Articles Posted in Indiana

Indiana juries are more likely to issue a plaintiffs’ verdict, at least according to a recent Jury Verdict Research report that found that plaintiffs win damages in 57% of Indiana jury trials. The median money award for personal injury trials in Indiana is $25,036.

The Indiana comparisons to the national data are interesting: plaintiffs receive damages in 48% of cases that go to trial. So Indiana is more likely to find for the plaintiff. But they award less: the national median is $40,000. (Remember, this is a median, not an average, which excludes, by definition, large verdicts.)

Statistics mislead – there are a thousand clichés to prove it. Interstate comparisons are even more challenging because they are based on results created by different variables. States with higher thresholds to get a jury trial in the first place should – on average – be higher. But these statistics are still interesting.

The Indiana Supreme Court sent back to the trial court last week a wrongful death medical malpractice action involving the tragic death of a child after surgery for an undescended left testicle. The boy was just 13 months old. Just awful.

The issue in Alsheik v. Guerrero was something far less sad: prejudgment interest. This case went to trial and the jury awarded $1.165 million. The trial judge denied the plaintiff’s attorney’s request for pre-judgment interest. The plaintiff appealed this ruling.

In Indiana, for civil cases to qualify for prejudgment interest, the plaintiff must send a settlement letter. The purpose of the settlement letter is to give the defendant “notice of a claim and provide them with an opportunity to engage in meaningful settlement.”

Trying to tell the difference between a product and a service may not be harder than deciding if a glass is half full or half empty, or if a tomato is better characterized as a fruit than as a vegetable, but it is certainly not easy.”
Whitaker v. T.J. Snow Co., 151 F.3d 661, 664 (7th Cir. 1998).

Is it a good or is it a service? This argument has been fought ever since the distinction between products’ cases and service arose. This distinction really mattered in a burn injury case in Indiana that was decided last week because the Indiana Product Liability Act does not apply to transactions that involve wholly or predominantly the sale of a service rather than a product. Barely, it would seem, a lawsuit against a maker of work shirts for burn injuries, allegedly caused because of the failure of a cotton uniform shirt to serve as expected, survived summary judgment last week in Indiana.

Here are the facts. Plaintiff was a welder/plasma torch operator who was operating a Pro Cut 80 plasma cutter made by the defendant. The Pro Cut 80 plasma cutter is used to cut through metal and steel. As you would expect, the plasma cutter fires off sparks when cutting metal. While using the plasma cutter, the plaintiff’s shirt catches fire causing serious burns.

Plaintiff sued a number of folks, including the manufacturer of the shirts saying these shirts just shouldn’t catch fire like that because everyone knows what the people in these shirts are doing, and the defendant has an obligation to make them safe for the intended use. The plaintiff’s argument that the negligence claim is not subject to the product liability act in Indiana because the relationship between the defendant and plaintiff’s employer was for the laundry service rather than the providing of work shirts.

Continue reading

Jury Verdict Research has come out with some new data that underscores how hard it is to rely on verdict statistics in a particular jurisdiction to prove how that venue values cases.

JVR found that the median compensatory award for personal injury trials in Indiana is $25,036 and injured plaintiffs recover damages in 57 percent of cases that go to verdict. This is different – in opposite ways – from the national data. The national median is approximately $40,000 and the nationwide plaintiff recovery probability is 9% less. To be sure, the differences are statistically significant. Are we to believe that juries in Indiana are trusting people who take plaintiffs at their word but just don’t think their claims are worth as much? (Actually, this is possible when you think about it.)
But the statistics get even crazier. Indiana awards twice as much for head injuries ($30,000 v. $15,000) as the rest of the country, but then awards only half of the national median for shoulder injuries ($25,000 v. $49,418). It makes no sense, really.