Photo of Andrew L. Frey

Andy Frey has been integral to the development of constitutional limitations on punitive damages for over 30 years.  During that time, he has argued four punitive damages cases in the US Supreme Court for business defendants, including BMW of North America, Inc. v. Gore, the Court’s seminal excessiveness case, as well as Philip Morris USA v. Williams and Honda Motor Co. v. Oberg, each of which resolved procedural due process challenges in favor of our clients.  No other defense counsel has argued more than one punitive damages case in the Court.  Andy also has successfully argued punitive damages cases in many lower federal and state courts.  Andy has represented insurers, automobile manufacturers, consumer product manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, energy companies, financial institutions, and many other kinds of businesses in punitive damages litigation.

In addition, Andy has written many scholarly pieces on punitive damages, including co-authoring with Evan Tager and Lauren Goldman the chapter on punitive damages in the ABA’s multi-volume treatise, Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts.  Andy has also often appeared on panels on punitive damages.

Andy retired from Mayer Brown in 2020, but remains available to assist Mayer Brown clients with punitive damages litigation.

Montana Punitive-DamagesMontana is known fondly to many as Big Sky Country, but it also is quickly gaining a reputation for big punitive damages awards.  Not only are juries imposing breathtaking amounts of punitive damages with increasing regularity, but the courts of Montana generally have been upholding those awards (or reducing them to amounts that would still be considered excessive in most other jurisdictions). Most recently, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a $5 million punitive award that was five times the already generous amount of compensatory damages.
Continue Reading Montana Supreme Court Upholds $5 Million Punitive Award That Is Five Times The Compensatory Damages

directional sign USA statesThe Supreme Court held in BMW v. Gore that states may not use punitive damages awards to punish a defendant for the impact of its conduct in other states. BMW involved an obvious violation of that principle: The plaintiff introduced evidence of approximately 1,000 vehicles that BMW had sold around the country without disclosing pre-sale refinishing, asked the jury to punish BMW $4,000 for each vehicle, and then received a punitive award of exactly $4 million—1,000 X $4,000.

But in many other cases, the violation is more opaque. Sometimes evidence of the number of “victims” of the conduct is introduced, but the punitive award does not bear a precise or readily ascertainable relationship to that number. In other cases, the plaintiff doesn’t introduce the number at all, but merely emphasizes that there are many other victims around the country and then receives an outsized punitive award.

How then is a court to know whether the award constitutes impermissible punishment for harms suffered by out-of-state victims?

Continue Reading Using Supreme Court Commerce Clause Doctrine To Demonstrate That A Large Punitive Award Effects Improper Extraterritorial Punishment

Books-IRS_187115In mid-January, Senator Patrick Leahy (Dem. Vt.) proposed—again—legislation that would prevent businesses from deducting from taxable income any punitive damages they have paid during the relevant tax year.

Although it would seem that this legislation has little chance of being enacted in the current Republican-controlled Congress, out of an abundance of caution we think it is worth reciting the reasons why this proposal is a bad idea.Continue Reading Why Senator Leahy’s Proposal To Bar Businesses From Deducting Punitive Awards From Taxable Income Is A Bad Idea

Do Not Duplicate StampIn prior posts, we have occasionally adverted to the issue of multiple punishments in the constitutional context.  Just before the new year, a California appellate court issued an unpublished decision in Paletz v. Adaya bearing on a different aspect of the multiple punishment problem.  In Paletz, the Court of Appeal reversed an award of punitive damages as duplicative of an award of statutory penalties, concluding that the plaintiffs were not entitled to collect both forms of punishment for the same course of conduct.
Continue Reading California Court Of Appeal Holds That Plaintiff May Not Collect Both Multiple Damages And Punitive Damages For Same Conduct

HorrorEveryone who follows punitive damages law knows that the Supreme Court has identified three guideposts for determining whether a punitive award is excessive under the Due Process Clause: (i) the degree of reprehensibility of the defendant’s conduct; (ii) the ratio of the punitive damages to the compensatory damages and/or the harm to the plaintiff that was likely to result from the defendant’s conduct; and (iii) the disparity between the punitive damages and the legislatively established penalties for comparable conduct.  The first guidepost in particular requires an assessment predicated on the facts of the case, which the parties will likely have disputed.  How should courts go about resolving those disputes?
Continue Reading Why Courts Should Not Defer To Phantom Factual Findings When Reviewing Punitive Damages Awards For Excessiveness

Medical_Insurance_Concept_35162090A jury in the Western District of Louisiana made headlines last spring when it awarded a stunning $9 billion in punitive damages to a plaintiff who contended that the diabetes drug Actos caused his bladder cancer.  Last week, the district court cut the award by 99.6 % to approximately $37 million. Despite the impressive scale of the reduction, in our view the remitted award remains unconstitutionally excessive.  Furthermore, the district court’s lengthy opinion reveals significant errors of reasoning that we hope the Fifth Circuit will correct on appeal.  We address three of them here.
Continue Reading When Is A 99.6% Reduction Of A Punitive Damages Award Not Enough? When The Original Award Was $9 Billion And There Are Thousands Of Other Plaintiffs Seeking Comparable Awards.

It seems perfectly obvious, to this writer at least, that by far the most significant factor fueling the drive over the past several decades to ever larger punitive awards is evidence of corporate finances, and jury instructions and arguments that punitive damages should be set on the basis thereof.

Business people sitting next to gorillaThis post will explore the following elements of the issue: (1) Why is financial evidence such a dominating factor in many juries’ punitive damages calculus?  (2)  When and why did this reliance on wealth in setting punishments arise?  (3) What are the economic and legal fallacies that undermine the validity of this practice? and (4) Do the Supreme Court’s decisions in BMW and State Farm provide a viable basis for arguing against the prevailing judicial tolerance of the misuse of such evidence and argument?

While this post is unusually lengthy, the topic is one that requires extended treatment.Continue Reading Corporate Finances: Punitive Damages’ 800-Pound Gorilla

In a post last week, Lauren Goldman discussed the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision in Lewellen v. Franklin striking down Missouri’s cap on punitive damages as applied to common-law causes of action and promised that we would do a subsequent post addressing the court’s further holding that the punitive damages in that case were not unconstitutionally excessive.  This is that post.
Continue Reading Missouri Supreme Court Makes Fundamental Mistakes In Conducting Excessiveness Review Of Million-Dollar Punitive Award

ChoicesIn a recent post, we set forth our views on why, with some forethought, traditional bifurcation—i.e., trying liability for the underlying tort, compensatory damages, and liability for punitive damages in the first phase and, if necessary, the amount of punitive damages in a second phase—can be a beneficial procedural safeguard for defendants.  Sometimes, however, circumstances may dictate other forms of bifurcation, or even trifurcation.
Continue Reading Alternatives To Traditional Bifurcation