Attorneys Danny Thomas and Michael Kilgore from Humphrey, Farrington & McClain recently negotiated a $6.9 Million settlement with the United States Department of Justice to settle eight cases HFM brought against the United States arising from what NPR described as the “largest sex-abuse scandal in the history” of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Thomas and Kilgore had previously obtained more than $3 million in three judge-tried cases which occurred via zoom during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Before HFM’s attorneys succeeded at trial, similarly situated plaintiffs represented by other law firms had agreed to $6.7 Million in settlements across 92 cases. The United States had offered HFM’s clients similar settlement amounts (approximately $85,000 per Plaintiff), but HFM held out, knowing that these claims were worth much more.
As a result of their hard-fought victory on behalf of these veterans, Danny Thomas and Michael Kilgore were named Legal Champions by Missouri Lawyers Media in its 2021 Missouri Lawyer Awards. The Legal Champion award is awarded to lawyers, not based on the size of the verdict, but on the importance of the principle or policy at stake. Missouri Lawyers Media awarded Thomas and Kilgore after they “won hefty judgments against the federal government for men who were abused by a physician assistant at the Leavenworth VA Medical Center in Kansas.”
