Here in Washington state, civil cases are slowly making their way back to the “courtrooms”. In King County where Seattle is located, most of the civil trials proceeding at this time are actually taking place not in the courthouse but at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, Washington. This facility has several large conference rooms that allow the trial participants to keep an appropriate physical distance. Courts currently require that all jurors, attorneys, judges and staff be in person and masked at all times. Most judges are allowing any witnesses, including parties, to testify either by video-conferencing or in-person. Voir dire is all by video conferencing in small groupings of five or so prospective jurors at a time and done over several days. Judges are typically being very flexible and understanding with any jurors that are at high risk with COVID and will dismiss them if they express any concern about catching COVID by being required to come to the Meydenbauer Center. Prospective jurors also must have a laptop and good connectivity with wi-fi in order to make it through the voir dire process.
There can be no doubt that the juries that ultimately get impaneled during this time may be of a different composition than might normally be found prior to the pandemic. So, how is this impacting verdicts? I have not done any scientific analysis ( I wish someone were doing so), but based on feed back I’m getting from carriers not only in Washington but around the country, there is a significant percentage of verdicts that are exceeding pre-trial expected ranges. If so, there are likely many reasons for this but let me hypothesize about two. The first, is that a significant percentage of more conservative leaning older folks that are common to serve on juries are opting out due to COVID concerns. And the second possible reason could be that the younger tech savvy jurors that work for Amazon may have a different perspective on the value of money as they reside in $800k 1000 sf condos and see that Russel Wilson makes $35m a year. A whiplash case that could have been accurately predicted to fall within a $10k window is now seemingly resulting in an award two or three times higher than “normal”. A couple of insurance bad faith cases that were valued at six- but not seven-figures have resulted in awards of more than $10m. I have not heard yet of jury verdicts going for less than would be expected. In King County, it is unlikely civil cases will be heading back to normal processes any time soon. Juries historically have been somewhat unpredictable but that seems to be even more the case currently.