Behind the Tyler Skaggs Settlement: How an iPad and an 18-Word Jury Note Changed Everything

After nine weeks of testimony in the wrongful-death trial involving former Los Angeles Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs, the turning point came in a brief handwritten note from the jury room.

The jurors’ question was simple: “Do we as the jury get to decide the punitive damage amount? There is no field for it?”

It was this 18-word question that finally brought the Angels to the settlement table more than six years after the Angels’ then-director of communications gave Skaggs a lethal counterfeit oxycodone pill laced with fentanyl. It also confirmed that a bold trial strategy developed by the Skaggs family’s stellar trial team, which included Durham, Pittard & Spalding’s Houston partners Lara Hollingsworth and Dana Levy, had worked.

Punitive damages are typically not allowed in California wrongful death actions. But early in the case, at the pleadings stage, Hollingsworth worked with Texas trial counsel Rusty Hardin & Associates LP and California trial counsel Behar Gibbs Savage Paulson LLP to develop a unique legal theory that would pave the way for the jury’s pivotal question.

Hollingsworth and her team discovered a wrinkle in California law allowing punitive damages in survival actions when there is property damage before death. At first, it did not appear that Skaggs had suffered such damages, but when Hollingsworth and her team looked closely at the evidence, they soon realized that Skaggs’s iPad had been contaminated with fentanyl and that the DEA would not return the iPad to his family as a result. This realization allowed the trial team to develop a strong case for punitive liability and a viable path for the jury to award punitive damages.

Unsurprisingly, the Angels’ defense team fought hard to prevent this theory from reaching the jury, but Hollingsworth, Levy, and their team not only ensured that the punitive damages claim survived multiple pretrial defense challenges, they also worked with California trial counsel Kinsella Holley Iser Kump Steinsapir LLP and Behar Gibbs Savage Paulson LLP to diligently craft jury instructions and persuade the trial court that California law favored submitting two punitive liability questions to the jury.

It all came together during closing arguments when trial counsel was able to walk jurors through a verdict form that included punitive liability questions. When jurors later sent out a note during deliberations asking where to write in a dollar figure, it signaled that they had likely crossed a critical threshold: punitive liability had been found, and damages were being calculated.

It also demonstrated the value of bringing in the DP&S team early to assist with trial and appellate strategy.

The settlement marked the closing chapter of the Skaggs family’s push for justice following Tyler’s July 2019 death, something that Hollingsworth has been working for from the beginning.