Personal Injury Law

Tennessee Tort Cases By the Numbers

By John A. Day

The Tennessee Supreme Court has just released the 2006-07 “Annual Report of the Tennessee Judiciary.” It has some amazing, indeed alarming, information.

• There were 584 medical malpractice cases filed in Tennessee last year. To put that in perspective, there were 10,165 general “Damages/Torts” cases filed. Indeed, there were less medical malpractice cases filed than there were kidnapping (660) and homicide (1622) cases.
• There were 28 jury trials in Chancery Court and 393 civil jury trials in Circuit Court in the entire state.
• There were just 590 jury and non-jury personal injury and death cases tried in the entire state; 289 of those were jury trials. In 242 jury and non-jury cases the plaintiffs recovered money (about 40%).
• Davidson County had 54 of the jury trials; Shelby County had 31. Knox Courty had 45 jury trials of personal injury and wrongful death cases, Hamilton County had 23 and Montgomery County had 6. Forty-three counties had no personal injury or wrongful death jury trials.
• There were only 15 medical malpractice trials in the entire state during the one year period covered by the report. ]
• About 5% of all personal injury and tort cases end up going to trial (jury or non-jury).
• Total damages awarded ($44,600,000) in personal injury and death cases is down from $94,500,000 a year previously.
• The total number of tort cases filed has dropped in the last ten years.
• This data is for the one year  period ending June 30, 2007.

Read the statistical section of the Annual Report here.

I will have some comments about  this data in later posts.

Full post as published by Day on Torts on January 11, 2008 (boomark / email).