The New York Law Journal generally doesn’t give me full articles, but today they did. Actually, it’s much more than an article and should please all readers who get to Sidebar by searching with terms such as “How much is my broken foot worth?”
I hope I’m not being condescending to define a jury verdict as the amount of money a jury has awarded a plaintiff who, quite obviously, did not settle but chose to go to trial with a jury–not just a judge–and the jury deliberated and decided whether the defendant was indeed at fault, and then they decided how much money the plaintiff should be awarded for suffering the injury, whatever it was.
Very much to the point is that the NYLJ derived this list from the Jury Verdict Reporter. I’ve written about the Jury Verdict Reporter here and have noted that subscriptions to it are way too expensive for ordinary plaintiffs like us; but that libraries (at least here in New York) do carry the journals, although not usually the latest years.
So here’s a sort of research treat thanks to the NYLJ. At the bottom of the short article is a link to the list, which appears in the form of a magazine. You turn the pages and then most likely use the zoom icon, because the writing is too small to read clearly.
I noticed that the “magazine” also had a page of mediated settlements. That, too, could be an interesting read for a plaintiff who is mid-case, since New York courts nowadays seem to order cases to mediation before trial, hoping to save everybody time and money by nudging the parties toward a settlement.
This “magazine,” though, doesn’t seem to have the complete Jury Verdict Reporter information on cases (see above link to my post on this). Its chart does show the type of case, and the jury verdict amount, but that doesn’t really tell you everything about an injury, for instance.
So don’t get overexcited about how much money you might get for your broken foot. But you will get an overview of jury verdicts. Which themselves must be questioned since I’ve often written here that huge jury verdicts are very often challenged in appeals, and appellate courts often lower the amount–sometimes by a large amount.
With all those little caveats, here is the link to the top New York verdicts of 2014: Source: Top New York Verdicts of 2014