Dykema Case Recognized as one of California’s Top Verdicts of 2021

Dykema, a leading national law firm, is proud to announce that a case that the firm handled as defense counsel, Perry v. Kia Motors America, was recognized as one of the “Top Verdicts of 2021” in California by the Daily Journal in its annual Top Verdicts feature.

In July of 2021, a jury deliberated for just over 60 minutes, after a two-month trial, before returning a 12-0 defense verdict in favor of Kia. The Plaintiff sought more than $103M in damages. Plaintiff filed suit following a rollover accident involving a 2015 Kia Forte in which a passenger allegedly suffered a traumatic brain injury. Plaintiff claimed that Kia knew about an alleged defect in the vehicle’s passenger side seatbelt system.

The Dykema trial team of Jim Feeney, Dommond Lonnie, and Clay Cosse argued that the restraint systems in the 2015 Kia Forte met all applicable federal safety standards and design of system was not defective. The team also explained that the seat belts in the vehicle had locking mechanisms separate from pretensioners, and that Kia designed the Forte’s seat belts based on data showing that pretensioners did not offer significant protection to front-seat passengers like Plaintiff who experience a far side lateral impact at 16.2 G’s of force.

Furthermore, the Dykema trial team informed jurors that 395,000 similar Kia vehicles are on the road, having traveled more than 6 Billion miles in a year, but that none of them were involved in accidents where injuries were supposedly caused by lack of deployment of the seat belt pretensioners. They also argued that the resulting head injuries were more consistent with that of an incident where the passenger would have hit the driver’s body or the driver’s seat rather than hitting the roof, thereby indicating that the seatbelt worked as expected.

This marks the fourth Dykema case in three years recognized by the Daily Journal as one of California's Top Verdicts. In 2020, another successful defense of a Kia product liability case was featured, while two other cases were included in 2019. The Perry case was also recently recognized by Courtroom View Network (CVN) as one of the “Top 10 Most Impressive Defense Verdicts of 2021.” In the last year alone, Dykema’s talented Automotive and Transportation Industry Group was named “Practice Group of the Year” by Law360 and ranked as a Top-5 Firm nationally for Automotive Product Liability by Chambers USA.