J-Law 23 — Full Disclosure of Trial Costs to the Jury

Juries must receive a detailed accounting of all litigation expenses — expert witnesses, attorney fees, and every associated cost — and the exact amount the victim will ultimately receive.

A jury deciding damages without the cost ledger is performing surgery blindfolded. Expert witnesses billing tens of thousands, attorney fees consuming a third or more, filing costs, deposition costs, exhibit costs — the machinery of litigation devours enormous sums before any recovery reaches the person it was awarded to, and the twelve people setting the number are shown none of it.

Full disclosure serves two functions at once. It allows jurors to award what they actually intend the victim to receive, closing the gap between verdict and outcome. It also puts the process itself on display: when a jury sees that pursuing justice consumed half the recovery, the jury has learned something true and important about the system, and so has the public. Institutions hide their ledgers when the ledgers embarrass them. The economics of litigation are part of the case, and the people entrusted with the verdict are entitled to the whole of it.

The expected counterargument: costs and fees are legally irrelevant to the defendant's liability, and disclosure will inflate awards. Relevance is defined by the task, and the jury's task is fixing the compensation an injured person will actually receive — a number that cannot be fixed intelligently while its largest deductions are hidden. Inflation, examined honestly, means accuracy: a jury that awards more because it learns the victim keeps half has corrected an error the blindfold was causing, and a defendant's interest in benefiting from the jury's ignorance deserves no protection from any court. Deliberate concealment of decision-critical information from a decision-maker is recognized as manipulation in every context outside this one. The objection defends the manipulation on the ground that it produces smaller numbers, which is an argument about whose money it is rather than an argument about justice.