There were ten jury and non-jury awards of $1,000,000 or more in Tennessee tort cases in the year ending on June 30, 2011.
The number of million dollar verdicts was exactly the same as it was ten years earlier, a year when there were 50% more trials.
These are the counties with million dollar verdicts or judgments:
Tennessee jury verdicts were down substantially in 2010-11, according to data released by the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts.
Total damages awarded in tort cases in state court were only $32,051,326, down by a little over 60% from a year earlier, when the total damages awarded was over $91,000,000. These numbers include jury and non-jury cases.
The average verdict or judgment was $168,691, down over 600% from a year earlier, when the average verdict was over $400,000. The average verdict includes only those trials in which the fact-finder returned an award of money damages. It does not include defense or no-money awards.
The number of jury trials in Tennessee tort cases continues to decline, according to data released by the Tennessee Adminstrative Office of the Courts.
In the one year period ending June 30, 2011, there were only 222 jury trials in tort cases in Tennessee state courts. Ten years ago, the period ending June 30, 2002, there were 412 jury trials in tort cases. Looking at the ratio between cases filed and cases tried to a jury, jury trials are down over 50%.
Is this trend due to mediation? I doubt it. True, there are lots of mediations in tort cases today, but mediation has been around for more than 20 years and was a firmly entrenched part of tort practice in Tennessee well over 10 years ago.
New data out from the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts puts data behind what those of us who practice tort law knew: tort filings are down in Tennessee.
The AOC’s Annual Statistical Report shows that tort filings for the one year period ending June 30, 2011 were 10,576. Ten years ago, in the one year period ending June 30, 2002, there were 12,166 tort cases filed in the state.
Total tort case filings in the six counties with the largest population were as follows:
We all know that the services provided by homemakers have a substantial value, but this article from Vestopedia puts some numbers on it.
The author notes that "
The life of a homemaker is one that includes an endless amount of demands and to-dos. Depending on the size of the home and family, the position of homemaker can go well beyond the usual nine to five. We examined some of the tasks that a homemaker might do to find out how much his or her services would net as individual professional careers. We only take into consideration tasks which have monetary values and use the lowest value for each calculation.
The Arkansas Supreme Court has rejected an effort by the Arkansas Legislature to define who is permitted to give testimony as an expert witness in a medical malpractice case.
Broussard’s medical malpractice case was dismissed on summary judgment after her expert witness was excluded under Arkansas Code Annotated section 16-114-206 (Repl. 2006). Broussard argued that the requirement in section 16-114-206(a) that proof in medical-malpractice cases must be made by expert testimony by “medical care providers of the same specialty as the defendant” violates section 3 of Amendment 80 of the Arkansas Constitution.
It takes a particular type of jerk to project a loogie onto a hamburger that is being served to another person. (I guess you would never do that to a hamburger you intended to eat yourself.) And there is a relatively small subset of jerks who would do this to a police officer who ordered the burger for a late-night meal.
Now, what are the odds that the police officer would sense that something was amiss before eating that burger? Deputy Bylsma from Clark County, Washington did, and when he pulled the top of the bun off his burger he observed a “slimy, clear and white phlegm glob” on the meat patty.
Now, the good deputy had one course of action that comes immediately to mind. He could go into Burger King, identify which of the only two people on the job committed this act, and then proceed to resolve the situation with a good ol’ fashioned ass whipping. But Bylsma was smarter than that.
Jury Research Institute has a fine article about the all-important task of witness preparation.
The article breaks down the preparation process into three stages:
You will find that this article will help you in your efforts to prepare your witnesses for trial.
The Federal Rules of Evidence have been "restyled" effective December 1, 2011. The objective was to make the rules simpler to understand and use without substantively changing the meaning.
The Federal Evidence Review has a free PDF that not only contains the new rules but also links to legislative history, links from the index to each rule, the ability to search the rules within the PDF using Adobe’s "search" tool, and other benefits as well.
You can download the PDF here. The old version of the rules may be seen here.
Two lawyers in Connecticut recently made news when they elected not to put on proof of economic losses in a trial of a personal injury case, instead focusing on non-economic damages. The result? A verdict for $10 million in non-economic damages.
The case arose when representatives of Segway failed to give the plaintiff a helmet during a test drive of the device. The plaintiff fell, hit his head, and had a mild traumatic brain injury. Plaintiff lost his sense of taste and smell. There was no notable loss of mental functioning.
The Connecticut Law Tribune reports that "Adelman [one of the plaintiff’s lawyers] said he didn’t want to distract the jury with claims for medical treatment, lost income or attorney fees. If the jurors had those figures, he said they would not be tempted to use a formulaic multiplier of economic damages to arrive at non-economic damages. ‘We didn’t want the jury to be thinking about what the doctors get, ‘or what the lawyers get,’ said Adelman, “because the case was about John.’”
