10 Things to Know About Professional Liability

1. There were 1.3 million active licensed lawyers in the United States in 2013. —American Bar Association
2. In 2012, the probability of a plaintiff receiving a favorable verdict in a jury trial involving an employment practices liability claim was 50 percent. —”Employment Practice Liability: Jury Award Trends and Statistics,” 2013 edition, published by Thomson Reuters
3. During 2012, the median jury verdict in a trial involving an employment practices liability claim was $70,000; the mean verdict was $513,771. —”Employment Practice Liability: Jury Award Trends and Statistics,” 2013 edition, published by Thomson Reuters
4. The range of all verdicts in such cases was from a low of $53 to a high of $42.7 million. —”Employment Practice Liability: Jury Award Trends and Statistics,” 2013 edition, published by Thomson Reuters
5. A survey of more than 1,400 organizations’ total professional liability costs rose in 2013 to $1.25 per $1,000 of revenue from $1.17 in 2012. There was an even greater jump in cost from 2011, which saw costs at $0.92 per $1,000 of revenue. —2014 RIMS Benchmark Survey
6. The long-time $250,000 cap on noneconomic damages for medical malpractice in California reduced average payments by 20 percent. —Study published in Health Affairs by researchers Seth A. Seabury, Eric Helland and Anupam B. Jena
7. The average size of medical malpractice payments grew 3.4 percent from 1991 to 2003. —Findings by Dartmouth health economist Amitabh Chandra published in Health Affairs
8. A surgeon in the United States leaves a foreign object inside a patient’s body after an operation 39 times per week, performs the wrong procedure on a patient 20 times per week and operates on the wrong body site 20 times per week. —2012 Johns Hopkins study published in the journal Surgery
9. New York (166,317) and California (163,163) had the most lawyers of all U.S. states as of 2013. —American Bar Association
10. The states with the fewest attorneys were: North Dakota (1,560); Wyoming (1,668); South Dakota (1,865); Vermont (2,270); Alaska (2,442); and Delaware (2,888). —American Bar Association