Articles Posted in Personal Injury Verdicts

When trying to figure out the settlement value of a personal injury case, trial attorneys pull from usually only one resource: their own experience. We pull from our own cases and from cases we have heard about from other lawyers. But how good are we at valuing cases?

First, it is important to underscore how unbelievably important this skill set is for trial lawyers. Mostly when a case goes to trial, it is because someone miscalculated the value of the case. The insurance companies rely heavily on data in valuing cases (which sometimes reliably cements their reputation as unfeeling robots). While they deny it, they continue to believe that they can predict how much money a jury is likely to award based on the relationship between the amount of special damages (medical bills and lost wages) and the award for noneconomic damages. Sometimes this logic holds. The key skill for personal injury lawyers if being able to identify which cases defy the data because of intangibles that data cannot measure.

• Twelve factors that matter in evaluating injury claims
• What I have learned from reading reports of thousands of jury verdict reports
• Writing demand letters

Most notably, insurance companies invariably devalue the character, or lack thereof, of the plaintiff, which is just an unbelievably critical value marker. So the insurance company’s predictions misfire both ways. Knowing when the insurance company has miscalculated the value of a case gives you a tremendous advantage over the insurance company because you know which offers or demands should be accepted – some will be steals – and which cases should be tried.

An article titled “Predicting Civil Jury Verdicts: How Attorneys Use (and Misuse) a Second Opinion” written in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies provides the answer how personal injury attorneys do as a class in estimating verdicts: not good.

The average accuracy error for lawyers in predicting the value was 0.387. For a verdict of $100,000, this is equivalent to an estimate of $244,000 or $41,000. That’s a big range. With those estimation skills, it is a wonder more cases don’t go to trial.

The study found that when you averaged the estimates of more lawyers – testing the idea of bouncing case value off other attorneys – the average estimation error dropped to 0.228, which on a $100,000 case is equivalent to an estimate of about $169,000 or $59,000. When expanded to 28 lawyers, the average estimation error was 0.130, equivalent to an estimate of $135,000 or $74,000. Continue reading

Jury Verdict Research has some interesting statistics on verdicts on money damages awarded at trial in premises liability claims.

Also included in the report is a look at median awards in different types of premises liability cases. So, at least theoretically, we have on average the same injuries but different defendants. The median award for premises liability claims against owners/operators of industrial property was the highest at $250,000. The median awards for other premises liability cases, according to the studies, were: $125,000 against recreational facilities; $114,726 against government property; $95,883 against service establishments; $75,000 against residential property owners; and $82,500 against retail stores.

I’m probably overstating the case. Owners of industrial property are far more likely to be mixing with dangerous activities, I’m sure. Still, the differences in the data are striking. Juries definitely consider who their plaintiffs and defendants are and that invariably gets factored into the verdict. It shouldn’t. But juries are human beings.

Jury Verdict Research has some interesting data on which injures comprised the largest proportion of cases in which juries or courts awarded the victim over $1 million. Here is the category followed by its relative percentage of million-dollar verdicts:

• Death – 28%
• Brain Damage – 14%
• Leg Injuries – 6%
• Spinal Nerve Injuries – 6%
• Disc Damage – 5%
• Emotional Distress – 5%
• Paralysis – 4%
• Arm Injuries – 2%
• Cancer – 2%
• Foot Injuries – 2%
• Sexual Assault – 2%
• Vertebra Injuries – 2%
• Other Injuries – 22%

Did you see any major surprises here? I didn’t except for seeing leg injuries with 50% more million-dollar verdicts than paralysis injuries. Thankfully, I think this might be most because of the fact that paralysis is, relatively, a rare injury in a car accident.

Where are the million-dollar verdicts geographically? The Southwest – composed of Arizona, California (which I suspect did a lot of the heavy lifting to push these numbers), Colorado, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah – has the highest percentage of million-dollar verdicts with 19%. The Northwest – with Alaska (which has high awards actually), Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming has the lowest percentage of million-dollar verdicts at 7%. No shock there, either.

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The much-anticipated list of judicial hellholes is out. Baltimore made the list once again.

The write up on Baltimore begins with the notion that for evidence that Baltimore is a judicial hellhole, well just ask Miller & Zois.

Baltimore has been described as an up-and-coming Judicial Hellhole for years, but don’t just take our word for it. Plaintiffs’ firms, such as Miller & Zois, advertise Baltimore as “a favorable jurisdiction for plaintiffs’ injury lawyers.”

Is Miller & Zois calling the city a jurisdiction “favorable” for plaintiffs’ attorneys tantamount to prove that Baltimore is a “judicial hellhole” for defendants? If so, I really need to adjust my expectations.

But that is just the start. This report prefers rhetoric to exactitude at every turn and reads like a college term paper that was turned in at that last minute. It complains “Judge Glenn” – retired Judge Glynn – is rigging the asbestos docket. How? The report does not exactly say. It implies it is by consolidating the cases. Yes, the asbestos cases in Baltimore are consolidated. Baltimore joins a zillion other jurisdictions that have done the same thing. Why? The cases are consolidated on causation, not product identification or damages. This is not a class-action lawsuit. The cases are consolidated on damages because it is simple to prove. If you got mesothelioma you either got it from asbestos or you were a vermiculite miner. Call me crazy, I’m willing to let the court figure this out for scheduling purposes.

This is how this report reads from top to bottom. The entire premise of this beat down of Baltimore is just filled with unsupported innuendo. The impression left is that asbestos cases being filed in the city are because of forum shopping, Plaintiffs’ attorneys looking to get to these juries. But the auto plants, shipyards and steel mills, and many other defendants (Locke Insulators, for example) are located in Baltimore. That’s not forum shopping, it is suing where the harm occurred.

The downright fictions and convenient distortions continue. Baltimore juries are not “notoriously biased against business defendants.” They cite no evidence. The report really focuses on asbestos cases. Yeah, Baltimore juries are mad at asbestos defendants. So is pretty much every jury under the sun that has evaluated the evidence. Continue reading

I have recently received a good bit of heated interest in my last two posts (here and here) on the Maryland Court of Appeals opinion in Tracey v. Solesky, in which the court held that in dog bite cases involving a pit bull or cross-bred pit bull mix, plaintiff no longer needs to prove that the dog in particular, or pit bulls, in general, are dangerous.

There is no question that dog bite claims make up their fair share of serious personal injury claims. Here are some statistics:

• The insurance industry pays more than $1 billion in dog-bite claims each year. State Farm, the insurance company in Solesky, paid more than $109 million on about 3,800 dog bite claims nationwide in 2011. In 2010, State Farm had approximately 3,500 claims and $90 million in payouts.
• The Insurance Information Institute estimated that nearly $479 million in dog bite claims were paid by all insurance companies in 2011, spokeswoman Loretta Worters said. In 2010, it was $413 million.
• The CDC says that dogs bite approximately 4.7 million people each year. Over half of the victims are children. Most of these bites are not serious. But approximately 800,000 people seek medical attention for the bites each year. Sixteen people a year die from dog bites. It has to be said: most of these are from pit bulls. Still, at least 25 different breeds of dogs have been involved in the last 238 dog-bite-related fatalities in the U.S.
• Approximately 92% of fatal dog attacks involved male dogs, 94% of which were not neutered.
• The median (not average) dog bite verdict in Maryland over the last 23 years is $24,600.
• At particular risk for dog bites are (1) children ages 5 to 9 years old, (2) seniors, and (3) postmen. Children are the biggest risk. Kids are 900 times more likely to be attacked than a letter carrier.
• State Farm’s average cost per dog bite nationally in 2011 was $28,799.
• Approximately one-fourth of dog bite claims are like Solesky in that they involve unrestrained dogs off of their owners’ property. I think these are the dog bite injuries that most concern the public.

