The vocabulary word of the day — litigious.
We’ll give you a hint; it’s an adjective. The word has two meanings: first, “concerned with lawsuits or litigation,” and second, “unreasonably prone to go to law to settle disputes.”
And here it is in a sentence: The United States is way too litigious. Or at least, that’s a common stereotype of the land of the free. Unfortunately, in a nation of drivers (and texting drivers), boaters (and texting boaters), pedestrians (and texting pedestrians), motorcyclists (and we seriously hope not-texting motorcyclists), and with an aging population of senior citizens, millions of Americans have a very good reason to be litigious.
For example, in the United States one pedestrian is injured every seven minutes. In total, lost wages, property damage, medical costs, and other injury expenses cost Americans $267.5 billion annually.
So at any given time, thousands of Americans are trying to find a personal injury lawyer to represent them. Specifically, most of them are looking for a car accident attorney to help them win injury settlements. The majority of lawsuits, nearly 55 million, are traffic related, which dwarfs the 20.6 million criminal cases filed.
And because of the sheer volume of cases, up to 96% of personal injury cases are settled pretrial.
Off the road, medical malpractice and elder abuse are leading causes of personal injury settlements. Malpractice claims have the highest settlement average, at almost $600,000. And since 1.6 million Americans now lives in a retirement home, elder abuse cases have also been on the rise so far this century.
Most retirement homes are run by for-profit companies, and 30% of them were cited in more than 9,000 abuse cases in just a two year period. People with dementia are particularly prone to abuse, and often cannot provide testimony against their abusers.
So when you consider the wide range of potential causes of personal injury settlements, the land of the free doesn’t seem like the home of the overly litigious anymore. Winning a personal injury claim might seem like an easy payday from a distance, but up close, it’s often poor compensation for a terrible tragedy.