The age of the nuclear verdict is here, and companies facing intellectual property claims are in the blast zone. 

In 2024, according to data compiled by Lex Machina, juries awarded a record $4.3 billion for patent infringement claims and $665 million in trade secrets-related cases.  The upward trend has continued well into 2025. In November alone, major corporations with more than $1 billion in damages in two separate patent infringement cases. 

But the huge damage awards are not limited to large companies. Middle-market companies are facing nuclear-level verdicts of $10 million-plus as well. 

Just before Thanksgiving, for instance, a federal jury in Massachusetts awarded $38.9 million in a trademark battle involving rival vegetarian food companies. A Delaware jury returned a $22.7 million patent infringement verdict in November against a company that operates in-flight Wi-Fi networks. And over the summer, an Illinois jury issued a $59 million verdict against a garbage truck manufacturer in a long-running trade secrets case.

Does Size Matter?

A recent study found that jurors may be just as likely to recommend large damage awards against small and medium-sized companies as they are against the Fortune 1000.

Conducted by insurer Swiss Re and released in September, the study was based on a national survey of U.S. adults that explored the behavioral forces driving increasingly severe jury verdicts. Survey respondents were presented with a series of random litigation scenarios to measure their sentiments about litigation targeting corporate America. 

The results show, in the words of Swiss Re, that “attitudes toward corporate defendants are also trending more and more to the extreme.”  Juror sentiment has “shifted decisively toward plaintiffs and is influencing verdicts in measurable ways.”

Jurors said they were more inclined to trust the business practices of smaller and middle-market companies—yet strongly supported punitive damages against them if they were found to have caused harm. Swiss Re noted that “when injuries are severe” small and medium-size companies “are just as vulnerable to nuclear verdicts as large corporations — and in some cases more so, due to thinner capital buffers and lower [liability] policy limits.”

Reducing the Nuclear Threat

How can a middle-market company avoid entering nuclear verdict territory? As always, an ounce of prevention helps. Juries tend to respond when companies have taken good-faith, common-sense steps like conducting trademark searches, running targeted freedom-to-operate patent reviews, tightening internal policies to avoid exposing trade secrets, and documenting their efforts to avoid impropriety. 

The Swiss Re study and other research shows that the nature of jury pools is changing. On average, Millennial and Gen Z jurors are more likely than their older jury peers to be skeptical about a company’s claims. The defense team, as the Swiss Re report suggests, must weigh the composition of the jury pool as it prepares for trial and when “evaluating the tradeoffs between proceeding to court and settling.”

Defense strategy may shift as well. Simply poking holes in the plaintiff’s case may not be enough. Jurors will expect to hear an easy-to-understand, positive story about the company’s efforts to act responsibly around its intellectual property and to respond reasonably once concerns were raised.

Early counter-anchoring may be critical as well. As the Swiss Re research notes, jurors are “responsive to reasonable, fact-based suggestions, especially when presented to them before plaintiff narratives take hold.” Companies that give trial teams the empirical data to suggest damages in a lower, more limited range may prevent jurors from pressing the nuclear button.