Tort Reform Taking Hold?

Lawyers Weekly is out with its Top 10 Jury Verdicts for 2003. According to writer Bill Ibelle, "After six years of surging upwards into the stratosphere, the nation's Top Ten verdicts to individual plaintiffs came crashing back to earth this year, with the lowest total since 1997."

Even so, I note verdicts of $255M, $250M, and $164M, hardly results of the sort that will put the tort-reformers out of work. They'll have to keep up their nefarious struggle to whittle away our constitutional rights. In the meantime, if verdicts were lower last year, credit should be placed where it's deserved. Aren't the defense lawyers entitled to some recognition?

Defense lawyers will find some in The American Lawyer's "second biannual Litigation Department of the Year contest," where O'Melveny & Myers (them again) edged out Jones Day, Kirkland & Ellis, and Latham & Watkins for top honors.

Comments

[Jen]

Great info :) Thanks for posting it. As for the defense lawyers, I can agree to a degree :) However, I personally give props to the jurors.

[David]

I would look to the jurors as well. To the extent it can be objectively determined, I would wager that neither defense tactics nor the quality of lawyering has changed over this period. Tactics are, by necessity, determined in part by the economic issues inherent in large firm cost structures, and the need for some kind of settlement predictability, and - despite some snarky blogger comments to the contrary - the quality of most of the lawyers in the firms you mention is very high. Accordingly, I would argue that we are really seeing is that a "runaway verdicts are bad" meme has been effectively disseminated through the zeitgeist and filtered down to the average juror.