An Alabama jury awarded $1.5 million to a man shocked by low-hanging power lines. The Plaintiff was paving a road in Alabama when his vehicle struck Black Warrior Electric power lines, sending 7,600 volts of electricity through his right arm. Suffice to say, that is a lot of electricity, although…
Max Kennerly writes about a lot of new bills being proposed in Pennsylvania. Any legislature can propose a bill and there is always someone in every legislature – on both sides of the aisle – who likes to put out radical bills so they can brag to their constituents about…
Jury Verdict Research has come out with some new data that underscores how hard it is to rely on verdict statistics in a particular jurisdiction to prove how that venue values cases. JVR found that the median compensatory award for personal injury trials in Indiana is $25,036 and injured plaintiffs…
A Jury Verdict Research study found that the average personal injury verdict in California is 1,635,327. The median, which takes out huge verdicts like one in the study for over $100 million, is California. California juries are tougher on liability: plaintiffs receive damages in 45 percent of cases that go…
The Montana Supreme Court affirmed an $850,000 award to the parents of a baseball player who tragically died after being struck by a ball hit with an aluminum baseball bat. If your kids are playing baseball – particularly if they are pitching – you have thought about these facts. An…
A medical malpractice lawsuit on behalf of a Florida veteran will begin this week against the Miami Veterans’ Administration hospital. In the lawsuit, the plaintiff claims he contracted hepatitis C from an unclean medical device used in a 2007 colonoscopy. This may be the bellwether trial on this issue: there…
In Wilson v. State Farm, a U.S. District Court in Kentucky found that an insurance carrier did not act in “bad faith” by delaying payment of the settlement in a car accident case pending plaintiff’s lawyer squaring away a Medicare lien. In Wilson, the plaintiff brought an uninsured motorist claim…
The Georgia Court of Appeals has tossed a $459 million junk fax verdict on Wednesday, finding that the trial judge erred in concluding that the defendant sent 306,000 unsolicited fax advertisements because plaintiffs did not prove the faxes had been received. Wow, $459 million for faxes? Juries are crazy. Well,…
The Mississippi Supreme Court reversed a directed verdict for a hospital in a nursing medical malpractice action in which the plaintiff suffered IV infiltration – leakage of fluid from an IV into the patient’s tissues from an IV line – and burn injuries. The directed verdict from the trial court…
The average car/truck/motorcycle accident verdict in New York is $837,020, which is stunningly high compared to most other jurisdictions. Why is this? Are New York jurors just that much more generous than, say, jurors in Maryland? The answer is that New York’s no-fault accident law requires that plaintiffs suffer a…