Evan Tager is a member of the Supreme Court & Appellate practice in Mayer Brown’s Washington, DC office. Identified by Chambers USA as one of America’s leading appellate lawyers for the past eight years, and profiled by Legal Times as a leading appellate lawyer, Evan has been integrally involved in a range of issues of paramount importance to the business community, including punitive damages, class certification standards, admissibility of expert testimony, and enforceability of arbitration agreements.
Read Evan’s full bio.
Only three months after AbbVie obtained a retrial of a case in which a jury had imposed $150 million in punitive damages without awarding any compensatory damages, a new jury awarded the same plaintiff $200,000 in compensatory damages and $3 …
Louisiana generally does not permit punitive damages. But if an accident happens on navigable waters, and the plaintiff brings a claim under federal maritime law, a Louisiana jury can award punitive damages, and Louisiana courts then must decide the full …
We reported on a bunch of eye-popping punitive awards in 2017. There have been further developments in a number of those cases. Though we may provide more comprehensive discussions of some of those developments, here is a quick update.…
The Ninth Circuit recently issued an unpublished 
As my colleague Andy Frey and I reported in 
Inevitably, when conscientious judges delve into the multi-dimensional issue of excessive punitive damages, they get some things right and other things wrong. Such is the case with the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in 
They don’t call the California Superior Court in Los Angeles “The Bank” for nothing. Late last month, a jury held Johnson & Johnson liable for $70 million in compensatory damages and $347 million in punitive damages in a case brought …
In an effort to address the problem of excessive, multiple punishment, the Florida Legislature enacted a statute that “punitive damages may not be awarded against a defendant in a civil action if that defendant establishes, before trial, that punitive damages …
Just about a week after suffering 
As early as 1967, 
Concluding in In re Sundquist that the defendant bank had violated the automatic stay by foreclosing on the home of …
Seemingly minor legal issues sometimes can have a surprisingly significant effect. That is particularly true with the ratio guidepost because the effect of any dispute about the guidepost’s application is literally multiplied. We recently filed an 
We are excited to report that in late December Thomson Reuters released the fourth edition of the multi-volume treatise Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts. As in the first three editions, we contributed the chapter on punitive damages—Chapter …
St. Louis and Kansas City have long been cross-state baseball rivals. Who can forget the 1985 I-70 World Series?
A couple of months ago, the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 
In recent years, St. Louis has done much to earn a place on 
Courts applying BMW and State Farm often emphasize the Supreme Court’s admonition that the constitutional line is not “marked by a simple mathematical formula”—typically when rejecting a defendant’s argument that the ratio of punitive to compensatory damages is indicative of …
On June 9, 2016, the California Supreme Court issued its decision in 
There have been subsequent developments in several cases about which we have posted in recent months.
We have previously posted—for example, 
Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in BMW of North America. Inc. v. Gore, the first time the Court had ever held that a punitive damages award was unconstitutionally excessive under the Due Process Clause.…
Lately, we have had many occasions to criticize courts’ analysis of punitive damages issues, so it is nice for a change to be able to report on the Tenth Circuit’s insightful decision in 