Does Every Case Go To Trial?

That’s a great question and the answer is an astounding no. In fact, what we do is we hold bad actors accountable. And if you look at the number of cases that are litigated now versus what they were a hundred years ago in the 1920s, and 1930s, it was a small percentage of the amount of cases that are litigated. People put out the lie that we live in a litigious society, and oh, there’s jackpot justice. It’s because the news runs with all the bad stories. But I think jurors and people in general are smarter than that. If they smell something that doesn’t smell right or it’s a bad case, or it’s a frivolous case, they’re gonna know I’m not injuring my credibility by bringing one of those cases into the courtroom. So the answer to your question is no. And that’s, that’s a stacked reason for a couple of reasons. People today have unwittingly signed their rights away, signing arbitration clauses. You know, if you have a credit card, most likely you’ve signed an arbitration clause, which means if your credit card company does something wrong or whatever,  you can’t even sue them. You’ve gotta go to arbitration, which oftentimes is much more expensive than civil litigation. It takes longer. And so Americans have given up their rights to civil justice almost. And so, no,
in fact, I would say less than 5% of the cases that we work on at Feller & Wendt actually go into litigation. And of the cases that get litigated, probably one and a half percent go to trial. So it is not a lot of cases that go to trial.