'Price Is Right' Lawsuit Verdict Is Overturned, Case Returns To Trial

The Price is Right lawsuit that awarded former model Brandi Cochran $7.7 million, is headed back to court a Los Angeles judge decided on Tuesday.

The Price is Right lawsuit was big news last year, and when the model seeking punitive damages was awarded a huge, multi-million dollar sum, she thought justice had been served.

But when The Price is Right's production company FremantleMedia launched an appeal, it went to Judge Kevin Brazile, and he re-examined the trial.

Yesterday Brazile returned with his ruling: the case must go back to court because the jury in the first trial were given "bad instructions."

The high-profile lawsuit was filed by Cochran after she says the Price is Right producers discriminated against her when she became pregnant in 2008. That discrimination, the model claims, cost her her job.

And according to Judge Brazile, the judge in last year's trial failed to tell the jury that the discrimination in question had to be a "substantial" motivation factor, despite a request to do so from the defendants.

He wrote in yesterday's ruling, "The instruction error cannot be considered harmless. Of central importance to the case was the weight given to discriminatory intent and whether that intent need only be of a mere motivating factor or a substantial factor."

The ruling continued with the decision to return to trial, "Given this central dispute, the failure to give the proper instruction regarding substantial factor cannot be considered harmless, and a new trial must be granted."

The judgement comes just a week after the California Supreme Court decided that discrimination must be a substantial motivating factor in mixed motive cases.

Cochran was a model on The Price Is Right for seven years and worked alongside former host Bob Barker and current host Drew Carey. She filed her lawsuit after producers would not allow her to return to work after her maternity leave in 2010.