An active grandmother who gardened and practiced yoga was T-boned by a driver pulling out of his own driveway. The insurance company's opening offer: $14,937, discounted because of her age.

Our client was the kind of grandmother who stayed active by choice, not obligation. She gardened. She practiced yoga. She was, by every account, in the middle of an engaged, physical life when a driver pulled out of his driveway and T-boned her vehicle.

The collision left her with permanent chronic neck pain, the kind that doesn't resolve with time and doesn't let up. It changed what her daily life looked like going forward.

That offer told us exactly what the insurance company's strategy was going to be: treat an older client's pain as a natural consequence of aging rather than an injury this specific crash caused. It's a common tactic, and it depends on juries accepting the same assumption the adjuster made on paper.

We didn't let the case be defined by that assumption. We built it around who our client actually was, an active woman with a specific, documented quality of life before the crash, and a specific, documented loss of it afterward. Age wasn't the variable that changed. The collision was.

The jury agreed. The verdict came back at $2,500,000, more than 167 times the insurance company's opening offer.