The most consequential number in American litigation is one almost nobody can see. Verdicts make headlines — the $100 million jury award, the blockbuster class settlement. But the settlements that resolve the overwhelming majority of disputes are sealed, confidential, and scattered across private files. The market that prices them is the largest opaque market in American finance.
Which is exactly why the visible data matters so much. What we can measure, across practice areas, is sobering in its consistency: most cases settle for far less than the public imagines, and the patterns are remarkably stable.
Personal Injury: The Volume Business
Start with the workhorse of American civil litigation. Motor vehicle cases drive more than half of all personal injury filings, and the national median settlement sits between $25,000 and $31,000. The average runs higher — $40,500 to $55,000 depending on the database — because a handful of catastrophic cases drag the mean skyward. Ignore the average. The median is the number that describes the typical case.
Severity is the dominant variable, and the steps are steep. Soft-tissue car claims: $15,000 to $25,000. Slip-and-fall: $10,000 to $50,000, with the low end explained by how hard it is to prove a property owner had notice of a hazard. Cases with surgery or permanent impairment: $80,000 to $250,000. Wrongful death: $500,000 and up.
Then there is the single biggest lever no one talks about at cocktail parties. Insurance Research Council data has long shown that represented claimants recover roughly three to three-and-a-half times what unrepresented claimants receive — a gap that survives even after the attorney's fee comes off the top. The plaintiff's bar is not a charity; it is an arbitrage on an information asymmetry.
Medical Malpractice and Employment: Two Different Economies
Medical malpractice lives in another economic tier entirely. Published data put the average settlement near $348,000, and New York state figures run higher still — an average around $565,000. Serious birth-injury or catastrophic cases settle in the millions. The barrier is cost: expert review, depositions, and trial preparation routinely run $50,000 to $100,000 before a jury is seated, which is why malpractice firms screen out the vast majority of inquiries. Caps on non-economic damages in many states compress the numbers further — though lifetime-care economics can still push individual settlements into eight figures.
Employment discrimination is the inverse. Published jury-verdict data show individual-case medians of $40,000 to $50,000, with most claims resolving under $100,000. The engine here is fee-shifting: a prevailing plaintiff recovers attorney's fees, so cases with modest damages stay viable. The real money sits in aggregation — wage-and-hour class settlements routinely reach eight and nine figures, which is why the plaintiffs' employment bar thinks in portfolios, not cases.
Commercial disputes are the least transparent and the most volatile. Median breach-of-contract damages awards in federal court sit in the low six figures, but the range is enormous: trade-secret and shareholder cases settle for seven figures when the underlying business justifies it. In commercial litigation, the legal theory is rarely the price driver. Leverage is — the cost of continued litigation measured against the price of peace.
How Sophisticated Buyers Actually Use Settlement Data
The numbers above are interesting. What matters is who acts on them. Insurers set case reserves from internal settlement databases built over decades of claims — when your carrier tells you a case is "worth" $75,000, that figure comes from thousands of closed files, not counsel's gut. Large corporate defendants maintain settlement matrices by case type and venue, with authority bands that let claims managers resolve routine matters without ever calling outside counsel.
Litigation funders invert the process. Where a defendant asks "what will this cost me," a funder asks "what will this return" — and underwrites accordingly, rejecting upward of 95% of the cases submitted to them. Their pricing discipline, built on probability-weighted damages models and collectability analysis, is arguably the most rigorous case-valuation methodology in private practice.
The common thread: professionals price from distributions, not anecdotes. The lawyer who has handled twenty rear-end collision cases in one county has an informal dataset. The institution with ten thousand closed files has a real one. The gap between those two is where cases get mispriced — usually in favor of whoever holds the better data.
Why the Data Is Fragmented — and Who Profits From Aggregating It
Settlements are private by design. Confidentiality clauses are standard from $25,000 auto claims to nine-figure corporate resolutions, and there is no central registry of what disputes actually resolved for. Every published verdict database overweights trials — the visible 1% — and underweights the confidential 97%.
This gap created a small, lucrative industry. Lex Machina, now part of LexisNexis, mines dockets to build damages and timing datasets used to model outcomes. Thomson Reuters' jury-verdict reporting services and Jury Verdict Research compile awards by jurisdiction and case type for firms that need comparable-case ammunition at mediation. The clients are not curious. They are buyers and sellers of risk who will pay for the numbers.
The honest way to use this data: treat every figure as a range, not a point. Use medians, never averages, for ordinary cases. Adjust for jurisdiction — a New York auto case is not a Texas one. And weight severity and available policy limits above precedent, because those two variables explain more of the variance in any settlement dataset than everything else combined.
"Settlement data is the only honest price list in litigation. Everyone else is negotiating from anecdote."