July 31, 2025 Legal Intelligencer article by Aleeza Furman.

Lamb McErlane PC Partner Maureen M. McBride quoted.

Over the last few years, high-dollar verdicts seemed to be growing more and more common in Philadelphia.

The city saw a record number of eight-figure-plus civil jury awards in 2024, building on a high-water mark set only the year prior and stoking outcries over so-called “nuclear verdicts.”

But that trend came to an abrupt halt in 2025.

On the heels of a year in which Philadelphia juries handed up an average of one $10 million-or-higher verdict a month, court data shows that the first half of 2025 was entirely devoid of verdicts of that scale.

The stark drop-off is notable after such an active period of large verdicts, Marshall Dennehey appellate chair John Hare observed. “Inevitably, the numbers had to go down because they just couldn’t stay up at those levels,” he said.

While large verdicts are nothing new for Philadelphia, the last two years saw an abundance of attention-grabbing jury awards ranging from tens of millions of dollars up into the billions.

Hare contended that those verdicts have made defendants increasingly hesitant to take their cases to trial, resulting in the drop in large awards seen in recent months. “These verdicts have gotten a lot of attention,” he asserted, “and they’ve prompted cases to settle that otherwise might not have.”

According to Hare, clients’ wariness of high-exposure trials is further exacerbated by attrition among the ranks of experienced defense trial counsel. “When clients don’t have access to very experienced trial lawyers with whom they have very long relationships, their trepidation about proceeding to trial is increased,” he said. Meanwhile, Hare said, cases have generally been settling earlier and at higher volumes in Philadelphia due to efficiencies the court has built into its system in recent years.

And more settlements mean fewer verdicts.

Charles Becker, who heads Kline & Specter’s appellate department, said there are “an infinity of reasons” why a case might settle or go to trial. He cautioned against drawing broad conclusions about case outcomes based on numbers alone.

“If one is going to think about results in civil cases, one must assess those results against granular facts and circumstances and be mindful that individual jurors reach decisions based on case-specific evidence and arguments of counsel,” Becker said. “Sweeping statements about jury verdicts are an exercise in political advocacy, not a serious effort to consider individual case dynamics.”

A Slow Trial Year

Still, factors beyond individual case dynamics have played a significant role in driving recent verdict trends. Namely, 2025 has been an unusually slow year for trials.

The number of civil jury verdicts from the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas in the first six months of 2025 (71) was just over half the number the court saw in the same time period in 2024 (131).

Fewer trials have inherently yielded fewer verdicts of all sizes, including those in the tens of millions. And the makeup of cases going to trial looks slightly different as well.

For one thing, Philadelphia has yet to hold any mass tort trials this year. Mass torts are certainly not the only generator of large verdicts in Philadelphia, but they tend yield some of the court’s highest jury awards. Meanwhile, court data shows that Philadelphia is on track to see about one-third the number of medical malpractice verdicts in 2025 that it did in 2024, reducing another common source of high-dollar awards.

Higher Median Awards

Overall verdict numbers have also been significantly impacted by changes on the low end of the case value scale.

Over the past few years, Philadelphia verdicts seemed to be climbing more broadly, not just in the realm of multimillion-dollar cases. The median damages awarded in plaintiffs verdicts shot up in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. And although that number dipped in 2025, it still remains elevated compared to the pre- pandemic years.

That shift is a point of concern for some on the defense bar.

Maureen McBride, co-chair of Lamb McErlane’s appellate department, called the elevated numbers “a warning sign.”

“The ripple effect drives up settlements and insurance premiums across the board, hitting businesses of all kinds,” McBride contended. “Ultimately, it’s the public that pays the price, facing higher costs and reduced access to services.”

However, the increase in the median damages may not actually mean defendants are being hit with larger payouts. Rather, it appears to be another downstream effect of the recent drop-off in trials.

Of the court’s various civil trial programs, the most dramatic reduction was in arbitration appeals. Court data suggests that Philadelphia is on track to see about a quarter the number of arbitration appeals verdicts in 2025 as it did on average in the pre-pandemic years of 2014 to 2019. In the first six months of 2025, the court had only 18 arbitration appeals verdicts.

As a result, there are fewer small verdicts coming out of Philadelphia.

That’s because, as the name suggests, arbitration appeals are challenges to awards coming out of the court’s arbitration program, which deals with cases where there is $50,000 or less at stake. Plaintiffs’ verdicts in arbitration appeals cases tend to be relatively small—sometimes as low as a few hundred dollars.

Slashing the number of arbitration appeals trials takes away some of the low-dollar awards from the mix, meaning the increase in median damages likely has more to do with what is happening on the low end of the verdict spectrum than any change in how jurors are valuing cases overall.

Ramped-Up Efficiencies

The reduction of trials is in large part due to shifts in how the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas handles its caseloads.

Over the past few years, the court has pushed to reduce the overall age of cases pending in its system.

“We cleared out more cases in 2024 than we’ve done before, and it shows the eficiency of our case management program,” trial division Administrative Judge Daniel Anders said.

The drop-off in arbitration appeals trials is part of those efforts, with the court encouraging litigants to think twice about taking their cases to trial. According to Anders, arbitration appeals rarely result in large enough awards to justify the cost of bringing a case to a jury. Now, he said, “the plaintiff is taking a closer look at whether they will get a materially different verdict from the jury.”

By removing dozens of arbitration appeal trials from the court’s dockets, Anders said, judges have more time to invest in other work.

And for medical malpractice cases, the court has been employing a judge pro tempore program where experienced medical malpractice attorneys hold settlement conferences.

“It’s been really successful,” Anders said. “That intervention has allowed us to focus on the cases that have to go to trial.”

Read the article online at Law.com.