More Tennessee Personal Injury Case Statistics for Fiscal Year 2012-2013

Analysis:  The Tennessee Judiciary has published their new annual report covering fiscal year 2012 to 2013 (July 1, 2012 to June 30, 2013) on Tennessee Court statistics.  This report provides a significant amount of useful statistics and information about the Tennessee judicial system.  One important part of the report is the information about personal injury tort cases in Tennessee.    

Out of the 438 cases that went to trial in fiscal year 2012 to 2013 in Tennessee, a total of 180 received actual monetary awards (41.1% of the trials resulted in a damages award).  The total monetary awards provided in these 180 trials was $34,514,022.00.  This is an average award of $191,744.57 per successful trial.  This statistic is greatly skewed by one Davidson County jury award of $13,623,000.00 which was the largest award in Tennessee for this fiscal year, however this jury verdict was reversed on appeal in a February 2014 Tennessee Court of Appeals decision and this case has been remanded to the trial court to be re-tried.  When this one award is removed, the average monetary award in Tennessee was $116,061.23. 

Out of the 180 personal injury tort cases where the jury provided a damages award, 151 of them resulted in an award between $1.00 and $99,999.00.  22 of these cases resulted in an award of between $100,000.00 and $999,999.00.  Only 7 of these cases resulted in awards of greater than $1,000,000.00.  This shows how conservative Tennessee juries are in assessing damages in personal injury cases.  Obviously a lot of cases settle before getting to trial, but these statistics show how few large jury awards there are in Tennessee on an annual basis. 

I will likely have a few more posts regarding the statistics found in this report.  These statistics help us assess how liberal or conservative certain jurisdictions are within Tennessee, at least using the measuring stick of how often damages are awarded by juries.  This can certainly be helpful to provide the best information to be able to inform your client of the chance for success in a particular case.  It can also be a helpful tool to assess what kind of settlement value is appropriate for a case regardless of whether you are on the plaintiff or defendant side of the matter.  Numbers do not lie and frankly, these numbers show how favorable things are for the defense in Tennessee.