IRVINE, Calif. — A federal court has entered a $79.5 million judgment against Ameris Bank after a unanimous jury found the bank wrongfully terminated Balboa Capital founder Patrick Byrne after he challenged calculations that he maintained deprived him and other employees of millions of dollars in earned compensation.
The July 27 judgment in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California followed a two-week trial and jury verdicts returned June 11 and 12. Jurors found Ameris liable for wrongful termination in violation of public policy, whistleblower retaliation under California law, failure to pay wages due at termination and breach of contract involving Balboa’s Long-Term Cash Incentive Plan.
The judgment awards Byrne $16.6 million in compensatory damages and statutory penalties, including roughly $9 million in unpaid incentive compensation, along with nearly $62.9 million in punitive damages.
The jury specifically found that Ameris acted “with malice, oppression, or fraud,” the legal predicate required under California law for punitive damages.
Matthew Sessions, Byrne’s lead trial attorney with Allen Matkins Leck Gamble Mallory & Natsis LLP, said in an interview with the Vanguard that the size of the punitive award reflected evidence jurors heard about the bank’s handling of Byrne’s repeated compensation complaints.
“That’s why this whole thing I think resonated unanimously with the jury,” Sessions said.
Byrne founded Balboa Capital in Orange County in 1988, building the equipment financing company over more than three decades before selling it to Georgia-based Ameris Bank in late 2021.
Sessions said Ameris prevailed over competing bidders in part by offering Byrne an arrangement under which he would remain as chief executive of the Balboa division for three years and participate in a Long-Term Cash Incentive Plan, or LTIP.
“We want to lock you in for three years. We think you’re great. We think you are the company. We think that you can keep pushing the company forward,” Sessions recalled of the arrangement presented to Byrne.
The incentive plan tied compensation to Balboa’s earnings before taxes, with a portion of the money above specified thresholds available for distribution to Byrne and approximately 140 to 150 employees who moved with Balboa to Ameris, according to Sessions.
The first year appeared successful.
“First year they blow it out of the water,” Sessions said. “They greatly exceed the earnings before taxes goal that Ameris had set for Balboa. And so massive bonus payouts end up going to Pat and to his other employees to distribute to.”
The dispute emerged the following year when Byrne was told Balboa was no longer on track to meet its performance target.
Byrne requested the accounting records Ameris was using and concluded the bank was treating certain expenses differently from what the incentive agreement required, Sessions said.
“Pat looks at the accounting records and sees, hey, in many important ways, Ameris was not following the terms of the contract,” Sessions said. “They were calculating EBT earnings before taxes differently.”
Sessions said Byrne continued raising the issue internally and ultimately received payments for the first quarters he disputed, including interest.
But the dispute expanded after Byrne examined the earlier accounting and concluded that compensation for 2022 had also been understated.
“He goes, ‘Hey, I need you to repay us for 2022, the amounts you owe, and I need you to pay for 2023,’” Sessions said.
According to Sessions, Byrne continued pressing the issue through 2024, including in increasingly tense communications with senior Ameris officials.
Ameris notified Byrne in March that his contract would not be renewed at the end of the year. The bank then terminated him in the summer of 2024.
“They don’t even let him send an email saying goodbye to all the employees that he brought over with him, that he had worked with some for decades,” Sessions said.
One longtime employee testified that she learned about Byrne’s termination when an information technology employee asked why he had been directed to deactivate Byrne’s computer and cellphone, Sessions recalled.
For Byrne, Sessions said, the dispute ultimately came down to a basic principle.
Asked at trial whether he believed Ameris had violated the law, Byrne responded, according to Sessions: “Well, I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure everybody knows if you do the work, you got to get paid.”
The jury agreed that Byrne’s protected complaints were a substantial motivating reason for his termination.
Byrne said following the judgment that the case demonstrated the consequences when corporations retaliate against employees who challenge compensation practices.
“This judgment affirms that no one — not even a major bank — can silence employees who speak up about unpaid wages, or manipulate compensation to deprive people of what they earned,” Byrne said. “I raised these concerns not only for myself but for the colleagues who built Balboa with me. This outcome is about holding Ameris accountable for keeping its promises to its employees.”
Sessions said some of the most significant evidence involved internal communications among Ameris officials after Byrne questioned the accounting.
According to Sessions, Byrne would identify specific calculations he believed violated the agreement, after which internal discussions continued without him.
“They take them off the chain and the accountants would say, ‘Hey, Nicole, if we just concede points one and two, we won’t have to pay Pat. But if we concede points one, three, and five, we will have to pay them,’” Sessions said, describing evidence presented at trial.
