Traffic Jam

Dead: 422. Injured: more than 20,000. Cause: driving on those happy, blood-soaked holidays, Christmas and New Year's. As the last twisted wreck was towed away, the last bits of glass and gore rinsed off the asphalt, lawyers and insurance companies began the dreary job of figuring up the price tag on destruction. Determining who pays how much for auto accidents is far and away the biggest legal business in the U.S. today.

The automobile accounts for half to three-quarters of personal-injury suits, fully 25% of all civil cases brought to state law courts. In Chicago, more than 50,000 auto cases are awaiting trial. In Los Angeles, auto liability cases have nearly tripled in the past decade. In New York City, more than 90,000 new cases come up each year. Across the country, Americans pay out $6.5 billion a year in automobile insurance premiums--yet in the past decade the insurance companies have suffered a net loss of more than $850,000 on this business.

Padded Bricks & Padded Bills. For many a victim, an auto accident is a ticket to a lottery in which the value of his injuries depends on a lawyer's skill and a jury's unpredictable sympathies. About half the time, in fact, juries in personal-injury cases decide for the defendant rather than the person claiming to be hurt. Yet some juries are markedly munificent. A Philadelphia jury gave $500,000 to a man injured in a taxi crash who claimed he suffered "excessive pain" in his back when anything touched it, even his clothing. A San Diego woman, arms and legs paralyzed, blinded in one eye, her speech and hearing impaired by a collision with a police car, won $650,000.

Such large awards are rare, though insurance companies claim that the highly publicized examples raise the average size of all awards and settlements. What bothers the underwriters more than the occasional big payoff is the widespread evidence of fraud. In one macabre conspiracy, a Los Angeles man arranged to have a friend push his car off a cliff, smash both his legs with a padded brick, and place him and his drugged wife beside the wreck. "No one would ever believe that I was crazy enough," boasted the man; the plot was uncovered--and the conspirators jailed--only because his friend got frightened and called the sheriff.

In Washington County, Pa., where auto insurance rates and the size of awards have both climbed to the highest levels in the state, the insurance companies and the county bar association have been battling what they say was an unspoken working agreement among certain courts, lawyers, witnesses and claimants. Judges in the county have been repeatedly rebuked by higher state courts for their handling of damage suits. One man who did not even miss work after his auto accident got $9,000 for a sprained thumb. In another case, two defense lawyers charged that the judge entered the jury room during deliberations to urge a "liberal" award.

Delay before the Jury. What the average auto accident claimant wants to recover, according to a recent New York study, is the actual cost of his medical and car-repair bills plus "a little gravy" to pay him for his trouble and pain. What he gets, according to the same study, is an average $850. After paying his lawyer, he has about $500 left.

Getting his case to the jury so that he collects even that much may take four years in New York City, three years in Boston, over 2 1/2 years in Honolulu or Detroit. Courts in Los Angeles have held the delay to less than two years. In Miami the wait is less than six months--an interval many lawyers consider too short to allow the medical evidence to "ripen." But in Chicago, at the other extreme, the traffic jam is backed up for a staggering 5 1/2 years.

Urged on by such delays, fully 90% of accident claims are brought to some sort of compromise before a jury verdict is reached. And court congestion, widely blamed on auto cases, is causing increasing pressure for court reforms. Compulsory pretrial meetings may expedite early settlements. Split trials, a new device where a jury first decides whether the defendant is liable at all, before the amount of damages is discussed, are being tried in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Some lawyers even propose a new kind of insurance that would compensate auto accident victims no matter who was at fault, eliminating the need for these negligence lawsuits.

In Chicago last week, Chief Judge John S. Boyle instituted a complete reorganization of the county circuit court: until last week, no more than eight judges were hearing personal-injury cases; now 40 fulltime judges will be assigned to these trials, with six more hearing nothing but pretrial proceedings. "We have just got to make a massive attempt," says Boyle. "People keep smashing into each other, and we must make better arrangements to get them to court."

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