Dog Bite Statistics Update

• According to the Insurance Information Institute, homeowner insurers paid $797 million in dog bite and other dog-related injury claims.
• According to the Triple-I, there were 17,802 dog bite claims in 2019. This is a 2.9 increase from 2018.
• The average cost per dog bite claim in 2019 was $44,760. This was 14.7 percent higher than in 2018, which was $39,017.
• Between 2003 and 2019, the average cost per claim increased by 134 percent. This was because of increases in medical costs, settlement sizes, judgments, and jury verdicts.
• According to a 2019 study, the highest reported breed for dog bites is “unknown.” It is followed by pit bulls, mixed breeds, German shepherds, terriers, and rottweilers.
• Forty-eight dog bite fatalities occurred in 2019. About 70 percent of them involved pit bulls.
• In 2019, 27 percent of dog bite fatality victims were children 9 and under, 6 percent were between ages 10 and 18, and 67 percent were adults 19 years and older.
• Over 63 percent of fatal dog bites in 2019 involved more than one dog.
• About 27,000 dog bite victims underwent reconstructive surgery in 2018.

Continue reading

The Defense Line – a publication of the Maryland Defense Institute – publishes a quarterly newsletter that includes a few “Hey, look, Ma, we got a defense verdict” pieces. Here is a sample:

Johnson, et al. v. Dr. Rosemarie Filart, M.D., et al. — Bonner Kiernan Obtains Defense Verdict in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, Maryland — Alleged Medical Malpractice/Wrongful Death

A 53 year old man, [name deleted], developed deep vein thrombosis (DVT) after completing a course of anticoagulant therapy prescribed by Dr. Rosemarie Filart of Johns Hopkins. One of his primary care physicians, Dr. Mark Saba, subsequently placed the patient on a blood thinner to treat the DVT, but Mr. Johnson still went on to suffer from a pulmonary embolism (PE) and died. The decedent’s family (including a wife and two adult children) filed a lawsuit against Dr. Filart, Dr. Saba, and Dr. Saba’s partner, Dr. Lawrence Boas, alleging that Mr. Johnson’s pulmonary embolism was a result of the premature discontinuation of anticoagulant therapy (by Dr. Filart) and/or improper treatment of the DVT (by Saba and/or Boas). Drs. Boas and Saba, represented by E. Phillip Franke and Ace McBride of Baxter Baker Sidle Conn & Jones, were both voluntarily dismissed by the plaintiffs in the middle of the trial. Plaintiffs elected to continue their case against only Dr. Filart, represented by Carolyn Israel Stein and Jason Engel of Bonner Kiernan Trebach & Crociata. After a three week trial, the jury returned a defense verdict in favor of Dr. Filart after 45 minutes of deliberation. Plaintiffs had sought $1,200,000 in economic damages, plus noneconomic damages for the decedent’s alleged pain and suffering and the family member’s suffering due to the loss of their decedent.

Car accidents can cause circulatory system injuries.  My law firm has seen heart attacks, spleen injuries, liver and lung injuries, gallbladder injuries.

Jury Verdict Research provides a study on median compensatory award for circulatory system injuries:

• Heart attacks: $443,750

Metro Verdicts Monthly’s cover graph is hip replacement settlements and verdicts in Maryland, Washington, D.C., and Virginia.

The graph just says “hip replacements” so there is really no context. I will assume that these are primarily injury cases and not product liability claims because those claims – most notably against DePuy, Stryker, and Zimmer – do not make up a substantial part of the verdicts and settlements involving hip replacements since 1987.

With that introduction, the median verdict/settlement in hip replacement cases:

Click to enlarge

Jury Verdict Research conducted a study of its database of verdicts and found that the average jury award in a bicycle accident case is $279,970. Underscoring how high jury verdicts distort the average verdict, the overall median money awarded in bike accident cases is $50,000. The plaintiffs only prevail in 41% of the cases that go to trial.

I think the relatively low success rate of bicycle accident cases at trial is a general bias against bikes that may be, bizarrely, even stronger than the bias against motorcycles. Many jurors, who typically drive cars think bicycles shouldn’t be on the road.