, according to Marathon Strategies. By Marzen and his colleagues’ count, nuclear verdicts between 2012 and 2021 totaled $431 billion. This is making insurers increasingly nervous.
"Our civil justice system should be predictable, stable, efficient. And these verdicts are not predictable," said Rhonda Hurwitz, senior director of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. While many of the verdicts at the $1 billion-plus end of the spectrum are punitive, designed to punish bad behavior, according to the Swiss Re Institute, most verdicts that qualify as "nuclear" are not. Rather, said Hurwitz, they’re driven by compensation for pain and suffering — experiences that are very hard to quantify.
"We’re not saying that if there is a legitimate injury that they shouldn’t have their ability to receive compensation," said Matt Webb, senior vice president for legal reform policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform. "What the concern is, though, is when you look at verdicts in the nuclear category, there’s not any rational basis for where those numbers are coming from. I mean, literally numbers are being picked out of thin air." | 
