In 2019 (pre-pandemic) approximately 400,000 civil lawsuits were filed in the county and district courts of Texas. Of that number, only 9,000 (2.3%) were tried to a jury verdict. What happened to the other 97%? A number were not prosecuted, others were dismissed on motions, but for the surviving cases, they were all settled by an agreement of the parties.
Jury trials are extraordinarily expensive, in time and money to prepare for and present to a jury. Depending on the type of case and deep pockets of the litigants, attorney fees can run from thousands to millions of dollars, Attorney time can run from hundreds to tens of thousands of hours.
After expending all the money and time, going to the jury is always a roll of the dice. No matter how good a case a client may feel he or she has, after presenting ones story, the defendant gets its chance to tear down the case, leaving it up to the jury to sort out the mess of conflicting testimony and evidence. Letting the jury, 12 strangers, decide, you lose control of events.
That is why, in the vast majority of litigation, cases are settled, and not tried. In negotiation you give and take. You might get less than you want, but you have the certainty you will get what is in the pot. That certainty is value in itself.
Lawsuits have always been settled, over the phone, in meetings, over a handshake, or even in the middle of a trial. In the last few decades, the process has been formalized. One impetus has been the judges themselves. A trial can take from days to weeks, and it would be impossible to try to a jury all the hundreds of cases that are on a judges docket. To move the docket and compel the parties to take a hard look at settlement, virtually all judges require the parties to engage in a formal process of attempting to negotiate a settlement, called mediation, prior to the trial date.
For more information concerning the mediation process contact the Law Office of Elliott Klein, LLC.
In my next article, I will discuss the mechanics of mediation.