Sessions said another communication showed employees discussing whether a particular accounting approach would avoid triggering payment.
Byrne did not know about those internal discussions until they were produced through discovery, Sessions said.
“I think that’s what the jury, they took all those kind of pieces into play in addition to other problems we pointed out,” he said.
The punitive damages portion of the case was decided during a separate phase after jurors determined liability and compensatory damages.
Sessions explained that evidence concerning Ameris’ financial condition, which was excluded during the initial phase to avoid prejudicing jurors, became relevant once they were asked to determine the appropriate punitive award.
“Because that affects how big of an award is enough to tell a bank like this, stop,” Sessions said.
A member of the trial team compared the principle to imposing a traffic fine on a billionaire versus a financially struggling college student: The same dollar amount might deter one but have virtually no impact on the other.
“So you got to take that into account, jury, when you decide how much,” Sessions recalled the argument.
The resulting punitive award was $62,906,613.
“The jury saw the evidence clearly and held Ameris Bank fully accountable,” Sessions said in a statement after the verdict. “This is a stunning damages award, driven by substantial punitive damages that reflect the jury’s finding of malice. It validates our client’s courage to stand up for what is right and the strength of the claims.”
Ameris Bancorp has said it intends to appeal. In its second-quarter 2026 financial results, the bank’s parent company reported an $82.5 million pre-tax litigation accrual. Executives subsequently said the company had accrued “the full amount of the verdict plus related costs.”
The charge reduced reported second-quarter earnings to 77 cents per diluted share, compared with $1.60 per share on an adjusted basis.
The judgment also awards prejudgment interest on the $9 million past-economic-loss award at 10% annually dating to the Sept. 16, 2024, filing of Byrne’s lawsuit, as well as post-judgment interest and costs. Byrne may also seek attorneys’ fees.
Following a separate bench proceeding, the court entered judgment against Ameris under California’s Unfair Competition Law.
The dispute may not end with Byrne.
Stacey Villagomez of Allen Matkins said the firm is examining potential claims involving other Balboa employees.
“This case was never about just one plaintiff,” Villagomez said. “Roughly 150 employees transitioned from Balboa Capital to Ameris, and many were potentially affected by the same LTIP practice, resulting in underpaid earned wages. Allen Matkins is preparing additional claims on behalf of other affected individuals.”
Sessions similarly said the broader implications of the case extend beyond a single executive because the disputed compensation practices potentially affected scores of workers.
“Well, I think that’s exactly right,” Sessions said when asked whether other employees might not have possessed Byrne’s ability to identify the accounting discrepancies. “And I’m not one to speculate, but it does make you wonder where else has this happened? Because this is just one small division.”
Balboa, Sessions noted, represented only about 140 to 150 employees within a bank employing thousands.
Sessions said the case illustrates why whistleblower and wage protections matter, particularly when an employee challenges the practices of a substantially larger institution.
“That’s kind of the chilling effect,” Sessions said. “And that’s what these laws are here for.”
“You want people to feel like people can work hard and feel like they’ll get paid for what they’re doing,” he added. “And so I think it’s helpful when you see the system work.”
Ameris has separately sued Byrne in federal court. In that action, Ameris Bank v. Patrick Byrne, the court has dismissed or narrowed several claims, including allegations involving trade secrets, California Penal Code Section 502 and conversion, while dismissing the bank’s breach-of-contract claim involving Byrne’s employment agreement without leave to amend.
For Sessions, who said much of his practice ordinarily involves representing defendants rather than plaintiffs, the Byrne case also underscored the burden facing employees who take retaliation claims to trial.
“When you’re on the defense, you can kind of play a role of, ‘Hey, look, it’s not on us to prove that we’re not liable. It’s on their job to prove that we are,’” Sessions said.
On Byrne’s side, he said, “we have to remember team, it is on us to prove they did it wrong. We carry the burden.”
“And so it’s definitely more pressure when you go into trial on the plaintiff’s side than the defense side.”
After approximately eight days before the jury, Byrne carried that burden.
The jury answered every question it reached on the 28-question special verdict form in his favor and ultimately concluded that Ameris had not simply breached its obligations to Byrne, but had engaged in conduct warranting nearly $63 million in punitive damages.
Sessions said the public nature of such verdicts serves a broader purpose beyond compensating an individual plaintiff.
“You want people to see that justice is being served and that people won’t get away with doing things like this,” he said.
“The jury trial system, it’s imperfect, but I don’t know that there’s a better one in the world,” Sessions added. “And it’s nice when it sees it work because it encourages other people like, ‘Hey, no, people get things right eventually.’”
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