It never ends, does it? Another careless person fell onto the New York City subway tracks and was grievously injured. Then he lawyered up, sued the city and a Brooklyn jury recently found the city’s motorman 70% at fault with……

It’s also what makes Eric Turkewitz’s one-third contingency rate (or whatever it may be) feasible, I imagine (if someone actually had 20K in medicals and 10K in lost wages, it would seem unfair that they only g0t 20K from the jury, no?)

So why not get rid of them?

Or even set up three levels of statutory “pain and suffering” with fixed amounts: $1,000 for minor, $10,000 for medium and even $100,000 for maximum?

Because not knowing whether you’ll be hit for $1 or $1 million in “pain and suffering” is just not a part of a LEGAL SYSTEM, which by definition lets society know what the punishment will be if they screw up.

Most people believe that irrationally high verdicts are written down by the judge or the appellate courts. But that only means that jury error has been mitigated, not necessarily corrected. My impression is that the write-down process is as haphazard as the jury process.

The annual amounts of payouts per citizen by New York City have been compared to similar statistics from other cities in the United States and in the world. I suspect that Ted Frank has those numbers. For example, Bronx juries are twice as generous as juries in other boroughs.

Let’s try that again:

So what you see in the headlines is notwhat you get.

And that’s what I get for commenting on a blog when I should be packing to leave town for a race.

Something else about jury awards in New York: The jury makes a full award without discounting. This gives high jury numbers as wage losses increase over time.

But money has a time value also. And so after the award is given, the judge does a reduction to present value pursuant to CPLR 50-A and 50-B. The judge uses the discount rate in effect at the time of trial. Judgments over 250K for future losses get structured and paid out as an annuity.

The court will also make deductions under our collateral source rule (CPLR 4545). Medical payments that will be paid by insurance with reasonable certainty get deducted from the verdict (if they had been claimed).

The article, of course, doesn’t break out how the damage awards in the three cases were made as between the different categories.

So what you see in the headlines is what you get. And the idea that one could draw conclusions about the relative aspects of the damage awards in the three cases based solely on the Times article is, in a word, preposterous.

For more information on damages and jury awards, I would highly recommend a new blog by John Hochfelder, New York Injury Cases Blog: http://www.newyorkinjurycasesblog.com/

John has been going beyond the scant info in published reports and pulling briefs and calling the lawyers involved to more fully develop how damages compare from one “similar” case to another.

What’s so plain about this? The article gives no information whatever about the occupations of the victims. Loss of a leg can have enormously different economic consequences for different people. For a professional athlete, construction worker, or dancer, it is a career-ender. For someone who sits at a desk, it has a minimal effect on employment.

Of course only exceptional ones make the paper. You’re just being silly. Why would newspaper report, for example, a pedestrian knockdown case with a broken leg, surgery and a $50,000 verdict?

The three accidents took place in 2002, 2005 and 2006. That they were all tried in recent months doesn’t exactly show anything, except that there was an exceptional confluence of events that put them in the courthouse in closer proximity to each other than the actual accidents.