$15 Million Commercial Truck Sideswipe Settlement in Louisiana

A sideswipe collision that left almost no damage on the cars cost one Louisiana man his health, his career, and years of his life. This case, resolved for $15 million through a Gasquet settlement confirmed by an $8.2 million jury verdict, shows exactly why catastrophic injury cases require attorneys who know how to prove what insurance companies work hardest to deny.

Jerome Moroux and his team represented a man doing one of the most ordinary things a parent does: driving to pick up his children from school. A commercial vehicle sideswiped him during that drive. The crash left little visible property damage. By the standard metrics people use to judge accidents, this one did not look serious.

But in the weeks and months that followed, our client began losing feeling on the left side of his body. Pain spread. Weakness set in. When doctors finally identified the source, they diagnosed him with thoracic outlet syndrome, a condition where blood vessels or nerves are compressed at the point where they pass from the neck into the shoulder. The crash had triggered it. What looked like a fender-bender had begun quietly dismantling a man’s nervous system.

To treat the thoracic outlet syndrome, our client underwent two surgeries. During the second one, a surgeon severed an artery. That emergency required an immediate cardiac bypass. A man who had driven to school pickup now found himself in a fight for his life on an operating table.

The complications did not stop after surgery. He developed pudendal neuralgia, a chronic nerve condition that produces unrelenting pain in the pelvic region. He suffered severe headaches. He struggled with depression, which is one of the most common and least acknowledged consequences of catastrophic injury. The accumulation of these conditions was not a setback. It was a permanent reorganization of what his daily life could look like.

Our client was an attorney. His work demanded sustained focus, physical stamina, and the ability to be fully present for clients. After the accident, he could not maintain his caseload. He began referring a substantial portion of his current cases — and the future work those relationships would have generated — to another law firm. He did not stop working. But he stopped being the lawyer he had built his career to be.

This is where personal injury cases become genuinely complex. Lost earning capacity is one of the most misunderstood and most contested elements of a catastrophic injury claim. The defense pointed to the referral fees and business arrangements our client had developed after the crash, noting that his annual income actually appeared higher than it had been before the collision. On paper, he was earning more. In practice, he had surrendered the active control of his own practice and handed off the work he could no longer perform. That distinction — between what shows up on a tax return and what a professional actually lost — is exactly what insurance companies count on juries not to understand.

The defense argued that our client’s injuries predated the collision and that the sideswipe had nothing to do with his condition. This is one of the most common strategies insurance carriers use in catastrophic injury litigation: find anything in a person’s medical history and use it to reframe the entire case as a pre-existing problem.

What that argument ignores and what Jerome Moroux and his team built the case to show is that a crash does not have to create a condition from scratch to be legally responsible for it. When a collision worsens or accelerates a condition a person was managing, the defendant is still accountable for what that acceleration cost.

After two weeks of testimony, medical evidence, and expert witnesses, the defense made its final position clear: they asked the jury to award zero dollars. Not a reduced amount. Zero.

While the jury deliberated, the parties reached a Gasquet settlement, a legal mechanism that allows a case to partially settle without surrendering the injured party’s ability to recover the full value of their damages, totaling $15,000,000. Shortly after that settlement was finalized, the jury came back with a verdict of $8,200,000.

That number confirmed what our team had argued throughout: the injuries were real, the losses were real, and the crash that caused them was the defendant’s responsibility. Internal injuries, nerve damage, surgical complications, and psychological harm are harder to see than a broken bone, but they are no less devastating. And they require attorneys who know how to make a jury understand what cannot be shown in an X-ray.

We built this firm to handle exactly these cases – the ones where the damage is not obvious, the defense has resources, and the injured person cannot afford to lose. For more than two decades, we have taken on commercial trucking companies, their insurers, and their legal teams, and we have won. Our results include hundreds of verdicts and settlements at $2 million or more, over a dozen cases exceeding $10 million, and four jury verdicts in a single four-month stretch in 2025 that totaled more than $60 million.

If you or someone you love has been injured in a commercial truck accident or any other serious collision in Louisiana, contact us today for a free consultation. You may not know yet how serious your injuries are and that is exactly the moment to call. Reach us at (337) 233-2323 locally or (888) 337-2323 toll-free, or visit bdm.law.