Lex Machina, a service provided by Lexis Nexis, has released its latest report on employment litigation verdicts. That report shows a ten year high with $1.17 billion in jury verdicts between 2019 and 2021. The report includes results from federal district and appellate courts. Lex Machina points out that 21,193 employment matters were filed in
Well, a recent study confirms what many of us expected. Joanna Shepherd, law professor at Emory University, conducted a study of employment discrimination lawsuits.The study looked at whether backgrounds of individual federal judges had an impact on the outcome of a discrimination lawsuit. The study asks whether the professional background of some judges makes them
I talked the other day about a recent book from the University of Chicago Press: Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Perpetuates Inequality. See my poor post here. The authors went to federal records and interviewed individual plaintiffs to study how well discrimination lawsuits achieve the simple aim of rectifying discrimination in the workplace.
Employment cases are difficult for the employee. I have mentioned a couple of studies about the success rates for employment cases. See my prior posts here and here. Now, we have another study. In Rights on Trial: How Workplace Discrimination Perpetuates Inequality, the authors went to federal records and interviewed individual plaintiffs to
Success rates for plaintiffs in federal court have dropped dramatically from the 1980’s. In a study by two University of Connecticut law professors, they reported a success rate of 70% for plaintiffs in federal court in the mid 1980’s. The study looked at adjudicated civil cases of all types. That rate dropped to about 35%
One of the unique aspects of employment law is that many persons enter into the judicial system representing themselves. An old saying holds that a lawyer who would represent himself has a fool for a client. That is, someone who tries to represent himself will make many mistakes, because that person is too emotionally involved
A federal judge writes a nice blog on federal judges. See herculesandtheumpire.com. He discusses the studies on employment cases in the Northern District of Georgia. I wrote about that study here.
Judge Richard Kopf titles his blog post, "Judges are Killing Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964." The judge wrote
Two Atlanta area lawyers researched discrimination cases in the Northern District of Georgia. They found among the cases filed in federal court, 80% were dismissed without a trial. In a report published in the Oct. 20, 2013 edition of the Atlanta Journal Constotution, the lawyers looked at 181 discrimination cases alleging race, sex harassment, national
Usually at settlement times, clients ask me about our chances for success at trial. What might happen at trial drives everything in a lawsuit, especially settlement. But, predicting 6 to 12 of our fellow citizens is more art than science. Jury dynamics are often mysterious. There are so many variables in jury deliberations that that
Alex Colvin of Cornell University has published one of the first empirical studies of arbitration in the employment context. He looked at the reports submitted by the American Arbitration Association, one of the leading providers of arbitrations, in California. The study looked at 3,945 arbitrations, of which 1,213 were decided by an arbitration award. See