Again, I am comparing your track record to that of the standard set by the criminal prosecutor, despite all the disadvantages of that law practice.

Why don’t you try to meet the standard set by 25 year olds, just out of law school, paid $80K, instead of $800K, with a load of 200 cases, not 20?

The answer? The judge is paid off by both medmal bars to churn litigation, profiting both sides at the expense of the doctor. In the criminal law, there is no money to be made from the lawsuit lotto. So, there is no lawsuit lotto.

If 81% of trials result in defense verdicts, and 81% of claims are resolved without payment, then precisely 0% of cases are settled before trial.

I think you’ll agree with me that’s not the case.

The part you’re missing is how “claim” is defined in the context of third-party insurance. Every time a doctor says someone threatened to sue them, every time a doctor believes they committed malpractice, every time there is any communication with the insurer at all about potential liability, there’s a “claim.” Moreover, every single defendant in a lawsuit has a “claim” opened against them. If a plaintiff later recovers against some, but not all, of the parties, the parties dismissed are listed as “claim with no payment,” even though the plaintiff “won” the case overall.

Your “80%” claims number thus means a lot less than you think it does.

Similarly, the success rate at trial means little, since it’s more a factor of how the insurance company views the case than the merits of cases overall. The insurers generally settle strong cases and makes weaker cases go to trial, hence a bias in the sample of cases going to trial for weaker ones.

I, like most plaintiff’s attorneys, reject more than 90% of the cases that come my way. I then win or settle far more than 20% of the ones I do take.

http://www.pmslic.com/assets/downloads/pmslic_annual_report_2008.pdf

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court statistics on verdicts in medmal. Defense verdicts? 81.4. Those in that judicial hellhole, Philadelphia? 67.7%

http://www.aopc.org/NR/rdonlyres/4CA576C5-8401-4446-A6B5-22BB212E76B2/0/JuryVerdicts2008.pdf

So, no, not embarrassed by your fictional numbers. Not sure what relevance they’d have anyway — if your “80%” number was right, it’d be an argument in favor of contingent fees of well over 50% of the recovery. It wouldn’t mean much about a “lotto.”

Yeah – that would be like juries deciding a medical malpractice case. I swear to goodness Matt, you seem to make SC appear more sane by the day.