No Billion-Dollar Verdicts in 2008
The year 2008 passed without a single billion-dollar verdict.
The top verdict overall last year was in a dispute over a contract for satellites. Jurors awarded $606.6 million against Boeing Co. and a subsidiary. The damages may seem big—but the award was the lowest top verdict of the year since 1991, Bloomberg reports.
The publication says court rulings clamping down on excessive punitive damages are spurring lawyers to ask juries for lower punitives. Plaintiffs lawyers have taken note of the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, State Farm v. Campbell, that held a ratio of no more than 9-1 was appropriate in all except the most egregious cases.
One of the lawyers for the plaintiff in the Boeing dispute, ICO Global Communications Holdings, was Barry Lee of Manatt Phelps & Phillips, according to Bloomberg and the Am Law Daily. He told Bloomberg he sought less than three times the compensatory damages of $370.6 million in his arguments to the jury.
“We wanted to make it clear we believed we were entitled to punitives, but we were taking a reasonable approach,” he said. The jury ended up awarding $236 million in punitive damages.
The only verdict above $1 billion in the past three years was awarded against Microsoft Corp. in a patent case. The $1.5 billion verdict was reversed on appeal, and the case settled before a retrial, the story says.
