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Jurors may be developing a more positive view of plaintiffs and plaintiffs’ lawyers.

That’s what James B. Lees Jr., a West Virginia personal injury lawyer and communications expert, believes.

Lees, a partner at Hunt & Lees in Charleston, W.V., has tried 250 jury trials in his 30-year legal career and travels throughout the country conducting focus groups. Over the past few months, he has observed a change in jurors’ attitudes towards plaintiffs and their attorneys.

“While you are still seeing people who believe there are too many lawsuits, too many frivolous lawsuits, they are not as passionate, and it is not this widespread belief,” he says.

For example, most jurors no longer believe that bringing a malpractice verdict against a doctor will drive all the physicians out of state

“You’ve seen a tempering of some of that more passionate dialogue,” says Lees. “Lawyers doing voir dire today I suspect are not finding quite as many people who are biased against plaintiffs in lawsuits.”

Lees attributes some of this shift to the 2008 presidential election.

He notes that neither Barack Obama nor John McCain devoted much time to talking about perennial hot-button issues such as tort reform.

“When you start to make those topics less available, it becomes less important,” Lees says.

‘Numbness to big numbers’

The economy is also having an impact on jurors, Lees says.

With the government’s bailout efforts approaching $3 trillion, the public is becoming inured to big numbers.

“There is almost numbness today to big numbers,” Lees says.

The result, he says, is that jurors seem more willing to award multi-million-dollar verdicts.

“A couple of years ago if you said, ‘I want you to return a verdict of $10 million,’ there would be a shock,” Lees notes, “but today people are being inundated with [news of] a $700 billion stimulus, and so when they hear bigger numbers, there’s almost an acceptance of it.”

In talking with focus groups and juries, Lees has also observed:

• There is a real anger against plaintiffs who try to claim diminished earnings capacity, claims that are fairly prevalent in personal injury lawsuits, he says.

“The general reaction I’ve seen is, ‘You ought to be glad you’ve got a job.’”

• Americans are feeling a lot of anger, but it’s an “amorphous, general anger,” not directed against corporations, Lees says.

For example, several months ago, while conducting focus groups in Memphis, Tenn., several laid-off FedEx workers expressed the hope that the company’s bottom line would improve so that they could be re-hired.

• When determining economic damages, jurors and focus group members invariably raise the issue of insurance coverage.

“This idea of having laws where jurors aren’t told there’s insurance or we skirt around it, that’s just stupid,” Lees says.

Questions or comments may be directed to the writer at: nora.tooher@lawyersusaonline.com

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