Quick. Name the top five attorneys in personal injury in Nevada. If you didn’t mention Kimball Jones, read on.

In 2018 Jones and his team at Bighorn Law had a dream case, a real chance to stand up for a client with a remarkably sympathetic fact pattern: Victim of a rear-end car crash. Significant brain injury. Seven brain surgeries. A million dollars in medical bills.

Kimball Jones goes all in. He teams with high-profile local counsel and knows his way around the plaintiff bar. Can’t lose.

Dusted. Defense verdict. Zero. Nada. The case is such a clear winner and he is so sympathetic to the client’s loss, the team takes it up on appeal. Zero. Nada. That loss is on Jones’ shoulders every day of his life. He remembers the client as a good person who suffered too much, too long for such a heartbreaking loss. 

That loss sowed the seeds of an incredible string of wins — including verdicts for $3 million, $13.6 million and $8.9 million, followed by a $100 million punitive bad faith verdict in 2024 — all capped with a $550 million win in 2024, the biggest verdict for a single plaintiff in the history of Nevada.

Some people just don’t like to lose.

Jones is quick to credit his team at Bighorn Law and the firm’s mission since its founding in 2011, which is based on the premise of taking care of family, friends and the community. 

“We have been fortunate enough, and it has definitely been interesting how it’s developed,” Jones told Vegas Legal. “We have worked really, really hard to do things the right way, even when it’s challenging or not convenient. We’ve set up principles that we rely on within our firm that we believe in for real, and we operate that way. And then the cases just come in. People want a firm with that kind of dedication, and I think there are a lot of firms that may get cases like the ones I’ve described periodically, but they don’t necessary achieve for their clients the way we have done in these cases.”

Jones, who served as a counterintelligence agent with the Department of Defense before becoming a lawyer, notes that years of hard work and preparation — including conducting about 100 arbitrations — set the stage for his string of big-dollar verdicts.

“I think I just had some types of experience, some life experience, that was significant and gave me some context, some understanding and a little bit of an advantage on how to proceed,” said Jones, a BYU Law School graduate. “Before my $13.6 million verdict in 2019, my largest verdict was $26,000, also in 2019, and there was a reason for that. It wasn’t a fluke. Before then, I was not capable of winning one like that. I didn’t have the skill and the experience that I now have.”

The experience paid dividends in Jones’ first nine-figure verdict, when a Clark County jury nailed Progressive Corporation with a $100 million punitive damages verdict in August 2024. The decision was based on Progressive’s delay in the reimbursement of medical bills for plaintiff Hal Goldblatt, who suffered severe injuries including a traumatic brain injury when he was hit by a vehicle in a crosswalk.

Initially, the jury found the driver liable for about $7 million in damages. But ultimately, in a second phase of the trial, the jury hit Progressive with $1 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages. 

“The Goldblatt case first came through a friend of my partner, Jacqueline Bretell, who is just a force of nature, an unbelievable talented lawyer,” Jones said. 

The jurors based their decision on a series of failures by Progressive in delaying Goldblatt’s claim stemming from the simple fact that Goldblatt had originally requested payment of all undisputed benefits in a simple form letter rather than an attorney’s letterhead.

“I said: What are you talking about? Are you saying that if this exact same letter had been sent, every word the same, but on an attorney’s letterhead, that it would’ve been sent to an adjuster with the appropriate training and knowledge of how to handle this claim?” Jones said. “I asked him to provide more detail, if he could tell me anything more about that. And he said, ‘I can’t. It’s kind of a black box to me.’

“And there’s a very obvious reason for why they do it. Any insurance company is going to make a ton of money slow-rolling that money and investing it. Making nice gains in the market. Maybe on one claim, keeping $100,000 for an extra six months isn’t that big a deal. But multiply that by 10,000, 50,000, maybe 100,000 claims, and you’re talking about some real money. And they very rarely get sued for it.”

Jones added: “It turned out that Progressive’s revenue in the same year they were doing those tactics was $62 billion. So some members of the jury thought the verdict should be $620 million, or 1 percent of revenue, which they felt would really go a long way toward them changing this behavior. But at least one other juror wanted to do something like $10 million. So they compromised with the $100 million in punitive damages.”

The Nevada record-breaking verdict followed just three months later, in October 2024, when a Clark County jury awarded $50 million in compensatory damages and $500 million in punitive damages to the widow of a man who was hit and killed, while on his way to church, by a heavily impaired driver. 

Jones laid out the tragic case for the jury, describing how the driver, drunk and under the influence of drugs, plowed into the car of Nimfa and Marcial Escobia in an intersection while traveling 107 mph in a 45 mph zone. Marcial, formerly in training to be a priest before becoming a medical doctor, was killed, and Nimfa was left seriously injured and traumatized.

“She’s going to walk with a limp for the rest of her life, and she has severe PTSD,” Jones said. “She is terrified to drive, or even to go for a ride in a car. If there’s a loud sound outside of the car, she will have a breakdown. She’ll have to cover her face, her eyes, her ears in the car, and just has a full-blown shutdown. This is just her new normal. Her entire life has been turned upside down from this.”

“The entire trial is on video, and you can see the arguments I made, but more importantly, you can see the tone in which I made the arguments. I gave my closing argument very … almost quietly, the way I talked. It was 30, maybe 40 minutes for my closing argument in that case. The defense went on probably longer than me, close to an hour, but it was a lot of bouncing around and getting excited, talking in a loud voice, even personal attacks on me. There was zero of that from me, none. I had a powerful, tragic case, and the facts spoke for themselves.”

Jones gave a hat tip to Bighorn attorney/partner Josh Berrett, who also worked the Escobia case and took the depositions: “Josh handled this case in a tremendous way,” he said. 

The impressive verdicts stand in stark contrast to Jones’ humble upbringing in small-town Arizona.

“We were very poor, I mean so poor that I was very embarrassed by it,” Jones said. “Growing up, it was a painful thing. It’s something that has just kind of always stuck with me, feeling a little bit insecure about that. I’m terrified of debt. I’m very careful with how I handle my own finances because I remember how poor we were. It was tough.”

So to celebrate the big scores from last year, Jones marked the occasion by purchasing a car — a brand new Honda Accord.

“I love my new car,” Jones said. “That’ll be my car for the next five or 10 years. I’m not buying a jet anytime soon.”

Quick update: On a Friday afternoon, the last day of January, Jones had yet another reason to celebrate when a jury came back with a $114 million dollar verdict. Some people just hate to lose. 

Mark Fierro began his career as a reporter/anchor at KLAS-TV, the CBS television station in Las Vegas. He worked at the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C. He served as communications consultant on 24 nine figure IPO global road shows on Wall Street. He provided litigation support for the Michael Jackson death trial.

He is president of Fierro Communications, Inc., which conducts mock juries and focus groups in addition to public relations and marketing. Fierro is the author of several books including “Road Rage: The Senseless Murder of Tammy Meyers.” He has made numerous appearances on national TV news programs.