Has The Age Of Billion-Dollar Verdicts Passed?
After studying the largest jury verdicts awarded in 2008, a Bloomberg.com article declared that “[t]he billion-dollar verdict has disappeared from
The article offered a variety of possible explanations for this trend, including State and Federal limits on damages and claims, the campaign financing of some conservative judges by business interests and United States Supreme Court decisions limiting the amount of money that can be awarded in certain instances. Additionally, there is anecdotal evidence that plaintiffs’ counsel, wary of having excess awards eventually overturned, are not asking that juries award their clients huge punitive damages awards. One corporate-defense attorney speculated that juries are now so cynical towards plaintiffs that even “insurance companies want juries.”
