Runaway jury awards, known as Nuclear Verdicts®, have been an escalating problem for years. By our count, between 2023 and 2025, American juries awarded over $71 billion in nuclear verdicts.
Executive Summary
"You can write your congressman about tort reform or complain about litigation funding and attorney advertising, or that jurors have just gone crazy. Or we can do something about it today."Robert Tyson and Cayce Lynch of Tyson & Mendes believe it's time for the industry to "break the pattern of nuclear verdicts, embrace new defense strategies and restore sanity to the jury deliberation room." They provide four practical steps that insurers and defense team can take, using data they have compiled to support the strategies.
The insurance industry and the customers it serves simply cannot sustain these rising indemnity costs. Nuclear verdicts fuel social inflation, one of the biggest threats to our industry.
Despite these existential threats, what has the insurance industry done to stop nuclear verdicts? Anything? Has anything changed? Are nuclear verdicts going away this year? Do we even know what is causing these unjust verdicts and settlements?
Well, now we do. We recently conducted a painstaking analysis of 100 real nuclear verdicts from across the country and discovered a universal pattern driving each of them. This article details four practical steps we can all take to break the pattern.
