Although Orange County Superior Court is plaintiff-friendly, damages awarded by juries tend to be smaller compared to other counties, according to a legal data analytics company.
“Many contract cases end up filed against automobile companies so you have a lot of standard lemon law cases in Orange County,” said Gloria Huang, legal content associate with Lex Machina.
Lex Machina recently added information about Orange County Superior Court to its database, bringing the total number of counties statewide in its system to seven. The other six are Los Angeles County Superior Court, Sacramento County Superior Court, San Diego County Superior Court, Riverside County Superior Court, San Bernardino County Superior Court, and Alameda County Superior Court.
“Our main goal when expanding into the different state courts is to look at two things,” Huang told the Southern California Record. “One is GDP and one is population. So, as we moved through the California courts and through many other states as well, those are the two parameters we're looking at and Orange County was included in that.”
Analytics further found that the total number of auto-related torts that have been filed in Orange County since 2016 is more than 23,000 compared to 16,000 non-vehicle-related tort cases.
“Uber Technologies, Inc. and Lyft, Inc. both appear in the top five defendants for vehicle-related torts in Orange County,” Huang said in an interview. “Plaintiffs win almost two times as often by jury verdict and approximately 2.5 times as often by bench trial with an average damage award by jury verdict of approximately $450,000.”
General Motors had 74 open cases, according to the data, and the average damage award by jury verdict is some $530,000 compared to $1.8 million in Alameda County where a lawsuit is more likely to be filed against a medical technology or pharmaceutical company as opposed to an automobile company.
“The cases that are being resolved in Orange County because they're against automobile companies might be very small amount lemon law cases with not a lot of high-level damages at stake, to begin with,” Huang said.
In Alameda County, the average damage award is more than $1.8 million for cases resolved by jury verdict despite having lower numbers resolved at trial.
“It makes sense from the surface data without digging further that several of these high damages cases are likely being settled,” said Rachel Bailey, data relations manager and legal data expert with Lex Machina.
Top defendants named in Alameda County’s general jurisdiction cases included Cordis Corporation, Confluent Medical Technologies, and Johnson & Johnson while in Orange County, top defendants in general jurisdiction cases were the automobile companies General Motors, FCA US, and Nissan North America.
Orange County Superior Court serves 3.1 million citizens compared to 10 million in Los Angeles County Superior Court, 1.5 million in Alameda County Superior Court, 1.5 million citizens in Sacramento County Superior Court, 3.3 million in San Diego County Superior Court, 2.5 million in Riverside County Superior Court and 2.2 million in San Bernardino County Superior Court.