What Lawyers Do

Bloomberg. com reports that billion dollar verdicts are vanishing from U.S. courtrooms. In 2008 no such verdict was rendered by a jury, and there was only one in 2007. But in the previous 14 years, there were a total of 26 billion-dollar verdicts.

One reason for this is that the Supreme Court and lower appeals courts have limited punitive damage awards.

The lower threat of high punitive damages has helped corporate defendants by taking away an incentive to settle out of court, said attorney Marquette Wolf of Mesquite, Texas, who won an $84 million jury verdict against U-Haul International in 2008.

“When the threat of punitives was there, the courthouse was a level playing field,” he said. “Now the threat of consequence isn’t there for billion-dollar corporations.”

Wolf’s victory, which included $63 million in punitives, was later cut to $45.7 million, half in punitive damages. It is on appeal.

Other factors leading to the decline in large verdicts is the business-sponsored campaign to create bad publicity surrounding large verdicts, the ascendancy of conservative judges through campaigns on the state level and Bush administration appointments to federal courts, and state and federal limits on damages claims.

10 of the 12 all-time biggest awards were cut or reversed by courts. Last year’s reduction of punitive damages by the Supreme Court in the Exxon Valdez case from $2.5 billion to 507 million established a ratio of one to one between punitive and actual damages.

In contrast, as trial lawyers will readily attest, when a jury unreasonably does not reach a verdict in favor of an injured plaintiff or awards an unreasonably small damages amount, courts seldom ever intervene.

Jurors have also become less sympathetic to plaintiffs, said Deborah Kuchler of Abbott, Simses & Kuchler, a New Orleans lawyer who represents corporations.

“Juries are much more cynical than they used to be,” said Kuchler, who won a defense verdict for DuPont Co. in June in the retrial of a case the company previously lost. “Now even insurance companies want juries.”