Runaway verdicts poised to rise, but some states are successfully fighting back

Runaway verdicts — judgments over $10 million — against corporate defendants have increased by nearly 30% in the last year and state governors have had an outsized role in the results, according to a report from public relations firm Marathon Strategies.

Phil Singer, CEO of Marathon Strategies, noted Florida had historically been a state with the second largest sum of verdicts, behind Missouri with $4 billion, and ahead of Texas with $3.7 billion and Pennsylvania with $2.7 billion.

But more recently, Florida is nowhere near those latest sums, having dropped to seventh after Gov. Ron DeSantis signed comprehensive tort reform into law in 2023.

In 2023, seven states, including Florida, Iowa, Indiana and Montana, took action to limit the size and scope of verdicts. In contrast, at least 11 states took measures to expand liability in areas such as wrongful death cases, with governors from the following five states having signed those measures into law:  Maine, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota and Rhode Island.

Now, Marathon Strategies predicts that juries are poised to return even more huge verdicts this year. The firm cited the landmark $1.8 billion antitrust verdict against the National Association of Realtors and two brokerage firms, as an example, and pointed to real estate commission cases “being filed faster than can be counted.”

Marathon said that it compiled this report through a new review of verdict data, court records, media reports and other sources. In addition, the verdicts analyzed in the report were compiled by gross award calculations by the jury and did not reflect reductions, remittitur or reversals, among other case developments.

Meanwhile, tech companies continue to be charged in patent and privacy matters, some of which pertain to artificial intelligence. This trend could pressure companies to prefer to seek a settlement, as opposed to risking a trial and a billion-dollar verdict. And cases in the arts are seeing an influx of high-stakes litigation, such as the federal lawsuit targeting Madonna for starting a concert late.

Some factors that influenced the growth include jurors’ corporate mistrust, social pessimism, erosion of tort reform and public desensitization to large numbers. In addition, there has been an influx of millennial and Generation Z jurors who are generally more pro-plaintiff than prior generations — and attorneys have been tapping into all of these feelings through trial tactics.

According to the report, these trial tactics include “reptile theory,” in which plaintiff attorneys appeal to the emotional part of the brain, and “anchoring,” in which attorneys suggest an “extraordinarily large award” to jurors so the number becomes anchored in their minds.

And the result of this has led to 89 lawsuits — the largest number of such cases since 2009 — against corporate defendants in 2023, resulting in a verdict of at least $10 million, while 27 were “thermonuclear” or more than $100 million.

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