Study Shows Big Money in L.A. Verdicts

Los Angeles County juries delivered 91 civil verdicts of at least $1 million from 1980 through 1984, more than half the million-dollar awards in California and 24 more than in Chicago’s Cook County, according to a study by the Rand Corp.’s Institute for Civil Justice.

“Awards were greater in Los Angeles than in other jurisdictions,” the report said, “in part because juries heard more high-stakes cases that usually involve relatively serious injury claims.”

Los Angeles showed a 52% higher dollar amount for all jury awards than Cook County, the study said, although 400 more cases were tried there, largely because Cook County had a high proportion of trials concerning automobile accidents, which produce relatively low awards.

The study, released Wednesday and spearheaded by attorney-psychologist Mark A. Peterson, was an extension of a 1960-79 comparison of jury results in San Francisco and Chicago courts.

Results of the continuing examination of jurors’ work by the Santa Monica-based think tank are used nationwide by court administrators in planning caseload management. The material also is used by advocates and critics of reforms in the civil justice system.

Million-dollar awards accounted for 6.2% of the verdicts in Los Angeles and 63% of the $715-million total awarded during the five-year period.

San Francisco recorded 21 million-dollar verdicts, or 5.6% of its awards, for 58% of the total $113 million distributed.

Orange County, also considered an urban area for the study, tallied nine million-dollar awards, or 3.9% of its verdicts, but a whopping 64% of the total $87 million awarded (largely because of single verdict for $34 million).

San Diego County had 11 verdicts in the million-dollar category, or 4.8% of its verdicts, totaling 51% of the $67 million awarded in all jury trials.

Chicago’s Cook County, by comparison, had 67 million-dollar awards, or 3.5% of its verdicts, for 85% of the $470 million awarded by juries in the five years. (To avoid distorting the study, researchers omitted the two Cook County awards in the MCI vs. AT&T; long-distance telephone service case that resulted in a $1.3-billion verdict in the first trial and a $100-million award in the second.)

Researchers suggested that urban juries reach more and higher megabucks verdicts than their rural counterparts because of the types of cases tried in major cities: a high proportion of business and contract cases in the commercial center of San Francisco, for example, and major malpractice and product liability cases in Los Angeles.

Researchers said the study clearly shows that juries in urban areas tend to grant larger verdicts across the board than those in rural counties, but they could not explain why.

Paired with earlier studies, the researchers said, the new data shows that growth of megabucks awards is strictly a big-city phenomenon and that the amount of compensation continues to depend on the type of lawsuit. Plaintiffs with injuries caused by on-the-job accidents, medical malpractice and product liability tended to receive larger verdicts than those with similar injuries caused by automobile accidents.

When the Rand Corp. set out to study civil verdict results in major metropolitan areas in 1960, researchers targeted Chicago and San Francisco courts because of the availability of detailed jury verdict data in two periodicals, the Cook County Jury Verdict Reporter and Jury Verdicts Weekly, which helped in building data bases. The 1980-84 study was expanded to include all California counties in order to contrast verdicts in rural and urban areas.