Basically back in late 2022 me and my brother were involved in an auto accident (him driving), lady ran a stop sign and T-Boned us.
Cops couldn’t determine who was at fault even though it was obvious.
She got put into an ambulance because her foot was hurt, me and my brother did not go to the hospital as we were fine.
We had liability on the vehicle as it was only worth like $5000, our insurance didn’t want to mess with it so they just basically said that each party needs to handle their own vehicle replacements as both were liability. 50/50 no fault.
Fast forward a month, she’s suing my mother (policy holder on the vehicle and my brother was 17 at the time)
This case has been dragged out since then, and we are finally going to court next week.
In the time leading up to this, we’ve just been letting our insurance provided attorneys handle everything.
Apparently the lady’s attorney tried to subpoena Life360 since we both had it on our phones to try and prove speeding and/or phone use. (No worries from me as we weren’t)
This all just seems kinda ludicrous for a total loss of maybe $12000 across both sides.
A freaking jury trial?!? And her attorneys want any negative evidence against her thrown out.
I’m only nervous about this, as I’m worried the jury will assume since she’s old and we’re young that we were clearly at fault.
A 2 day jury trial for an auto accident lawsuit? How common is this?
byu/TheOfficialWasteland inInsurance
Posted by TheOfficialWasteland
7 Comments
the only question i see here is “how common is this?”
the answer is “not common”
anything else we can help with?
Jury trials aren’t common.
If you’re just talking about the ones that go to trial being two days that’s pretty normal. I’ve sat through ones that lasted a day and ones that lasted for two weeks. YMMV.
Some attorneys are blowhards who file suit but don’t actually know what they’re doing in a courtroom, so they always settle “on the courthouse steps” (meaning right before trial). Sometimes the insurer is wise to that and just waits for that.
I’ve had trials that settled in the middle of jury selection because the plaintiff attorney didn’t like who got selected. I did a case where the plaintiff was obese and there was a pencil-thin lady in the jury pool who was trying to get out of it with a bad lie about being prejudiced against fat people. The minute the judge questioned her and got her to admit she wasn’t actually prejudiced, and put her on the jury anyway, the plaintiff attorney was in the hall begging me to settle for 1/3 of what he’d wanted a few minutes before.
I’ve had cases settle in the hallway in the middle of a trial when one side or the other got cold feet because a witness on the stand didn’t go their way.
I’ve had cases settle in the middle of jury deliberations before a verdict was reached.
Sometimes you’ll have a case where the two sides are far apart and they make a “high/low” arrangement. So for example they might agree that the plaintiff gets a minimum of X dollars and a maximum of X dollars no matter what the jury decides, and the actual dollar verdict the jury says only if it’s between those two numbers.
I’ve even had cases where the jury came back with a verdict but the settlement negotiations just kept on going because the losing side had strong grounds for appeal.
So it could go just about any way.
Obviously you go into it planning to go all the way, and that you may have to testify and such, but they can pull the plug on it at any time before, during, or after trial.
Some places have mandatory arbitration before a trial is even scheduled.
I was the jury foreman on a 2 day auto/motorcycle accident trial. Was a three yr old accident at the time of trial. I’m also waiting for a possible trial of an accident I was involved in three yrs ago. Hoping it gets settled before a trial.
How do you know the loss is $12000? If she is claiming personal injury she is rolling the dice on getting a big payout.
Property claims are handled very differently than injury claims.
As a data point I was on the jury for an auto vs pedestrian accident trial where injuries were alleged. Took two days.
I served on a jury in a similar low-stakes case almost 20 years ago. After the trial was over and we had given our verdict, the judge dismissed us but said that, if we wanted, we could stay for a few minutes and ask the attorneys any questions we had. The first question was “why in the world wasn’t this settled before trial?” The answer was that the insurance companies have to try a certain number of these cases per year in order to update the data that is used to guide settlement amounts in similar cases.
We also found out that both of the attorneys represented insurance companies (one side was Allstate and the other was State Farm, I believe). So, although we were not told this during the trial, it was actually a subrogation case.