Legal Lessons

Big Cases of 2005 

Among the top 100 verdicts of 2005 across our country, court battles over corporate wrongdoing yielded some of the largest awards. The biggest verdict was in the securities fraud case brought by Coleman, the camping gear company. A Florida jury in May handed out nearly $1.44 billion in total damages, including $850 million in punitive damage to punish the wrongful conduct. An appeal is pending.

Another huge verdict came in a case alleging that the purchaser of a big California life insurer had concealed its ties to a bank, in violation of a state law prohibiting banks from participating in the management of insurance companies. A California jury came back with $700 million in punitives, but the judge tossed out the award, reducing the punitives recovery to zero.

Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc. and other high-profile corporate scandals look to make corporate malfeasance the most popular big dollars cases. At the same time, jurors have begun to temper their awards in personal injury verdicts, he said. They also tend to be better educated about the legal process and require more from plaintiffs' lawyers in terms of causation and injury in those types of cases.

Only one medical malpractice case ranked among the top verdicts last year. It involved a cancer patient who was given a massive overdose of Taxol, a chemotherapy drug. The jury gave $606 million in damages, which was reduced to $1 million by agreement of the parties.

The types of cases that made the top 100 verdicts of 2005 varied greatly, from accounting malpractice to workplace safety. Products liability was the most common kind of action, with 14 cases falling under that category. Thirteen trials involved motor vehicle cases, 11 involved medical malpractice, nine were breach of contract actions and seven were intellectual property (like copyright and trademark) cases.

Although products liability actions were the most common cases last year, the top five verdicts did not include such an action. The products liability lawsuit with the highest verdict was a Vioxx case, in which the jury awarded the plaintiff $253 million for the pharmaceutical company's failure to warn of the product's risk of causing heart attacks. Some $229 million of the award was in punitive damages, which were capped at $1.65 million. The end result was a $26.1 million verdict.

Punitive damages are effective, but still rare. It is rarer still they survive an appeal.