'Anger' and 'Defensiveness' Cost Insurance Companies Millions: 3 Tips for Avoiding a Jury's Punishment

Insurance Partner Lee Teichner was cited in a Daily Business Review article about how insurance litigation can become explosive, with multimillion-dollar consequences for defendants’ insurers. Decision Analysis, a national consultancy firm which researches trial strategies and the psychology of juries offered insight on how to avoid a jury’s punishment in insurance cases. One of their tips was to empathize, to show compassion for plaintiffs while still defending liability. Typically, anger always increases damages, even when there’s not a punitive damages aspect to the case. Mr. Teichner agreed that many large verdicts stem from scenarios where, “somehow the plaintiff’s lawyer has sort of rung that bell that the company did in fact put profits over safety or the wellbeing of the public.”

“As much as lawyers would like to paint corporations as machines, the reality is that there’s a lot of humans making a lot of human decisions,” Mr. Teichner said. “I don’t know that anybody goes into work on any given day saying, ‘Let’s make a bad product or let’s injure somebody today.’ If you can get a jury to think about the decision as it’s being made and the reason for which it’s made, you have a much better chance of success.”

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