Nuclear Verdicts: How Plaintiffs Build Them and How Defendants Stop Them

Edward R. Hugo, Founding Partner | Hugo Parker LLP

Edward R. Hugo is a founding partner of Hugo Parker, LLP, where he practices as a trial attorney, appellate lawyer, litigator, and litigation manager. His work spans products and premises liability, toxic torts, environmental claims, construction defect, personal injury, wrongful death, insurance, professional negligence, sexual molestation, and criminal law. He serves as designated trial counsel for several corporations in the defense of products liability and toxic tort claims and has tried scores of asbestos lawsuits to complete defense verdicts.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Hugo earned his J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1986  and his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. He is admitted to practice in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, as well as before the United States Supreme Court and various federal district and appellate courts. He is a Certified Civil Trial Specialist accredited by the State Bar of California, and both a Board Certified Civil Trial Advocate and a Board Certified Civil Pretrial Practice Advocate of the National Board of Trial Advocacy.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Hugo has been selected as a Northern California Super Lawyer for 17 consecutive years and holds an AV rating from Martindale-Hubbell. He is a Charter Fellow of the Litigation Counsel of America, a Charter Member of the Institute of Trial Presentation, a member of Rue Ratings’ Best Attorneys of America, a member of The American College of Board Certified Attorneys, and a member of the National Association of Distinguished Counsel, recognizing the nation’s top one percent of attorneys.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Hugo regularly lectures on mass tort, environmental, and products liability litigation, as well as trial and deposition skills. He has also been retained as an expert witness, testifying at trial, in arbitration, and in deposition on the duties of defense counsel, the effectiveness of defense strategies, the reasonableness of settlement values and defense costs, and insurance coverage issues.

• Experience

Mr. Hugo gained his early trial experience as a criminal prosecutor with the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, where he held the highest courtroom ability rating in each of his assignments and left the office as a Senior Trial Attorney after trying more than 75 felony trials and 40 Municipal Court jury trials. In private practice, he has served as designated trial counsel for corporate defendants in products liability and toxic tort matters, taking scores of asbestos cases to complete defense verdicts.

Lauren Brogdon, Partner | Haynes and Boone LLP

Lauren Brogdon is a trial lawyer and crisis management attorney whose practice spans product liability disputes, environmental litigation, catastrophic injury and wrongful death defense, and emerging contaminant matters. Chair of Haynes Boone’s Chambers-ranked Crisis Management Practice Group, she is trusted by some of the nation’s largest companies to translate legal knowledge into real-world solutions aligned with their business goals. Whether guiding clients through the immediate aftermath of a crisis or defending them in the highest-stakes litigation, Lauren combines courtroom skill with hands-on incident-command expertise—and her fluency in multiple languages positions her to serve multinational clients in cross-border incidents and investigations.

• Education & Credentials

Lauren earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School in 2012, where she served as Notes Editor of the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, and her B.A. in Policy Studies and English cum laude from Rice University in 2009. She is certified in Crisis Leadership through Harvard Kennedy School Executive Education (2023) and is a graduate of the FEMA Emergency Management Institute’s Executive Crisis Leaders Fellowship (Cohort 6, 2024), with multiple crisis and incident-command certifications through both the National Incident Management System and FEMA. She is admitted to practice in Texas and Pennsylvania and before all four U.S. District Courts in Texas, and speaks Spanish, French, and Italian.

• Recognition & Leadership

As Chair of Haynes Boone’s Crisis Management Practice Group, Lauren leads one of the firm’s signature, Chambers-ranked teams. Her honors include recognition by The Best Lawyers in America for Product Liability Litigation – Defendants (2025–2026) and earlier “Ones to Watch” listings across Energy, Environmental, and Product Liability law; selection to the Houston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” (2023); a BTI Consulting Group Client Service All-Star (2025); and repeated inclusion in Texas Super Lawyers Rising Stars for Class Action/Mass Torts (2017–2022, 2025). She has also been named a Breakthrough Woman by the Greater Houston Women’s Chamber of Commerce (2025) and a finalist for Texas Lawyer’s Pro Bono Attorney of the Year (2025), and received the Houston Corporate Counsel Award for a creative partnership with Chevron (2020).

• Professional Involvement

Lauren is deeply engaged in the Houston legal and civic community. She serves on the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Houston Area Women’s Center and as legal advisor to the board of Camp For All, and previously served as President of the Houston Young Lawyers Association, Board Chair of Houston Volunteer Lawyers (the largest provider of pro bono services in Harris County), and a director of the Houston Bar Association. She is a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation, the Houston Bar Foundation, and the Houston Young Lawyers Foundation, and a member of the State Bar of Texas Pro Bono College. A prolific author and speaker, she presents regularly on crisis management, nuclear verdicts, environmental litigation, and disaster response for organizations including TexasBarCLE, the
Institute for Energy Law, and Law360. Throughout her career she has devoted substantial time to pro bono litigation, representing dozens of clients in divorce, child custody, and domestic violence matters.

