Tillinghast Study: U.S. Tort Costs Reach A Record $260 Billion

According to the U.S. Tort Costs and Cross-Border Perspectives: 2005 Update from the Tillinghast Business Of Towers Perrin, U.S. tort costs reached a record $260 billion in 2004, or approximately $886 per person. This surpassed the previous record set in 2003 by $16 billion. The 2005 Update analyzes U.S. tort costs from 1950 through 2004, with projections through 2007. The study also examined tort costs in several other industrialized nations and found that U.S. tort costs exceed other countries’ by a sizeable margin, when measured as a ratio to economic output (measured by GDP). The U.S. had a 2.2% ratio of tort costs to GDP, compared with Germany (1.1%), Japan (0.8%) and the U.K. (0.7%). Aside from Italy (1.7%), the other countries examined in the study have tort costs comparable to historic levels observed in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s.