But is digital journalism – news distributed via websites, Facebook, Twitter and other electronic channels – making matters worse?

A report from a New York-based consumer advocacy group, the Center for Justice & Democracy, contends that is exactly the case. The center has long argued that by covering only the most sensational outcomes, the media offer a skewed view of how the civil courts work and create the false impression that plaintiffs routinely win big verdicts for frivolous claims.

But now, the center contends, readers increasingly are dependent on headlines that appear in short computer links. And when readers don’t click on the links for the full story, they get less context than ever.

“Digital news aggregators like Google and social media like Facebook and Twitter function by communicating only the briefest set of words and often just headlines,” Joanne Doroshow, the center’s executive director, said in a news release. “These headlines commonly  emphasize large monetary awards, which do not reflect typical verdicts, and rarely note the misconduct that led to the verdict in the first place.”

To carry out its research, which updates a report it released a decade ago, the center searched on Google News and 25 of the most-viewed blogs for news stories on civil jury verdicts and settlements in cases involving physical injuries. The research tracked an 80-day period this spring and early summer and identified more than 50 articles.

Of the reported trials that were won by plaintiffs, the median jury award was $4.6 million. This was nearly 192 times higher than the national average of $24,000 for damage awards to victorious plaintiffs.

In addition, the center’s review of the articles found coverage of six plaintiff victories for every one defense victory. Yet, throughout the civil justice system, plaintiffs win just over half of the time in cases that go to trial. And the vast majority of cases never get to that stage — they are dismissed or settled.

Another flaw the center cited in news coverage was a frequent failure to mention prominently, if at all, state-imposed caps on damages that can limit payouts to a fraction of the amounts awarded by a jury. The report said “these terrible journalistic failures … perpetuate the same kind of myths about the frequency of high jury awards that led to legislative caps in the first place.”

But Ted Frank, a litigation reform expert at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York, said the report was guilty of an omission of its own – it neglected to mention that defendants are hurt by shallow news coverage, too. He said defendants sometimes are demonized in news stories about lawsuits, only to get relatively scant coverage when the cases are thrown out.

In other cases, even if defendants never suffer a defeat in court, they may pay out large sums in settlements to plaintiffs. That might limit a company’s negative publicity, but it also can leave the public in the dark about the costs of litigation.

Frank, a longtime critic of the center’s research, placed much of the blame for news coverage that exaggerates jury verdicts on plaintiffs lawyers. “The lawyers behind the big-money verdicts have a vested interest interest in promoting the success of their cases,” Frank said. “When they win a big verdict, the press releases go out.”

STUART SILVERSTEIN

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Quite the contrary, says a report by the Center for Justice & Democracy, a New York-based non-profit consumer group.

The center’s analysis, based on Department of Justice data and other research, makes the case that juries seldom award punitive damages on top of compensatory awards, and when they do the punitive damages tend to be modest–a median of $64,000 in 2005. What’s more, the report said, punitive damages serve a critical purpose in deterring wrongdoing .

The paper comes as tort reform is being championed as a way to fix the economy and reduce the nation’s health care costs. Two years ago the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal government could save $54 billion over the next decade by imposing new limits on medical malpractice lawsuits. Business and trade organizations also argue that big damage awards create financial uncertainty that discourages economic growth.

Thirty-eight states now limit punitive damages, and New Hampshire and Louisiana have banned them altogether.

According to the report, Justice Department data from civil trials in the nation’s 75 most populous counties show that:

• Winning plaintiffs received punitive damages 6 percent of the time in 2001, and 5 percent of the time in 2005.
• From 2001 to 2005, the percentage of successful medical malpractice plaintiffs awarded punitive damages dropped from 4.9 percent to 2.6 percent.
• From 2001 to 2005, the share of winning plaintiffs awarded punitive damages in product liability trials dropped from 4.2 percent to 1.3 percent.

Joanne Doroshow, the center’s executive director, said in a news release that the report dispels conventional wisdom about punitive damages. “Their social importance lies not in their frequency,” she said, “but in signaling to big companies that the financial consequences of acting recklessly can be severe.”

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While the findings might suggest that most of these claims are meritless, authors of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine said that only a small minority of patients harmed by medical errors take their grievances to court because of the cost and complexity of litigation.

As The Associated Press reports, most physicians and nearly all surgeons will face a malpractice claim at least once during their careers.

But trial lawyers typically work on a contingent-fee basis, meaning they advance the costs of litigation and only collect if they win. Case preparation and expert witnesses are expensive, and plaintiffs are often financially outgunned by doctors, hospitals and their insurers. Malpractice award are capped in some states.

As a result, attorneys tend to pursue only airtight cases that are expected to reap a high cash award.

The researchers analyzed data for about 41,000 physicians who bought coverage from one of the nation’s largest malpractice insurers from 1991-2005. They agreed not to identify the insurer, which covers about 3 percent of the nation’s doctors.

The study also found that some medical specialists were targeted more than others, led by neurosurgeons and heart surgeons, 19 percent of whom were sued every year.  Pediatricians and psychiatrists were sued the least, with only about 3 percent facing a claim each year. But when pediatricians did pay a claim, it was higher than the others, averaging $520,000 versus an average of about $275,000 for other specialties.  

“Jurors’ hearts cry out for injured patients, especially when kids are involved,” Chandra told The Associated Press.