• Experience

Lauren has handled many of the most high-profile crises and disputes in her field, including matters involving catastrophic industrial accidents, environmental spills and releases, live-event fatalities, missing persons, and mass-casualty incidents, and she routinely advises boards, C-suites, and business unit heads on litigation avoidance, product liability, and communications strategy. On the litigation side, she served as lead counsel for ExxonMobil in mass-tort personal injury and property damage suits arising from an incident at its Baytown refinery—securing a directed verdict, complete dismissals, and favorable settlements—and as trial counsel for the NCAA in wrongful death cases alleging that college football causes neurodegenerative disease. She has served as national trial counsel for an international gasoline manufacturer in chemical-exposure cases, represented petrochemical companies in multi-district MTBE groundwater contamination litigation, and achieved a landmark summary judgment holding that fracking was not subject to strict liability in Pennsylvania. Her crisis-management representations range from advising a global renewable energy leader on a wind turbine collapse to guiding hotel, financial, medical device, and entertainment clients through reputational and legal fallout from sensitive incidents.

Emily Buchanan, Partner | Haynes and Boone LLP

Emily Buchanan is a partner in the Litigation and Insurance Recovery Practice Groups in the Dallas office of Haynes Boone, where she focuses primarily on representing commercial policyholders in insurance coverage disputes. She advises clients on insurance programs and risk management and represents insureds in disputed claims through negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, and litigation, across a wide range of business insurance—including various liability coverages, property and casualty coverage, and specialized forms of coverage. Emily pairs a genuine passion for helping others with keen insight into complex insurance issues, crafting litigation strategies that maximize clients’ insurance benefits as efficiently as possible.

• Education & Credentials

Emily earned her J.D. summa cum laude from the University of Tennessee in 2016, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif, and her B.A. cum laude from Baylor University in 2010. She is admitted to practice in Texas and before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and all four U.S. District Courts in Texas (the Eastern, Northern, Western, and Southern Districts).

• Recognition & Leadership

Emily has earned steady recognition from the leading legal directories. She was named a Next Generation Partner in The Legal 500 U.S. for Insurance – Advice to Policyholders (2026), recognized by D Magazine as a “Best Lawyer in Dallas” for Insurance Law (2026), and previously listed in Legal 500 U.S. as a Leading Associate (2024–2025) and Rising Star (2023). She has appeared in the Texas Super Lawyers Rising Stars
directory (2022–2025), including its Women’s Edition (2023), and in the “Ones to Watch” category of Best Lawyers in America (2022–2026). In 2021, she was honored as DVAP’s Finest Volunteer of the Month for her pro bono service.

• Professional Involvement

Emily is a Fellow of the Texas Bar Foundation and an active member of the Dallas Bar Association and the American Bar Association. She serves as an Associate of both the Dallas Insurance Law American Inn of Court and the Higginbotham Inn of Court (2023–present). A dedicated volunteer, she routinely takes on pro bono matters through the Dallas Volunteer Attorney Program, including intake clinics and preparing wills for clients in need. She also serves as an adjunct professor at her alma mater, the University of Tennessee College of Law, teaching a course on insurance law, and is a frequent author and speaker—presenting on nuclear verdicts, cyber insurance, claims-handling discovery, and AI, and publishing in outlets such as Law360 and the Journal of Texas Insurance Law. Before attending law school, Emily taught middle school social studies at a low-socioeconomic school in Tyler, Texas.

• Experience

Emily has built a substantial trial and coverage-litigation record on behalf of policyholders. She successfully tried a two-week insurance coverage trial in Colorado federal court, securing a verdict in excess of $10 million for an insured condominium developer under a builders’ risk policy, and obtained double-summary judgment for an energy company on breach-of-contract claims involving additional-insured and indemnity obligations under a master service agreement. She has defeated insurers’ summary judgment motions on issues ranging from late notice under a commercial umbrella policy to “consent to settle” provisions under professional malpractice coverage, achieved dismissal of a professional liability insurer’s declaratory judgment action in the Northern District of Texas, and successfully defended that result on appeal before the Fifth Circuit. Her representations span energy, construction, real estate, and hospitality clients, including securing coverage under long-term care, property, professional liability, and builders’ risk policies. Earlier in her career, Emily served as a visiting prosecutor for a neighboring city, sitting first chair in more than twelve jury trials over six months and securing convictions in each.

SESSION 1 – Anchors Away: Building — and Defending Against — the High-Value Damages Case Under the New Anchoring Restrictions | 1:00pm – 2:00pm ET

Anchoring — tying noneconomic damages to fighter jets, athlete salaries, and other outsized reference points — has been a signature driver of nuclear verdicts. That playbook is now under direct legislative attack: Georgia’s SB 68 restricts anchoring arguments to those “rationally related” to the evidence, Texas’s SB 30 narrowly failed and is poised to return in 2027, and other states are following. This session examines how plaintiffs are rebuilding high-value damages presentations to survive the new restrictions, how defendants can leverage them to contain exposure, and what the shifting landscape means for insurers and policyholders facing excess-limits verdicts.

BREAK | 2:00pm – 2:10pm ET

SESSION 2 – Nuclear verdicts are the result of the synergistic interaction between nuclear jurors and nuclear facts | 2:10pm – 3:10pm ET

Nuclear verdicts are the result of the synergistic interaction between nuclear jurors and nuclear facts. This session presents the keys to preventing them: deselecting nuclear jurors before they are seated, precluding anchoring, and defusing both plaintiff’s damages presentation and the defense’s own client. Attendees will learn how to make the number theirs — giving the jury a credible defense figure rather than leaving plaintiff’s anchor unanswered — and how to argue non-economic damages directly.