The October 2013 issue of the Mississippi Jury Verdict Reporter is out, with details of the following verdicts:
- $52,080,450 plaintiff verdict (50% fault to target defendant)- Hinds County defective car seat case that I blogged about here;
- $1,547,291 plaintiff verdict- Jackson County bad faith wind vs. water trial covered here;
- $1 million plaintiff verdict- Bolivar County nursing home case;
- $802,000 plaintiff verdict- Harrison County underinsured motorist case;
- $225,000 plaintiff verdict- DeSoto County underinsured motorist case;
- $156,200 defendant verdict- Tate County eminent domain case;
- $130,496 plaintiff verdict- Jackson federal court underinsured motorist case covered here;
- $126,000 plaintiff verdict- Wayne County utility negligence case; and
- defense verdict- Lauderdale County medical malpractice case.
My Take:
Wow! What a month for the plaintiffs.
I don’t think that plaintiffs have won this high a percentage of cases since the Miss. Jury Verdict Reporter began keeping tabs. I doubt that there is a trend here, but it’s nice for defendants to see that they can lose. Otherwise, cases would never settle.
Of course, defendants continue to clean house in medical malpractice cases. Medical malpractice was a big practice area when I started practicing law in the early 1990’s. There were a lot of specialists on both the plaintiff and defense sides. You could make a living as a medical malpractice lawyer, and there was no reason to think that would not continue.
But that has really changed. Hardly any lawyers focus their practice on just medical malpractice cases anymore. And unless plaintiffs can figure out how to win the trials, there will not be any med-mal specialists in the state before much longer.