The study was funded by the RAND Institute for Civil Justice, along with the National Institute on Aging, which has been interested in malpractice as a possible driver of health-care costs.

A study published in 2010 found that about one in four cardiologists said they order tests to avoid being sued. Births by cesarean section have reached an all-time high in the U.S., driven in part by legal fears of doctors, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics.

A poll of obstetricians, cited by The New York Times, found that nearly 30 percent of respondents were performing more Cesareans because they feared lawsuits.

According to Chandra, that fear stems largely from the emotional toll such claims take on doctors.

“They hate having their name dragged through the local newspaper and having to go to court,” he said.

CHRISTINE YOUNG

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The South Carolina Supreme Court ruled last year that Mary Priester could not sue Ford Motor Co. It found that such litigation was preempted by a federal motor vehicle safety standard that gave car manufacturers the option of installing either laminated or tempered glass in the side windows of passenger vehicles.

Her son, James Priester, died in a 2002 crash when he was ejected from the back seat of a Ford F-150 pickup and thrown through its tempered glass windows after the truck veered off the road and rolled over. The Priester suit contends that a sturdier window glazing would have prevented the teenager, who wasn’t wearing seat belts, from being ejected.

But in a separate vehicle safety case, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision last week that a federal regulatory option precludes state court lawsuits only if the latitude given to manufacturers was a “significant objective” of the regulation. In light of that decision, the high court Monday vacated the judgment against Mary Priester and sent the case back to the South Carolina Supreme Court for reconsideration.

Priester, in her petition to the Supreme Court, she said her case “involves an even more significant real-world issue” than the case decided last week, in which the family of a crash victim sued Mazda Motor Co.

Whereas the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Priester explained, no longer allows the allegedly defective lap-only seat belts at issue in the Mazda case, it still allows auto makers to use tempered glass in the side windows of passenger vehicles. “Both car makers and the public have an undeniably powerful interest in knowing the extent to which car makers may be held liable for failing to install laminated glass in the side windows of cars,” the petition said.

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According to the National Restaurant Association, such bills have passed in 23 states, but similar legislation has failed twice in Minnesota, most recently in 2005.

State Rep. Dean Urdahl, a Republican, is taking another bite at the burger. He has introduced the “Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act” to shield food producers and sellers from liability for weight gain resulting from an individual’s “long-term purchase or consumption of a food or nonalcoholic beverage.”

“If you eat too many cheeseburgers at a fast-food restaurant and get fat, it’s not their fault. It’s your fault,” Urdahl told the St. Cloud Times.

The 2005 bill, also introduced by Urdahl, passed the Minnesota House but never made it out of a Senate committee amid opposition from trial lawyers. But the GOP now controls both the House and Senate, probably improving the chances that the legislation will pass this time.

Urdahl portrays the bill as an effort to stop frivolous litigation. But a  spokesman for the Minnesota Association for Justice, a trial lawyers group, countered that “there’s no purpose” for the bill. The spokesman said he has never heard of a lawsuit in the state of the type that Urdahl is trying to ban.

Critics of obesity suits have pointed in particular to a 2002 New York case in which people sued McDonald’s Corp. after eating its food for years and putting on too much weight. The case is still pending, with a judge last year denying the plaintiffs’ motion to certify it as a class action.

The “worst” ranking comes from the Judicial Hellholes list. It’s a peppery annual assessment of civil courts put together by the American Tort Reform Assn., a business-backed group that bills itself as “the only national organization exclusively dedicated to reforming the civil justice system.”

The City of Brotherly Love tops the 9th annual list largely because of a specialized local court, the Complex Litigation Center, that handles mass tort claims, including asbestos cases and suits against pharmaceutical companies.

“The judicial leadership is engaged in a campaign to draw in massive personal injury lawsuits from around the country, viewing the increase in lawsuits and out-of-town lawyers as a boost for the court’s revenues and the local restaurants and hotels,” the ATRA report asserts.

It also faulted the Philadelphia courts for “excessive verdicts,” with “reportedly” fast-rising numbers of punitive damage awards of more than $1 million.

Following Philadelphia, in order, are the entire state of California (but particularly Los Angeles and Humboldt counties), West Virginia, South Florida, Cook County, Ill., and Clark County, Nev.

“While reasonable people may disagree about the specific rankings assigned to each, no one can reasonably argue that the jurisdictions cited in this report do not qualify as Judicial Hellholes,” the report said.

Except perhaps the Consumer Attorneys of California, which objects to the prominent mention of a Humboldt County verdict against corporate nursing home operator Skilled Healthcare. It countered that the “report blatantly mischaracterizes Skilled Healthcare as having “occasionally [fallen] below the staffing levels required by state legislators.”

“Even the most conservative jurors were outraged by the defendant’s cavalier attitude towards California’s minimum staffing laws,” Eureka attorney Tim Needham said in a statement.

The California trial lawyers group describes the association as funded by “a ‘who’s who’ of corporations with the most to gain by shutting the courthouse doors on consumers.”

The American Association of Justice, a national trial lawyers group, didn’t have any love for ATRA or its “hellholes” report either.

“Despite all the chemical companies and polluters behind this front group, it appears ATRA is going green — recycling the same junk report that has been debunked and ridiculed year after year. It’s an early holiday token of thanks to its drug, tobacco and insurance industry funders and a ploy for these corporations to continue their negligent behavior and avoid accountability,” the group’s communications director, Ray De Lorenzi, said in a news release.