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Publication Date

2-27-2026

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Picture this: You are a plaintiffs’ lawyer representing a permanently injured client in a high-stakes lawsuit. You think you can earn millions of dollars for your client based on their injuries—but something is holding you back: your client’s past medical bills. To date, she has only had to pay around $20,000. You worry that this fact might make your request for several million dollars in non-economic damages seem excessive to a jury. So, you make a plan: on the eve of trial, you withdraw your request for economic damages and stick to only requesting non-economic damages in the millions. There are no concrete bills presented to the jurors at trial—not even a whisper of the $20,000 in medical bills. In closings, you ask the jury for $20,000 less than you were initially planning to request. And it works—the jury comes back and awards millions of dollars to your client.

We have seen variations of this exact scenario play out in favor of plaintiffs repeatedly in the last year. We work as trial consultants; we consult on new civil cases every week and pick multiple juries for trials each month. Through this work, we have observed a growing trend in high-stakes civil litigation: plaintiff’s counsel is withdrawing their request for past economic damages on the eve of trial, opting instead to only request non-economic damages. This has happened in all kinds of personal injury cases; we have seen it done in medical malpractice, vehicle accidents, and premises liability cases, to name a few. And each time plaintiff’s counsel has withdrawn the request for economic damages, the judge has swiftly declared that all evidence pertaining to past medical bills is now irrelevant and therefore inadmissible, instructing the parties not to speak a word about the bills at trial. And, more often than not, the plaintiff finishes the trial with a large award.

This is no accident. Plaintiffs’ counsels are clearly dropping out low economic damage requests because they believe it can drive up jury awards. But it is counter-intuitive: how could asking for less money in damages result in a significantly higher damage award? What is going on here?

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