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Motivated by the recent national debate on the growth of jury awards, this report examines how jury awards change after trial. It considers not just tort actions, but all civil suits for money damages. For all types of cases, it (1) compares jury awards to final payments, (2) examines how results vary by award size, and (3) studies whether results differ by case characteristics. The authors find that, in the locales studied, defendants paid out an average proportion of 0.71 of the amount the jury originally awarded. Further, reductions were generally greater among cases with the largest awards. However, some sizable awards were not lowered, and results differed significantly depending on the characteristics of the case. The findings suggest that the system works already in much the same way that the current proposals for legal change are intended to work, namely by affecting "excessive" awards.

Verdicts --- Jury

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This report examines how different types of parties fared in over 9,000 civil jury trials in Cook County, Illinois, between 1959 and 1979. It builds on two previous studies of civil jury trials, The Civil Jury: Trends in Trials and Verdicts, Cook County, Illinois 1960-1979, R-2881-ICJ, and Compensation of Injuries: Civil Jury Verdicts in Cook County, R-3011-ICJ. These studies found substantial disparities in outcomes for different types of lawsuits, even after the types and seriousness of plaintiffs' injuries and the amount of claimed economic losses were accounted for. The analyses in the present report describe variations in outcomes for different types of litigants, and find that corporate defendants paid damage awards that were one-third larger than those that individual defendants had to pay. Government defendants paid even more than corporations in most of their lawsuits. However, corporations fared worse than all other defendants in lawsuits where plaintiffs claimed very severe injuries. Among individual litigants, blacks lost more often than whites, both as plaintiffs and defendants, and black plaintiffs received smaller awards. Black defendants, however, paid less than their white counterparts.

Damages --- Jury --- Verdicts

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This report describes types of injuries and losses claimed by plaintiffs, changes in claims during the 1960s and 1970s, and relationships between juries' decisions and (1) plaintiff's physical injury, (2) the economic loss suffered by plaintiff, (3) the type of lawsuit brought, and (4) the year in which the case was tried. The findings show that neither the types of injuries claimed by plaintiffs nor the level of compensation for most injuries changed appreciably between 1960 and 1980. However, compensation for the small number of cases that involved unusually severe injuries grew in recent years. The findings also show that compensation for similar injuries differed by as much as four-fold among different types of law suits, and that such differences increased in the 1970s. The report offers explanations for why compensation might differ among types of suits and describes further research that will examine some of these possible explanations.

Personal injuries --- Damages --- Jury --- Verdicts

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Verdicts --- Contracts --- Judicial statistics --- States --- States.

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eebo-0062

Judgments --- Verdicts --- Law and legislation. --- Law and legislation.