Trial Trends

We proudly claim that this publication presents the most comprehensive coverage of the civil verdicts that made news during 2007. But for each eye-popping verdict reported in this publication, there are some 1,230 more in our nationwide database. Those 123,000 reports span the past 20 years and include a fair sampling of plaintiff's verdicts large and small, defense verdicts, bench decisions and settlements. So while the Top 100 trumpets the best of the best, our database provides the complete picture. Skeptics might dismiss the value of a database built on $5,000 fender benders, policy-limit settlements and low-profile defense verdicts. But thousands of attorneys know that there is a dollar value beyond each of those cases-the dollars they earn or save their clients by leveraging the information in those cases.

For instance, a New York attorney's settlement attempts would be greatly boosted by knowing that five years of data show that his client's ankle fracture typically garners about $400,000 from a Brooklyn jury. A venue-shopping defense attorney can learn which available county is most favorable to defendants. Meanwhile, a plaintiff's attorney would certainly be helped by being able to point out that an opponent's star expert always testifies on behalf of defendants. These are just some of the many types of case-winning advantages that can be gained via a simple query of our database. But the possibilities don't end there: The following 10 charts illustrate other types of studies that can be compiled at your request.

For example, the state-comparison chart, which we produce every year in our Top 100 book, illustrates the continuing disparity between jury-award amounts in three of the most litigious states: California, New York and Texas. The wrongful-death chart shows that 76 percent of plaintiff's verdicts total $1 million or more, but, on the other hand, the motor-vehicle chart shows that 56 percent of those cases' plaintiff's verdicts result in recoveries of less than $25,000. Of course, those are only the plaintiff's verdicts-our database also includes tens of thousands of verdicts and decisions that favor the defense.

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In the state of Texas, the mean jury award continued its downward trend last year, dropping 5.9 percent, to $29,563, from $31,420 in 2006. That follows an 11.7-percent drop the prior year. The decline counters upward trends in two other greatly litigious states: California and New York. Meanwhile, New York dwarfs other states in terms of average dollars awarded to plaintiffs. The average New York plaintiff takes home $1.24 for every dollar awarded to a California plaintiff and $16.16 for every dollar awarded to a Texas plaintiff.

Every year, our workplace-bias study shows that employee-employer litigation is dominated by suits that stem from alleged incidents of sexual harassment or harassment based on gender, national origin or race. Last year, those cases grabbed a 60-percent share of the pie, though the number was a more robust 66 percent in 2006.

Last year's mean wrongful-death award was $7,901,273. That number represented a 23.3 percent increase from the prior year's mean of $6,408,508. The $7.9 million mean was undoubtedly inflated by a small number of huge, eight- and nine-figure verdicts. Indeed, as the pie chart shows, merely 32 percent of wrongful-death verdicts equal or exceed $5 million.

After a steep drop in 2006, the mean medical malpractice award resumed its ascent in 2007, checking in at $5,795,988. Last year's drop was somewhat caused by a monster $606 million verdict that skewed the 2005 results. Indeed, the median scale reflects that med-mal awards have remained fairly level throughout the past five years, ranging from $1.28 million to $1.51 million. And, as has been the case the past couple of years, about 50 percent of med-mal awards fall within the range of $250,000 and $1 million.

In 2007, premises-liability cases produced a mean award of $1,990,686, thus continuing the peak-and-valley trend that this case type has displayed over the past five years. Of course, premises-liability cases produce a wide variety of injuries, and that extreme variation could explain the volatility of award amounts. As the pie chart shows, award amounts are fairly consistently distributed across the landscape -- an award of $2.5 million or more is just as likely as an award that falls between $50,000 and $99,999.

Awards in motor-vehicle cases made a big leap last year, producing a mean award of $1,054,617, which represents a 35.8-percent increase from the 2006 figure of $776,382, which was a three-year low. However, last year's median verdict of $35,000 was a near carbon copy of the prior four years' median of $34,884, thus indicating that 2006 was merely an anomaly. Meanwhile, stratification has barely changed. During the five-year periods ending in 2005 and 2006, roughly 44 percent of the awards were less than $25,000. The same holds true for the five-year period ending in 2007.

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