What Tennessee jurisdictions were the most conservative for personal injury or death trials in fiscal year 2011-2012?

Every year the Tennessee Administrative Office of the Courts publishes the “Annual Report of the Tennessee Judiciary” to provide information on cases filed and/or decided in Tennessee.  The fiscal year 2011-2012 report covers all cases from July 1, 2011 through June 30, 2012 and was recently released.  Part of this report specifically deals with personal injury and death cases and whether damages were awarded at trial. 

One question I am often asked is how conservative a jurisdiction is for personal injury or death cases.  Below is a table of information I compiled from the report for fiscal year 2011-2012 showing statistics on damages and tort cases involving personal injury or death in Tennessee.  This chart shows the cases that went to trial (jury trial and non-jury trial) and how many of those cases resulted in damage awards.  I will list the counties in order with the most conservative at the beginning of the list by percentage of cases where damages were awarded:

Obviously, some of the statistics are not very reliable to provide an accurate depiction of how conservative or liberal a particular jurisdiction is because of the low number of cases that actually went to trial.  However, this gives a good general statistical picture for each Tennessee district.  Some standouts include the largest jurisdictions in Tennessee.  Not surprisingly Shelby County was the most liberal of the large jurisdictions with 63.3% of cases resulting in damage awards.  Davidson County Tennessee had a rate of 52.2% of cases resulting in damage awards.  Knox and Hamilton counties, expectedly, showed up as the most conservative of the large Tennessee jurisdictions where 37.7% and 35.7% of cases resulted in a damages award. 

Another interesting note concerns District 8 which includes Campbell, Claiborne, Fentress, Scott and Union counties.  In these counties there were a total of 39 trials involving personal injury or death.  A total of 0 of these cases resulted in a damages award!

A total of 37 Tennessee counties had no trials involving personal injury or death in the 2011-2012 fiscal year.  A total of 47 counties did not have any jury trials in this same time period.  That means that in almost half of the counties in Tennessee there were no jury trials (there are 95 counties in the State of Tennessee).

For the entire State of Tennessee there were a total of 204 cases where damages were awarded at trial.  Out of these, a total of 158 of them had an award between $1.00 and $99,999.99.  Twenty-Nine of these cases resulted in awards in the range of $100,000.00 to $999,999.99.  Seventeen of these cases resulted in awards of $1,000,000.00 or greater.