Malpractice Newsroom

Death Cases Were Subject To Post-Verdict Caps On Awards 58 Percent Of The Time, Compared With 41 Percent For Cases Involving Injuries

Plaintiffs with the severest non-fatal injuries (such as brain damage or paralysis) had their non-economic damage awards capped far more often than injury claims generally and had median reductions exceeding $1 million.
Plaintiffs who lost the highest percentage of their total awards due to the cap were those with injuries that led to relatively modest economic damage awards (about $100,000 or less), but caused a great loss to the quality of life (as suggested by the jury’s million-dollar plus awards for pain, suffering, anguish, distress, and the like).  These plaintiffs sometimes received final judgments that were cut by two-thirds or more from the jury’s original decision.
Plaintiffs younger than age 1 had awards capped 71 percent of the time.  Injury cases with reductions of $2.5 million or more usually involved newborns and young children with very critical injuries. 
The sliding scale on plaintiffs’ attorney fees imposed by MICRA also has had a dramatic effect on the participants in these cases, according to researchers.  The law prohibits attorneys from charging more than 40 percent of the first $50,000 of any recovery, 33 percent of the next $50,000, 25 percent of the next $500,000, and 15 percent of any amount over $600,000. 

Researchers estimated that attorney fees in these cases were reduced 60 percent overall, with the sliding fee scale having a greater effect on those fees than the damage cap does.  The smaller fees paid by plaintiffs would have tempered some of the impact of the cap but the limits on contingency fee percentages would have effectively shifted some of the costs for compensating medical malpractice from defendants to plaintiff’s counsel.

“Attorneys have always needed to be very careful about selecting new malpractice cases because they are expensive to prepare and in California, plaintiffs lose nearly eight out of every 10 cases that are taken to trial,” Pace said. “Add in the dual effect of the cap on awards and the limits on fees, and the level of scrutiny given to potential clients would go up markedly.”

While the RAND study provides one of the most in-depth looks to date at MICRA’s impacts on the size of jury verdicts, there are many issues related to the law that are beyond the scope of the study. For example, the study does not examine MICRA’s direct influence on premium levels and the availability of medical malpractice insurance in California over the past three decades.

Other unanswered questions include whether injured patients have received payments sufficient to provide for their future needs, MICRA’s effects on pre-trial settlement size, whether MICRA has affected demographic groups differently, and whether the law has had an impact on the quality of medical care.

The RAND report is titled “Capping Non-Economic Awards in Medical Malpractice Trials: California Jury Verdicts Under MICRA.” Other authors of the RAND report are Daniela Golinelli and Laura Zakaras of RAND.

The RAND Institute for Civil Justice helps make the civil justice system more efficient and equitable by supplying government leaders, private decision makers and the public with the results of objective, empirically based, analytic research