To Bifurcate Or Not To Bifurcate, That Is The Question

As we noted in a prior post, many state legislatures and supreme courts have mandated that the amount of punitive damages be tried separately from other issues in the case if the defendant so requests.  The principal impetus for mandating this procedure was concern that evidence of the defendant's financial condition, though assumed to be relevant to the amount of punitive damages, is undeniably irrelevant to and presents a grave risk of prejudicing the resolution of the other issues in the case—i.e., liability for the underlying tort, comparative fault, compensatory damages, and liability for punitive damages.

We will address in a future post why the assumption that an organization's financial condition is relevant to the setting of punitive damages is false.  But the purpose of this post is to take sides in the debate over whether this safeguard—colloquially known as bifurcation—is worth invoking.