Mark Lanier stunned the tort bar when he won a whopping $9 billion verdict on April 7 in a lawsuit alleging that prescription drug Actos posed a cancer risk. But then, on Oct. 23, a federal jury in Dallas came back with a defense verdict in the first trial involving DePuy Orthopaedics Inc.’s Pinnacle hip implant.

“I had a good year, and a bad year, but when you put it together the verdicts averaged $4.5 billion per case,” said Lanier, founder of The Lanier Law Firm in Houston.