Congratulations to the team at Gray Broughton, PLLC, for securing a unanimous $20 million noneconomic damages verdict on an institutional abuse case. The verdict was more than three times the plaintiff’s demand, and a full 80 times more than the defense’s final offer. The team used techniques learned from Nicholas Rowley, as well as Keith Mitnik’s Don’t Eat the Bruises, to achieve this phenomenal verdict. The plaintiff's team included attorneys Zac Grubaugh, Nathan Hittle, Sharif Gray, and Gray Broughton, and paralegal Lara Bradshaw.
Case Summary
Aiden Smith* was just thirteen years old, and a patient at a psychiatric residential treatment facility, when he was physically grabbed, dragged across a dormitory floor by his clothing, and shoved alone into a hallway by the facility's residential manager.
The incident was captured on dormitory surveillance video and viewed by a sheriff's deputy. While the footage was not saved, the deputy described it as showing Aiden screaming, seeking help, and attempting to strangle himself with his own shirt. He was alone in that hallway for at least forty-two seconds before another staff member arrived.
Aiden had a significant and well-documented history of trauma, including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse as a young child, along with multiple prior psychiatric hospitalizations. The treatment facility and the residential manager were fully aware of his history, his diagnoses, his triggers, and his propensity for self-harm.
“Aiden had been entrusted to [the treatment facility] care precisely because of the severity of his needs,” explains Sharif Gray. “His physical injuries from the incident were superficial, treated with a single packet of Neosporin…. Aiden's damages were entirely emotional and psychological.”
The plaintiff team demanded $6 million; the defense offered $250,000.
*The plaintiff's name has been changed.
The Pretrial Demand and the Defense’s Lowball Settlement Offer
The plaintiff team demanded policy limits, $6 million, before trial. They asked for no economic damages of any kind; they presented no expert witness, and focused only on pursuing compensation for their client’s pain and suffering.
At the forced judicial settlement conference, the defense offered $60,000. The week prior to trial, they offered $500,000. During trial, the defense lowered their offer to just $250,000.
Key Issues at Trial
The case, tried over five days, presented several contested issues. The defense aggressively challenged causation and damages, arguing through their retained psychiatric expert that the incident had no meaningful impact on Aiden's treatment needs, given his extensive pre-existing psychiatric history. The defense’s doctor characterized the incident as "relatively minuscule” and a "drop of ice on an iceberg" of prior trauma.
The treatment facility’s primary liability defense was the residential manager’s scope of employment: that she was acting outside the scope of her employment when the incident occurred, which would have insulated the institution from vicarious liability. The defense also raised contributory negligence and self-defense points, arguing that Aiden was the aggressor and that the residential manager was responding to a physical threat.
By the time the plaintiff’s father contacted the team at Gray Broughton, three other law firms had turned down the case.
Case Theme
“The case was built around a single theme,” explains Sharif. “Trust. We carried that theme through every phase of the trial. Our first words to the jury in opening were:
Good morning. [...] Every one of us has taken a loved one—be it a child, an elderly parent—and taken them to a school, a treatment center, a nursing home, or a hospital. We did our research. We spoke with the people there. We shook their hands.
And ultimately, we trusted that when we walked away [...] that our loved one would be safe.
The case that you are going to hear over the next couple of days is about an institution that offered that trust and then broke it. It's about an institution that not only broke that trust, but when asked for accountability, refuses it."
The plaintiff team called six witnesses: the defendant (via deposition clips), the deputy who viewed the later-deleted surveillance video, Aiden, Aiden’s father, a family friend, and the treatment facility's corporate designee (via deposition clips). They then used the defense's own case against them, turning the treatment facility's corporate witnesses, training materials, promotional videos, and stated core values into evidence of institutional hypocrisy.
The missing hallway footage became one of the most powerful elements of the trial. Through discovery, the plaintiff team established that the hallway cameras were operational; the deputy’s testimony established what the footage showed, and the treatment facility made the decision not to preserve it. The jury never saw the hallway footage, but they knew what was on it—and why it was likely destroyed.
