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Lawyers On Trial: Juror Hostility To Defendants In Legal Malpractice Trials, Herbert M. Kritzer, Neil Vidmar
Lawyers On Trial: Juror Hostility To Defendants In Legal Malpractice Trials, Herbert M. Kritzer, Neil Vidmar
Faculty Scholarship
In contrast to medical malpractice, legal malpractice is a phenomenon that has attracted little attention from empirically-oriented scholars. This paper is part of a larger study of legal malpractice claiming and litigation. Given the evidence on the frequency of legal malpractice claims, there are surprisingly few legal malpractice cases that result in jury verdicts. There are many possible explanations for this, one of which reflects the perception that lawyers are held in such low esteem by potential jurors that they risk harsh treatment by jurors when they are defendants in legal malpractice trials. Because we could find no empirical evidence …
An Exploration Of “Non-Economic” Damages In Civil Jury Awards, Herbert M. Kritzer, Guangya Liu, Neil Vidmar
An Exploration Of “Non-Economic” Damages In Civil Jury Awards, Herbert M. Kritzer, Guangya Liu, Neil Vidmar
Faculty Scholarship
Using three primary data sources plus three supplemental sources discussed in an appendix, this paper examines how well non-economic damages could be predicted by economic damages and at how the ratio of non-economic damages to economic damages changed as the magnitude of the economic damages awarded by juries increased. We found a mixture of consistent and inconsistent patterns across our various datasets. One fairly consistent pattern was the tendency for the ratio of non-economic to economic damages to decline as the amount of economic damages increased. Moreover, the variability of the ratio also tended to decline as the amount of …
Juries And Medical Malpractice Claims: Empirical Facts Versus Myths, Neil Vidmar
Juries And Medical Malpractice Claims: Empirical Facts Versus Myths, Neil Vidmar
Faculty Scholarship
Juries in medical malpractice trials are viewed as incompetent, anti-doctor, irresponsible in awarding damages to patients, and casting a threatening shadow over the settlement process. Several decades of systematic empirical research yields little support for these claims. This article summarizes those findings. Doctors win about three cases of four that go to trial. Juries are skeptical about inflated claims. Jury verdicts on negligence are roughly similar to assessments made by medical experts and judges. Damage awards tend to correlate positively with the severity of injury. There are defensible reasons for large damage awards. Moreover, the largest awards are typically settled …