The first case I tried for Miller & Zois 18 years ago was a herniated disc injury. I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a car/light truck crash. We got a $300,000 verdict in a case with a $15,000 settlement offer. The defense lawyer thought it was a nuisance case because there was no visible property damage. The jury set him straight.
Since then, our lawyers have handled hundreds of slipped disc injury accident claims for victims. If another plaintiffs’ law firm has handled more herniated disc injury lawsuits in Maryland, I’d like to know who that is. Our lawyers have spent a lot of time fine-tuning the science and the arguments to make at trial in these spinal injury cases.
I have always been particularly interested in verdict statistics in disc injury claims. Yesterday, I found some interesting data that looks at the median value of herniated disc injury claims based on the type of vehicle crash. The data provides two things: the median result and a probability range of verdict.
Of the two, I think the most interesting is the probability range. In this Jury Verdict Research Study, the probability range is defined as the middle 50 percent of all awards arranged in ascending order in a sampling, 25% above and 25% below the median. In other words, it provides the 25th percentile and the 75th percentile of verdicts. I believe that for plaintiffs with a good law firm who knows how to prepare and try a disc injury lawsuit, I think the 75th percentile is probably the median.
Anyway, these are the numbers:
The first thing that really stands out is the gap in the range, which is particularly pronounced as you might expect in truck accident crashes. I’m also surprised at how relatively low the statistics are for intersection accidents.
They are all motor vehicle accidents. What surprises me is how much more the value of herniated disc injuries explodes when taken outside of the motor tort context. Look at these payouts by type of tort claim: