How many trial attorneys talk publicly about adverse jury verdicts.  Not many.  

Of course, in my field -- commercial litigation - not many of us can call ourselves trial attorneys with a straight face.  We're litigators, which means we want and try to win before trial and reconsider our settlement posture if the light at the end of the tunnel is the train of trial.    

We'd like to be Perry Mason (or, depending upon your generation, Denny Crane or the deliciously evil class action attorney Patty Hughes played by Glenn Close in Damages). 

But we're not.  We take depositions, scan and code hundreds of thousands to millions of documents, fight the discovery wars, make motions on the pleadings and pin our hopes on the silver bullet summary judgment motion.

So here's a short lesson and some good advice -- Jury Trials, An Art or a Game of Chance - from the men and women who actually try cases at the Florida law firm of Levin Popantanio Thomas Mitchell Echsner & Proctor.  

Read the entire article, but here are the bare bones that form the basis of today's good settlement advice.  In this first injury trial, the paralyzed plaintiff won

an $8 million . . . verdict, [which] was reversed on appeal . . . 

The [second trial resulted in] a defense verdict [which was also] reversed on appeal . . . 

The [last] trial resulted in a $31 million plaintiff’s verdict.

Who tried this case three times?  Trial attorneys who have, since the firm's founding in 1955, won

more than seventy-five jury verdicts in the amount of $1 million or more, including twelve jury verdicts in excess of $10 million, and two in excess of $450 million. Additionally, the law firm’s total settlements have exceeded one billion dollars. 

With this and all their other substantial trial experience under their belts, these trial attorneys conclude: 

[A] trial attorney should always inform his/her client that a prediction on the outcome of a jury trial is simply an educated guess, and that the client needs to be prepared for widely divergent results. There is always an element of jury uncertainty. Any time a client agrees to have his/her case tried before a jury, the client needs to understand that in some ways it is simply a game of chance.

Id. (emphasis added).  Couldn't say it better myself (and yes, I did try cases to juries when I was a plaintiffs' injury lawyer in the early '80s, as well as some, but far fewer commercial trials scattered throughout the remainder of my legal career). 

Thanks for candor guys.  Much appreciated.