How much would taking it to court cost? Presumably the state would have to pay the defendants costs as well when she won.
IOW: how much more is $20m than the settlement + court costs if they made it a drawn out process?
CA seems predisposed to having interminably long trials (e.g., OJ Simpson, a murder trial that took a year), but in the normal course of business this is not a particularly complex case, nor one that should cost an inordinate amount to try. The most analogous case I've handled was a police excessive force case I sued out as plaintiff's counsel. We won (and actually got the largest punitive damages award against a MN police officer in history). Because we sued under federal civil rights law we were entitled to recover our full attorneys' fees and costs, which were just under $460K. I would think defense counsel's fees must have been considerably less, since we were the ones with the burden of proof and had to prepare the entire case, including wrangling witnesses and paying experts. I can't imagine (at least in MN) that the Dugard case would cost much more than that to defend, strictly from a fees/costs perspective. Again, though, CA is wacky when it comes to high-vis trials.
I don't think Dugard would have the right to recover her legal fees, though it would depend how it was sued out (I haven't really pondered what the causes of action would be, but essentially it would be a negligence case). Again, I'm not really up to speed on CA laws, but in MN the parole people who screwed up would likely be entitled to official immunity in this situation. It's generally quite difficult to sue law enforcement, because as a rule they're entitled to immunity unless they've acted in a
deliberate manner to interfere with someone's rights or safety.
It's impossible to really say with any confidence what a case like this is worth - the plaintiff's counsel could certainly say, with a straight face, that it's not possible to put a price on suffering of this magnitude. There's almost no limit to what I might ask for in this particular case. Still, $20M is a hell of a lot of money. As it happens my mom was the judge on the case that led to the largest PI jury verdict in MN history - it was a severe closed-head injury where the plaintiff would need full-time care for the rest of his life. As I recall he got $28M or so, but it was largely a function of the fact that the former CEO of the company that manufactured the industrial press his head was smushed by appeared to perjure himself by claiming the company was unaware of any safety problems with the machine - it was later shown that they'd had many such complaints and lawsuits, and he himself had signed memos regarding them. The jury got pissed and hammered them. The point is just that $20M verdicts are VERY rare.
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