(Article from Insurance Law Alert, January 2026)
For more information, please visit the Insurance Law Alert Resource Center.
Fighting Outsize Verdicts
Holding
A Louisiana appellate court affirmed a jury decision to award a plaintiff a fraction of the medical expenses he claimed in an auto-accident case, affirming a medical award that was significantly below the amount sought at trial. Agenor v. Suarez, No. 25-CA-74, 2025 La. App. LEXIS 2608 (La. Ct. App. Dec. 30, 2025).
Background
Agenor sued Suarez and her insurer seeking compensation for medical expenses and pain and suffering following a motor vehicle accident. At trial, Agenor claimed he incurred roughly $57,000 in medical expenses. The jury, however, awarded him only $5,000 for medical expenses and $7,500 for general damages. Agenor filed a motion for judgment notwithstanding the verdict, arguing that the jury’s award was “abusively” low. The court denied the motion and Agenor appealed.
Decision
The appellate court ruled that Agenor’s appeal lacked merit, affirming the trial court’s decision not to award him the full roughly $57,000 in medical expenses. On general damages, the appellate court concluded the jury did not commit a “manifest error” in crediting testimony that Agenor’s injuries related to the accident had resolved by February 12, 2014, and awarding general damages accordingly.
The appellate court explained that special damages, such as medical expenses, are those that can be determined with “relative certainty.” In its review, the appellate court outlined a two-step process for overturning the trial decision: First, there must be no reasonable factual basis for the trial court’s conclusions. Second, the appellate court must find that the trial court’s findings were “clearly wrong.”
The appellate court concluded that the jury’s award was supported by a reasonable factual basis and the jury did not err in determining its award. The court again noted that the jury credited physicians’ testimony that Agenor’s injuries related to the accident had resolved by February 12, 2014, such that it was not error to award Agenor for medical expenses incurred up to that date and to exclude those incurred afterward.
Comments
This case stands out amid a broader trend of increasingly large jury verdicts. Notably, as discussed in our October 2025 Alert, a 2025 Behavioral Social Inflation Study by Swiss Re, based on a survey of 1,150 adults in the U.S., revealed that a significant percentage believe that large corporations should be responsible for medical expenses even if they aren’t directly at fault. Martin Boerlin & Surbhi Gupta, Verdicts on Trial: The Behavioral Science Behind America’s Skyrocketing Legal Payouts (Sept. 24, 2025). In contrast, the outcome in this case suggests that juries, when presented with persuasive and fact-based expert testimony can steer away from inflated awards, despite facing an insurer as one of the defendants. That said, the appellate court’s decision leaves unclear what role the insurer played in the trial. Additionally, the fact that the tortfeasor, Suarez, was an individual rather than a corporation may have influenced the jury’s decision.