Trial Trends

You're merely a flip of the page away from the most prestigious plaintiffs' verdicts of 2009. From a monster intellectual-property dispute that produced a verdict of more than $1.67 billion, to the less lofty but still tony neighborhood of $16 million, we're about to parade what we believe is the most comprehensive list of last year's top verdicts.

In these pages, those 100 high-class cases rub elbows with one another, but in VerdictSearch's case database, the billion-dollar verdict is no more valuable or byte-consuming than the $5,000 trip-and-fall or the defense victory in a threshold case. Indeed, the database's 149,000 reports comprise plaintiff's verdicts--both large and small—and defense verdicts, bench decisions, settlements, mediations and arbitrations. That diversity is all important to our customers, who have long recognized the value of having this information at their fingertips. Need a practical example? Consider this. ...

You won a $5 million verdict for your client, who underwent an above-the-knee amputation as a result of medical malpractice. Tomorrow, you're due to appear before the appellate court to fight the defense's motion to skewer that verdict. Few if any of us would trade a leg for $5 million, but in the eyes of the appellate judges, $5 million may be a bit too much compensation for such an injury. What to do? Call us or visit www.verdictsearch.com. Before long you'd have discovered that VerdictSearch reported 53 such jury trials involving that injury in 2009 alone. Some quick arithmetic would demonstrate that the award produced an average jury verdict of $5,156,705.63—solid proof of your award's sustainability. Of course, you'd have to view the cases in your jurisdiction and weed out those that include other significant injuries, but the point is that you'd have hard data to back up your client's award. Where else can you get that?

For further examples of the information we can provide, check the charts on the accompanying pages. For instance, the wrongful-death chart shows that 72 percent of plaintiffs' verdicts total $1 million or more, but, on the other hand, the motor-vehicle study shows that 46 percent of those cases' plaintiffs' verdicts result in recoveries of less than $25,000. And let's not forget the defense judgments. While the medical-malpractice pie chart shows that 24 percent of plaintiffs' verdicts top the $5 million mark, our database will also reveal that about 70 percent of all 2009 med-mal cases resulted in a settlement or no award for the plaintiff.

Take a few moments to digest the trends revealed by these charts, then consider how this or similar information can help you prevail in your next case.

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Last year, premises-liability cases produced a median plaintiff's award of $242,782, which represents a 16.4-percent increase over the prior four years' combined median of $208,611.59. Don't be fooled by the spiky nature of the accompanying chart, the median has held relatively steady since 2005, varying by less than $50,000 in range. The relative consistency of these awards is repeated in the distribution of award amounts, as demonstrated by the pie chart, which shows that a premises-liability case is nearly as likely to produce an award between $50,000 and $99,999 as an award of $2.5 million or more. Of course, the consistent distribution is largely a product of the wide variety of injuries that are possible in these types of cases.

Plaintiffs in motor-vehicle cases have, on average, been receiving much more generosity from juries lately. After the median award in such cases jumped by 24.8 percent in 2008, last year saw an even bigger leap of 38.8 percent, to a median award of $48,480. This is an important development for defense attorneys, many of whom are working from insurance limits of $25,000 to $50,000 when attempting to settle these cases. For defense attorneys, the good news lies in the pie chart, which shows that 46 percent of all motor-vehicle awards fall below $25,000. For statistical purists: This year's averages do not reflect a $330 million motor-vehicle verdict that would have greatly skewed the results.

After spikes on both the mean and median scales in 2008, wrongful-death verdicts settled back to somewhere near their 2007 range a year ago. The 2008 numbers, particularly the mean, may have been skewed by two monster verdicts that combined to exceed $840 million. In 2009, with only one case exceeding even $100 million, the median award fell to $2,185,000, which is largely in step with the results of the prior four years. The pie chart provides further definition of the award landscape, demonstrating that, since 2004, 40 percent of plaintiff's wrongful-death verdicts have landed in the range of $1 million to $4,999,999.

Mean and median medical-malpractice awards increased by 27.8 and 33.8 percent in 2009, after having remained fairly steady since 2006. However, little or no change was recorded in the stratification of these awards. As has been the case for several years, roughly 50 percent of medical-malpractice plaintiff's verdicts fall between $250,000 and $2.5 million. And very little has changed at the top-in the most recent five-year study, verdicts equaling or exceeding $5 million ticked up to 24 percent, from 22 percent.

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