A Texas county jury has handed down a $49 million judgement against a trucking company that may no longer be in business, a figure about halfway between the $10 million minimum size of a verdict considered nuclear and some larger recent cases lost by trucking interests.
The jury verdict came last week in Ector County, Texas, home of the oil-rich city of Odessa. A Texas-based carrier, OPG Logistics, was the company defendant. But the jury also found negligence on the part of the driver, Biorkys Sanchez Fernandez.
According to the summary of the crash from the Houston-based Ammons law firm that represented the family of 29-year-old Steffan Mick who was killed in the crash in January 2025, the truck driven by Fernandez “made an unsafe left turn and caused the crash.” The jury found that both OPG and Sanchez were “grossly negligent,” according to the Ammons firm.
In an email to FreightWaves, a spokesman for the Ammons firm, a practice led by Rob Ammons who successfully argued the case for the Mick family, said OPG had at least eight drivers at the time of the crash. But the attorney for OPG, according to the Ammons firm, had said the company was no longer in business even as a defense was mounted.
An email sent to Kurt Paxson, the attorney with the firm of Mounce Green who represented OPG, had not been replied to by publication time.
According to the Ammons firm, Paxson “argued against liability on the company while admitting that their driver was negligent.” He asked the jury to limit the verdict to an award to $5 million, but instead got about ten times that.
Driver hit with 35% liability
The jury verdict breaks down as $40.5 million in compensatory damages, with 65% assigned to OPG and 35% to the driver. It also awarded $8.5 million in punitive damages, according to the Ammons firm.
A check of FMCA’s SAFER WEB records of OPG Logistics finds no company by that name. A company with a similar name, based in Nebraska–the company in the nuclear verdict was Texas-based–is listed as having one power unit. But its name, OPG Transport LLC, is not the same as the company involved in the Ector County case.
According to the Ammons firm, it had “checked and found documents that seemed to indicate that there is still a trucking company based from the same address.” A representative for that company, according to the spokesman, told the Ammons firm that it was “her partner’s company.”
Is it collectible?
With a verdict that large, and a defendant whose very existence is in doubt, the question can be asked just how much the Mick family and its attorneys will be able to collect.
A recent $81 million verdict and appeal against a company that now is part of Brad Jacobs’ QXO was ultimately settled. That’s an example of the most collectible types of verdicts: a publicly-traded company as the defendant.
By contrast, a more than $400 million verdict from 2020 against a carrier with one power unit was expected to result in a payout of no more than $1 million under the company’s liability coverage. Whatever insurance coverage OPG carried would be expected as core to any post-verdict settlement talks.
Besides the recent QXO-related verdict, which actually dates back to before QXO (NYSE: QXO) acquired Beacon Roofing Supply, other nuclear verdicts in recent years that came down against companies where collection might be possible was the $460 million award against trailer builder Wabash National (NYSE: WNC), later settled for an unknown figure, and a more than $40 million award last year against carrier New Prime for a wreck in Texas. That case is on appeal.
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