J-Law 24 — Jury Knowledge of Settlement Distribution

Juries must be told how much of any award goes to attorneys, the court, and litigation expenses. Law-firm advertising may promote only the net amount a victim actually receives, not the gross award.

Jurors are asked to compensate an injured person and then deliberately blinded to where the money goes. They award a figure believing it makes the victim whole, never told that a third or more departs immediately for fees, with costs and expenses consuming another slice before the injured person sees a dollar. The verdict they intended and the outcome they produced are different numbers, and the difference is kept from them by design.

Billboard advertising completes the deception at the other end. Firms trumpet gross recoveries — "We won $2 million!" — to attract clients who will never be told, until signing, how much of any such figure a victim actually keeps. Truth-in-lending laws forced lenders to disclose real costs; truth-in-labeling laws forced manufacturers to disclose real contents. The same principle applies with equal force to verdicts and legal advertising.

The expected counterargument: fee arrangements are private contracts between attorney and client, none of the jury's business and none of the public's. Privacy claims deserve scrutiny when they consistently protect the same party. The client's "private" arrangement is invoked to keep the jury ignorant, yet the arrangement's terms were drafted by the attorney, and the ignorance benefits the attorney — a privacy interest that runs entirely one direction is usually something else wearing privacy's clothes. Advertising, meanwhile, is public by definition, and regulating it for truthfulness is among the oldest and least controversial powers government holds; a gross figure promoted to people who will receive the net is materially misleading under any standard applied to any other industry. An informed jury and an honestly advertised profession threaten no one except those profiting from the current opacity.