Litigation

Tort Plaintiffs Be Warned: Contra Costa and Santa Clara Counties Are Not Friendly Places

By Bruce Nye

    To help you get your weekend off to a rousing start, here's a bunch of statistics.  Just what you were hoping for, right?

    About a year ago, Cal Biz Lit reported here on the U.S. Department of Justice's 2005 survey of state court civil jury and bench trials.  The link to that report is no longer  alive.  The report was revised in April, 2009, and is now available here.

    In the earlier post, CBL expressed surprise at the small number of cases tried to completion in some California courts.  Santa Clara County, with 89 judges or commissioners, tried a grand total of 54 cases to verdict or judgment (that's .606 trials per judicial officer). Contra Costa, Northern California's largest suburban county with over a million residents and 59 judges, had 29 civil trials go to verdict or judgment, about half a trial per judicial officer.

    Well, now the DOB has massaged the same data some more in a new report
available here, and it looks like some plaintiffs will wish fewer tort cases went to verdict.  'Cuz the outcomes weren't so hot for them. Nationwide in 2005, plaintiffs won their tort trials about half the time.  The median tort damage award when they won was $31,000.  But in Contra Costa County, with twelve tort cases tried to conclusion in 2005, plaintiffs won twice -- that's 12%.  And while the win / loss record in Santa Clara County was near the national norm, the median damage award in the fourteen cases the plaintiffs won was a piddling $19,000.  That's right, folks, Santa Clara County jurors in 2005 awarded a thumping total of about $266,000 in tort damages to all plaintiffs against all defendants!

    Here are the plaintiff win rates in some of the other major California counties:  Los Angeles, 42.8%;  Alameda, 56.2%;  San Francisco, 53.2%;  Orange, 41.9%.  This is not particularly surprising.

    Nor are the average plaintiff verdict amounts much of a surprise:  Alameda is right near the national average, $30,000.  San Francisco is higher at $43,000.  And Los Angeles County, the largest in the state, had an average plaintiff tort verdict in 58 cases of $106,000.  CBL suspects this may be heavily skewed by a number of eight figure asbestos verdicts.

    And speaking of asbestos, the DOJ reports that out of 16,359 nation-wide state court tort trials in 2005, 2.2% were product liability trials, and about one in four of those were asbestos cases.  On the other hand, 58% were automobile accident cases -- obviously the largest number by far.  A distant second was medical malpractice, at about 15%.

Full post as published by CalBizLit on November 13, 2009 (boomark / email).