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 Near the time of Trial One part of a lawsuit that often arises at this time, is that parties will become serious about trying to settle a case. No party usually wants to look at spending thousands of dollars in legal fees and trial costs, not knowing how a jury might decide. One only need read the newspapers to determine how unpredictable a jury can be to parties. Witness: the 220 million dollar judgment against the Wall Street Journal’s parent company by a jury, the judge’s subsequent reduction of the award amount, and then the testimony uncovered after two years, during appeal, that the Plaintiff lied about and withheld critical evidence from the jury. The result was that the award was overturned in its entirety, but only after spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to prove it. This uncertainty and risk is associated with every trial, especially those with juries involved. Thus, uncertainty can be beneficial, since it may lead parties to settle cases and pay money they might not otherwise pay. It can also lead some Plaintiffs to accept an award of damages which is less than they expected, but may be more than they would get from a jury, given the jury mood at the time of trial, which may be different from that at the time the lawsuit was filed. This process then is ripe for promoting settlement of cases, and any party to a lawsuit would be well-advised to carefully consider their settlement prospects, especially given the amount of money that is about to be expended on both sides. Cases settle at this stage. Indeed, it is for this reason that after each side has received most all of the evidence of the other side, and each side has had time to analyze the demeanor of the witnesses who will testify, that an informed decision regarding settlement of a lawsuit can take place. Predictably, many cases settle at this stage.
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