Jury awards exceeding $10 million - commonly referred to as nuclear verdicts - are no longer outliers. In 2025, they are a defining feature of the litigation landscape, reshaping how insurers, defense counsel, and corporate defendants assess risk and manage exposure. The frequency and severity of these verdicts continue to climb, and the trend is not slowing. What began as a troubling pattern in select jurisdictions has become a national concern across a broad spectrum of claims.
For insurers, the implications are not abstract. Nuclear verdicts are distorting loss ratios, driving up reinsurance costs, and fundamentally altering claims resolution strategy. Understanding the forces behind these verdicts is now table stakes: not just for litigators, but for underwriting, claims management, and C-suite leadership.
What’s Fueling the Rise? Key Drivers Behind Nuclear Verdicts
Several overlapping trends are contributing to the continued rise of high-dollar jury awards:
Social Inflation: The term “social inflation” captures more than just rising damages. It reflects a broader shift in public attitudes, particularly skepticism toward large corporations, insurers, and institutions. Juries today are more inclined to view litigation as a tool for accountability, not just compensation.
Litigation Funding: The growth of third-party litigation funding has supercharged plaintiff strategy. Funders enable deeper investment in case development, expert testimony, and trial presentation, while simultaneously reducing the pressure on plaintiffs to settle. With more capital behind them, plaintiffs’ counsel are more willing to push cases to verdict.
Reptile Theory and Trial Psychology: Reptile theory - designed to appeal to jurors’ primal sense of safety by framing the defendant as a danger to the community - continues to evolve. When combined with strong storytelling and visual presentation, it can evoke powerful emotional reactions that inflate damages well beyond traditional compensatory norms.
Generational and Cultural Shifts: Millennial and Gen Z jurors tend to approach authority with skepticism and bring stronger expectations around corporate accountability, diversity, and ethics. They are less likely to defer to traditional defense narratives and more likely to embrace punitive damages as a tool for change.
Where It Hits Hardest: Industry-Specific Impact
Nuclear verdicts are not evenly distributed across industries or lines of coverage. Certain sectors are feeling the pressure more acutely:
Commercial Auto remains ground zero, with verdicts in catastrophic injury cases frequently exceeding $25 million. Poor documentation, fleet oversight issues, and minimal early resolution efforts often compound the exposure.
Medical Malpractice verdicts are rising again after years of relative stability, especially in jurisdictions where caps on damages have been rolled back or invalidated.
Premises Liability claims, particularly against retailers and hospitality brands, are seeing increased scrutiny in cases involving negligent security or maintenance failures.
Product Liability remains a consistent driver of large verdicts, with jurors often swayed by narratives of corporate indifference to consumer safety.
Strategies to Mitigate Nuclear Exposure
Combating the nuclear verdict trend requires more than cost control or aggressive defense; it demands a strategic shift across the litigation lifecycle:
Early Case Assessment: Deploying predictive analytics and comprehensive early case evaluations helps identify high-exposure claims before litigation hardens. This enables better decisions on early settlement, resource allocation, or case escalation.
Jury Research and Psychology: Mock trials, focus groups, and AI-powered juror profiling offer real-world insights into how fact patterns, narratives, and even witness demeanor might play in front of a jury. These tools are especially valuable in shaping voir dire strategy and identifying dangerous themes early.
Neutralizing Reptile Tactics: Defense counsel must be trained to spot and challenge reptile framing in depositions and pretrial motions. Motions in limine, witness preparation, and reframing tactics must be deployed aggressively to prevent these psychological appeals from dominating trial.
Humanizing the Defendant: In an era of corporate distrust, it is no longer enough to assert policy compliance or deny negligence. Jurors want to see intent, humanity, and responsibility. Companies that present as faceless entities are at a major disadvantage. Building a defense narrative that connects with jurors on a human level is critical.
The Expanding Role of Litigation Technology
Technology is not just a support tool: it is a core component of modern trial strategy. The right tools can dramatically improve prediction, preparation, and positioning:
AI-powered predictive modeling identifies risk drivers and helps prioritize claims for settlement or defense.
Jury selection tools use behavioral and demographic data to identify jurors most likely to respond negatively to corporate defendants or be influenced by emotional appeals.
Litigation analytics provide strategic insights into judicial patterns, opposing counsel behavior, and jurisdiction-specific outcomes, allowing defense teams to anticipate and adjust.
Conclusion: A Shift in How Defense is Practiced
Nuclear verdicts are not just a trend; they are a symptom of deeper systemic shifts in how juries assign accountability and calculate harm. For insurers and their counsel, the response must be equally systemic. Tactical defense must give way to strategic litigation management: rooted in data, informed by psychology, and aligned with broader corporate values and risk tolerance.
At Caliber Law, we combine elite trial counsel with integrated technology solutions built specifically to help insurers mitigate nuclear verdict exposure. From early case triage to jury selection and trial strategy, our approach is designed for a new era of high-stakes litigation: where being right is not always enough, and being prepared is everything.