David A. Axelrod & Associates won one of the most significant professional malpractice verdicts in Illinois judicial history, winning a $31.35 million dollar verdict against Walgreen Company for pharmacy malpractice. The award included $25 million in punitive damages, as well as more than $6.35 million in compensatory damages.

The David A. Axelrod & Associates team spent months working around the clock to prepare the case on behalf of an Illinois man, Leonard Kulisek, who suffered a stroke and acute renal failure leading to kidney dialysis before dying. Mr. Kulisek’s suffering was caused by a negligently filled prescription by a Walgreen pharmacy manager. Kulisek had called Walgreens to refill his medication for gout, but the pharmacist erroneously gave Kulisek a diabetes drug. The negligently misfilled prescription drastically lowered Kulisek’s blood sugar levels, leading to kidney failure and brain injury. This negligence resulted in 22 months of horrible suffering and death.

During its representation of Kulisek, the Axelrod team discovered that Walgreens had failed to comply with Federal and State statutes requiring that all prescription narcotics be tracked and accounted for. As a result, the pharmacist who misfilled Kulisek’s prescription had spent eight years stealing and ingesting narcotic controlled substances while working for Walgreens. Walgreens did not discover the illegal drug use until almost one year after the prescription error occurred. When he was finally caught, the pharmacist admitted that he had stolen and ingested more than 86,000 narcotic painkiller pills from the Walgreens pharmacy that he managed.

“Len Kulisek trusted Walgreens to put the right pills in the bottle, and he ended up sick for the rest of his life,” David Axelrod commented at the time of the trial. Before the error by Walgreens, Kulisek had been a healthy, self-sufficient individual. The failure of Walgreens to properly inventory its supplies of controlled substances caused Kulisek to spend his last 22 months in horrible suffering and ultimately led to his death. David A. Axelrod & Associates’ extensive trial preparation included interviews with Kulisek’s friends and family in order to draw a portrait for the jury of Kulisek’s active life, as well as in-depth medical research and interviews with his doctors to establish the manner in which that life had been taken away from him by the recklessness of Walgreens and the pharmacist it failed to properly supervise.

As part of its preparation, the David A. Axelrod & Associates team had to conduct extensive research into medical issues. The team meticulously learned about medical areas such as nephrology, hypoglycemia, hypotension, and rhabdomyolysis, and called upon experts for their analysis of the manner in which the medication given to Kulisek ruined his life, and ultimately led to his death.

The research and preparation that David A. Axelrod & Associates undertook on behalf of Kulisek and those who loved him paid off in many ways: It established the illegal conduct of Walgreens and its pharmacist, made it less likely that Walgreens or any other pharmacy would harm other customers through similar conduct in the future, honored Kulisek’s memory, and compensated those who were closest to him for their loss.

Commenting on the jury’s verdict in the Chicago Sun-Times, the forewoman said, "the only way we could hope to change the system in the future was to hurt them financially." Another jury member said, "I didn't expect that out of Walgreens. We wanted to send them a strong message because it could happen to any one of us."