Florida jury awards exceeding $10 million over the years 2009 to 2023 amounted to a total payout of $33.2 billion, making the Sunshine State second in the nation in terms of the combined value of these so-called “nuclear verdicts.”
The data comes from a new report by the public relations firm Marathon Strategies, which found that such eight-figure jury damages awards increased 27 percent last year following a downturn in such verdicts during the COVID-19 pandemic years.
In Florida, tobacco, trucking, real estate and automobiles were the industries most affected by these large verdicts, according to the report. Last year, Florida`s nuclear verdicts in state and federal court totaled $492 million in damages, Marathon Strategies concluded.
Phil Singer, the Marathon Strategies CEO, said the frequency of nuclear verdicts has been ticking up nationwide over the past 15 years or so, and researchers have identified several factors that have contributed to the rise.
“One is a series of tactics that the trial lawyers have deployed to gin up the verdicts the juries are issuing,” Singer told the Florida Record.
One of these tactics is “anchoring,” referring to how attorneys can suggest an outsized damages award to juries to get the inflated sum “anchored” in jurors’ minds, he said.
“Other types of legal tactics along those lines (include) something known as the reptilian theory, where lawyers appeal to the emotional side of the brain as opposed to the legal side of the brain,” Singer said.
The Marathon report indicates that Florida`s passage of major tort reforms last year is paying off in terms of limiting such large jury verdicts. One new Florida law, House Bill 834, generally bars the recovery of damages awards when plaintiffs are more at fault for their own injuries than the defendants. Florida reform measures also eliminated attorney fee multipliers and shortened the statute of limitations for negligence cases.
“Marathon’s research found that Florida was the No. 2 state for nuclear verdicts from 2009 to 2022,” the report states. “In 2023, it was No. 7, suggesting that HB 834 may have had some early success in curtailing the size of these awards.”
The report also points to shifts in attitudes of the jury pool in the wake of the Great Recession of 2009, along with more pro-plaintiff millennials being called to rule on cases involving product liability and other disputes.
“While many factors have influenced this growth (in large verdicts), Marathon’s analysis of nuclear verdicts from 2009 to 2022 identified corporate mistrust, social pessimism, erosion of tort reform and public desensitization to large numbers as among the most important,” the report states.
In addition, potential jurors are more likely to have seen trial-attorney advertising that creates impressions in their minds about the scope of jury awards, according to Singer.
“With the growth of attorney advertising – which now eclipses $1 billion each year – aggressive parties plaster American televisions with ads seeking plaintiffs for mass tort litigation, amplifying denigrating claims and furthering the cycle of nuclear verdicts,” the Marathon report states.
Nationwide, most of the cases identified in the report (37%) dealt with product liability issues, which parallels historical norms, while nuclear verdicts in intellectual property matters dropped 43% from their historical baseline, the report states.