Settlement is better then litigation according to NY Times article

In what will come as absolutely no surprise to veteran trial lawyers or settlement professionals, a soon to be released study in the Journal of of Empirical Legal Studies outlines just how pronounced the cost is for plaintiffs that fail to settle and who instead proceed to trial.

As a career settlement professional who has been involved in literally 10's of thousands of negotiations over my professional life it is refreshing to see that some serious academics at Wharton School have joined with other objective analysts to quantify the economic loss of plaintiffs who foolishly proceed to trial and walk away from settlement offers.

I've seen time and again, as have other trial lawyers, the phenomenon of plaintiffs letting their anger, fear or greed over whelm them to the point that they spurn realistic settlement offers to gamble on the big pay day of a court verdict. However, as we all know, and as the great trial lawyer Gerry Spence once said to a room full of trial lawyers he was speaking with, " I can tell you how to get big verdicts, I just can't tell you how to keep them!" His point being that trying a case to verdict and a successful award can be done, but having it survive the appeals process and challenges is an entirely different matter.

We can argue endlessly about why settlement offers are low or small, but we can't as professionals continue to ignore that spurning legitimate settlement offers to risk a trial puts the client at risk and typically accomplishes nothing but add to their misery.

You can read the entire NY Times article here on settlements vs. verdicts.