Corporations v. Personal Injury
Verdicts are increasing. Settlement amounts are up too. I’m not talking about personal injury cases or medical malpractice verdicts. In fact, medical malpractice payouts have remained stable. (See Stable Losses document.) What I’m talking about is one corporation or business suing another. Here are some examples.
- In 1987 Pennzoil sued Texaco and received a jury verdict of $10.3 billion dollars.
- In 2002 Kinetic Concepts, Inc. sued Hillenbrand Industries and the end result was a settlement for $520,770,000.
- That same year IGEN International, Inc. sued Roche Diagnostics GmbH for breach of a licensing agreement and was awarded $505,000,000.
- Recently, a $612,500,000 verdict was rendered in NPT, Inc. v. Research in Motion, Ltd.
What? You haven’t heard of these multimillion dollar, indeed billion dollar cases?
Maybe, just maybe, that’s because the same corporate interests that are trying desperately to keep injured people from recovering fair and adequate compensation in personal injury cases aren’t offended by a corporation’s “right” to recover millions, even billions, in the same courtroom.