A significant jury award in a civil suit is nothing new in New Mexico.
Thirty years ago, a woman who suffered severe burns in Albuquerque after spilling a hot cup of McDonald’s coffee in her lap received nearly $3 million, a vast sum at the time. A judge later reduced the jury award to $640,000, but the initial decision turned heads, made national headlines and seemed to herald a new era in New Mexico courtrooms.
By today’s standards, such numbers would look like, well, coffee money.
New Mexico juries in recent years are presenting large — some would say exorbitant — awards to plaintiffs in personal injury cases, totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars in just the past few years.
Most recently, a Santa Fe County jury awarded $37.2 million Wednesday to a Bosque Farms man who sued the state of Department of Transportation and other defendants in connection with a 2021 crash on Interstate 40 near Gallup.
But there are others, including several in and around Santa Fe.
- In April, a Santa Fe jury awarded $31 million to a woman who sued Maria’s New Mexican Kitchen after she slipped and fell in a pothole in the restaurants parking lot.
- A Rio Arriba County jury awarded a staggering $485 million to plaintiffs in 2023, in connection with a lawsuit filed on behalf of a girl who was sexually abused in a specialized foster care program. The case later settled for an undisclosed amount, which was placed in trust for the child.
- In 2022, Santa Fe jurors awarded $66 million in a 2022 case filed by a Los Angeles cameraman who suffered a spinal cord injury on a New Mexico movie set in 2016.
- In 2015, a Santa Fe County jury awarded $165 million award to the estate of a Las Cruces mother and child who were killed when their vehicle was struck by a FedEx truck whose driver took medication for sleep problems related to late-night driving. The defendants in that case appealed the award, but the state Supreme Court upheld the decision, finding “substantial evidence supported the verdict and that the jury’s award was not the result of passion or prejudice.”
New Mexico Public Schools Insurance Authority General Counsel Martin Esquivel said in a phone interview such awards have “become out of control” at both the state and national levels, citing a national study which he said showed “nuclear verdicts” of at least $10 million reached an all time high in 2023 and that more than 27 of those awards were greater than $100 million.
“It’s clearly a trend that has a lot of ramifications for business and public entities,” he said.
Esquivel chalks the increase in massive jury awards up to a variety of factors, including jurors’ pessimism, mistrust of corporate and governmental entities and desensitization to large dollar amounts.
He said one study also found Gen Xers and millennials are participating in more jury panels and willing to award larger sums.
“People love to blame the lawyers, but it’s citizen jurors behind the rise who are causing a lot of havoc and are ultimately responsible for the large awards,” Esquivel said. “If a number sounds reasonable to them, they will go with it.”
Esquivel said the large awards are making it more expensive and in some cases impossible for entities in New Mexico to obtain insurance policies from companies wary of doing business in states where jurors are handing down such judgments.
He said in the past year, insurance premiums for the state’s school districts rose about 15%, a cost ultimately borne by taxpayers.
Attorney Luis Robles — whose firm frequently defends governmental entities against civil tort claims — said the increase in jury awards is due partially to the sophistication of plaintiffs attorneys who have gotten better at presenting proof of damages to jurors.
For example, he said, there was a time when attorneys would simply put a doctor on the stand to talk how a hip might have been broken and the associated medical bills. Today, plaintiffs’ attorneys might hire a “life care planner,” who will explain “the profound way in which a broken hip would limit the person’s mobility and keep them from participating in such activities as boarding a cruise ship.”
Robles said plaintiffs attorneys also learn from one another and build on each other’s successes, citing previous awards as the starting point for asking for larger and larger settlements or awards.
They have incentives to help one another, he said, whereas defense attorneys do not.
Robles said the New Mexico Civil Rights Act also has created uncertainty for insurance adjusters responsible for estimating risk levels in the state, resulting in the aforementioned scarcity of policies.
But plaintiffs attorneys make no apologies for their efforts on behalf of their clients. Lee Hunt, one of the plaintiffs attorneys on the Maria’s case, said if the insurers are worried about ever increasing awards, they’ve no one to blame but themselves.
“Nearly every significant verdict is a result of insurance companies refusing to fairly settle cases,” he wrote in an email.
“Plaintiffs tried to settle for fractions of the verdicts; instead insurance companies gamble and hope they can save money instead of fairly settling cases,” he added. “Juries are tired of corporations refusing to accept responsibility and of taking short cuts that maximize profits, but put people at risk. Juries are the one place where the field is level, where a group of citizens can express what is expected in the community.
“Threats of governmental entities or hospitals not being able to get insurance is simply an attempt to persuade the public that the problem is plaintiff lawyers, instead of insurance companies,” Hunt wrote.
Defendants in civil cases who feel jurors have handed down an unreasonable award can turn to judges for relief, as happened in the McDonald’s coffee case in ’94.
For example, an Albuquerque-based firm, Walz and Associates, successfully sought to have a federal magistrate judge reduce a $44 million jury award to a Las Cruces high school student who was the victim of sexual misconduct by a teacher.
The judge found the award “completely out of proportion” with the evidence presented at trial, indicating jurors had been swayed by passion or prejudice and gave the plaintiff the option of accepting a reduced award of $6.5 million or arguing the compensatory damages portion of the case again in a new trial. Online court records show the case is still pending.
