You’ve heard it before. Ninety-five percent of lawsuits settle before they are tried. Knowing this, doesn’t it make sense to study settlement and trial outcomes to see if settlement is usually a good idea? Some new research did just that and found that plaintiffs in lawsuits, such as the employee in a discrimination claim, who turn down a settlement offer often do much worse at trial than if they had taken amount the defendant was offering.

A new study in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies found that 61% of plaintiffs who gambled on going to trial were disappointed with the outcome because they received a smaller award than the amount they had been offered to settle before trial. The average settlement offer was $48,700 and the average award at trial was only $43,000 in the more than 2000 cases decided in California between 2002 and 2005 that were included in the research.

It was an error for defendants to go to trial instead of paying a settlement demand in 24% of the cases reviewed. Unfortunately for those defendants that chose to go to trial, the price of that mistake was high. In those cases, the plaintiff’s average settlement demand was $770,900 but the average verdict was $1.9 million, meaning that $1.1 million could have been saved in those cases if the defendant had settled. Don’t forget that these verdicts occurred in California, so they don’t reflect conservative Panhandle jury awards, but the percentages are worth thinking about if your company is defending a lawsuit.

The study also looked specifically at employment law cases. Continue reading Risks of Going to Trial →