The verdict data over the last few years has gotten everyone’s attention. Numbers that would have been outliers a decade ago are showing up regularly. Nuclear verdicts — those over $10 million — keep setting records. Anyone evaluating cases is trying to figure out what changed and what it means.
Even Alabama venues are seeing it. The $70 million verdict in Walker County we wrote about recently (where our utility client exited on summary judgment before the case went to the jury) would have been hard to imagine in that county a decade ago.
A handful of surveys since 2020 have tried to measure what shifted in the jury pool. The most-cited piece is a 2023 Orrick survey of more than 1,000 jury-eligible adults across the ten states where verdicts over $10 million happen most often. Jenna Greene wrote about it for Reuters under the headline “Today’s jurors are not OK (and probably don’t like you).” The core finding, according to Orrick partner Meghan Kelly, was that distrust of institutions is up across demographic groups — though for different reasons depending on where the juror sits politically.
The one pre/post number worth noting from the survey: 27 percent of respondents viewed corporations poorly before the pandemic, compared to 45 percent after.
The same survey found that 58 percent currently hold a positive view of “lawyers who represent injured people in lawsuits,” with only 13 percent holding a negative view. There is no pre-pandemic comparison for that second number, but it suggests the ambulance-chaser image, to the extent it ever fit, does not describe how today’s jurors see the plaintiff’s bar.
The verdict data points in the same direction. Marathon Strategies, which tracks corporate verdicts over $10 million, reports that both the size and frequency of these verdicts are up materially compared to pre-pandemic levels. By 2023, 89 corporate nuclear verdicts were entered, a fifteen-year high.
Practical Observations
Old comparables may understate current exposure on the high end. Cases that resolve through verdict are producing higher numbers than they were seven years ago, even controlling for medical cost inflation. Valuations anchored to pre-pandemic data deserve a second look on the cases most likely to go the distance.
Anchoring is doing more work than it used to. Plaintiff’s lawyers are opening with damages numbers that would have drawn skeptical looks five years ago, and the research on anchoring suggests even unreasonable numbers move the eventual verdict. Responding with a specific damages counter, rather than just contesting liability, matters more now.
Witness preparation matters more. “Reptilian-brain” style questions land harder on jurors who already distrust the institution than on jurors who do not. Witnesses prepared to redirect broad safety-rule questions back to specific facts do better than witnesses who comply with the old advice to “just answer yes or no.”
Some things have not changed. Strong defense cases still win, and they win regularly. Credible witnesses, clean documents, a coherent story, and a lawyer the jury trusts still carry the day in most cases that get tried. And venue still matters more than any national trend, though the line between historically conservative venues and the rest of the country is not what it used to be.
Juries may have shifted, but fundamentals have not. Identifying the right cases to try, preparing witnesses for a more skeptical audience, and pricing exposure against current data rather than seven-year-old comparables all matter more than they used to. It is more important than ever to have counsel who understands today’s jurors and is able to persuade them.