Taking Down the Defense Medical Expert
Grubaugh, acting as the primary attorney on the case, established the standards of a proper forensic evaluation—impartial, objective, complete—and then demonstrated, point by point, that the defense expert followed none of them. He also established her $700/hour rate, that she had billed over thirty hours on the case, that she hadn't interviewed Aiden's current treatment providers, and that she only spoke with Aiden himself for about thirty minutes.
Proving Institutional Abuse
Grubaugh also cross-examined the treatment facility’s COO, turning her testimony about the facility's proprietary de-escalation program into evidence of institutional failure. They confirmed on the stand that the program included specific training on coworker intervention when a colleague is out of protocol, and confirmed that none of those interventions occurred during this incident.
In rebuttal closing, Grubaugh reframed the defense's behavioral data as evidence that a child who had been dragged by his neck by a caretaker was too scared to act out. He cataloged the layers of the treatment facility's denial and asked the jury where the facility's accountability was: the same accountability they market as a company core value.
Nathan Hittle delivered the plaintiff's initial closing argument, walking the jury through the instructions and mapping the evidence to each element, giving the jury the legal roadmap they needed after three days of testimony. He drove the point home: that the defendants were there to ensure that children were safe, and that they woefully failed to meet this basic benchmark.
The Verdict
The jury deliberated for approximately three hours and returned a unanimous verdict: $20 million for the plaintiff. On polling, all jurors confirmed the verdict.
The jury found the residential manager negligent, found her negligence was a proximate cause of the incident, found she was acting within the scope of her employment, and rejected all affirmative defenses. After the verdict, several jurors spoke with the plaintiff team; they told them that multiple jurors had wanted to award significantly more than $20 million and that they had to negotiate down to reach that number.
The residential manager's liability was, in their words, "the easiest" part of the deliberation; the real deliberation centered on the treatment facility's institutional responsibility. “That feedback confirmed what we believed throughout,” says Sharif: “this jury understood the institutional betrayal at the heart of the case, and they wanted to hold [the treatment facility] accountable.”
After the Trial: Defendant Takes Accountability
After the verdict, the treatment facility's COO issued a statement offering "deepest apologies to the child and his family for this unacceptable incident," acknowledging that the conduct was "entirely inconsistent with our values and policies."
“That was the accountability our client and his father asked for from the beginning,” says Sharif. “It took a $20 million verdict and the courage of seven jurors to get there.”
Trial Guides Titles in Action
Sharif discovered Trial Guides about four years ago, during his first personal injury trial; he bought Jury Selection and Opening Statements by Nicholas Rowley, and has since referred back to a key, four-minute clip about fifty times. “I didn’t know how to do jury selection in a personal injury case. I've done it in criminal cases, but for personal injury I was lost.”
Voir Dire and Opening Statement (Nicholas Rowley, et al.)
In his early days as a trial lawyer, Sharif used to rely on Rowley’s brutal honesty, but now uses a blend of this and other techniques. For this trial, he reviewed Rowley’s approach to jury selection.
Like Rowley, Sharif believes that his job is not to look at demographics, but to ask the hard questions and to really listen to jurors. “That’s as simple as that sounds,” says Sharif; “It is difficult and it is fundamental. [Rowley’s outlook on jury selection] is one that I follow and I refer to all the time.”
Voir Dire and Opening Statement is available in paperback and ebook.
Don’t Eat the Bruises (Keith Mitnik)
“There's nothing I don't like about Mitnik,” says Sharif “Mitnik helps solidify cause challenges, but also uses voir dire and opening to frame the defense arguments.” Sharif did not wait to frame the case during examinations; he started in voir dire, particularly in case framing about the defense’s medical expert.
“I can't come out and say to the jury, ‘the defense’s expert is a quack,’ but I can prime them for the jury instruction about evaluating credibility. I can encourage them to use commonsense to evaluate who's telling the truth, and who's pushing too hard for the side that hired him.” In this case, before the plaintiff even got to cross-examining the defense’s medical expert, the jury had been primed not to take a defense witness at face value.
Don't Eat the Bruises is available in paperback, ebook, and audiobook.