The $55 million a jury awarded sportscaster Erin Andrews this week as a result of her lawsuit against a Nashville Marriott and a man who took and posted a nude video of her is just the most recent of this nation’s divisive verdicts.
Reader comments about news coverage of this verdict make clear the two camps: endorsement of the verdict as appropriate compensation for Ms. Andrews’ emotional injury and punishment for the hotel and perpetrator, or condemnation of an “excessive” verdict illustrative of this country’s “bloated” jury awards for greedy, “crybaby” plaintiffs. Some of the latter are making it about race – censuring jurors willing to award that much money to a “pretty white girl” when African-Americans who sue over years of wrongful imprisonment or excessive police force are awarded only a fraction of that amount. Others simply are incredulous an award that large could ever be justified for a lawsuit without death or physical injury.
Interestingly, some armchair pundits proposed what they believed would be a reasonable award – anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million. Why those numbers seemed suitable and others did not is somewhat of a mystery, as is the thought process for the actual trial jurors in the Andrews case, but it is always instructive to us how jurors arrive at a chosen number.
One juror, a Nashville police sergeant, indicated the verdict may have been a compromise. “We were sending a message out to the hotels and the chains to do better than what they’ve done,” juror Noble Taylor told the AP, adding he actually wanted to give more than $55 million.
When we ask focus group participants to award appropriate damages and they demur, we press them to think about verdicts they have heard about in the news and whether they thought the jury got it right or got it wrong, then bring that knowledge to bear when thinking about the lawsuit at hand. Although we typically caution that damages discussions are not going to be predictive based on the truncated nature of the exercise, we have noticed these widely publicized large verdicts are normalizing higher awards in the minds of your potential jurors.
For example, we believe the $124.5 million verdict a San Antonio jury reached against Audi this week in a child-injury suit, the $72 million award given in Missouri to the family of a woman who developed lethal cancer after using Johnson & Johnson talcum powder for decades and the Andrews verdict are all going to boost what Americans think of as “reasonable” verdicts. Even if they don’t think the actual awards are justified, their compromise number – “just” $90 million or “only” $50 million – may still be far more than you believed possible.
This is why we recommend research, in order to see whether jurors will adopt something even close to a plaintiff figure or whether their numbers skew low. From our perspective, it’s far better to learn how folks in your jurisdiction interpret “reasonable” well before they get to deliberations.
To discuss how we can help you research potential big-damages cases, contact Senior Vice President Claire Luna at 714.754.1010 or cluna@juryimpact.net.
