Las Vegas Personal Injury Trial Attorney

You have to demand it, in writing, within a specific time window after the case is filed. Nevada Rule of Civil Procedure 38 sets out this requirement, and if no demand is made, the right to a jury trial is automatically waived for the remainder of the case, with no opportunity to revisit that decision later. Once waived, the case proceeds to a bench trial, where a single judge decides both the facts and the law, rather than the eight-person jury that would otherwise hear it. This is one of the more common procedural mistakes in personal injury litigation, since the deadline can pass quietly if no one on the case is actively tracking it.

A standard Nevada civil jury has eight members under NRCP 48, though the parties can agree in advance to a smaller panel of four if both sides prefer it. That’s different from the twelve-person jury Nevada uses in many criminal cases, and the difference isn’t just a number: a smaller panel means each individual juror’s perspective carries more relative weight in deliberations, which makes jury selection, the process of questioning and choosing which members of the jury pool actually serve, a more consequential part of the case than it might be with a larger panel.

No, and this surprises most people. Article 1, Section 3 of the Nevada Constitution allows a civil verdict to stand once three-fourths of the jurors agree, which works out to six of eight jurors on a standard panel. Nevada law requires unanimity for criminal verdicts specifically, but the legislature has never extended that requirement to civil cases, so a single juror who disagrees cannot block a civil verdict the way one juror’s holdout can derail a criminal trial.

An offer of judgment is a formal, written settlement offer made under Nevada Rule of Civil Procedure 68 and NRS 17.117, and either side, plaintiff or defendant, can serve one more than 21 days before trial. The receiving party has 14 days to accept it; if they don’t, the offer is considered rejected and withdrawn. The real consequence comes later: if the case goes to trial and the party who rejected the offer doesn’t do better than what was offered, they lose the right to recover their own post-offer costs and attorney’s fees, and may have to cover the other side’s instead. The Nevada Supreme Court has described this rule’s purpose as rewarding a party who makes a reasonable offer and penalizing one who unreasonably refuses it, which makes it a real strategic pressure point on both sides of a case, not just paperwork.

Yes. Nevada’s comparative negligence rule under NRS 41.141 reduces your award by your percentage of fault as long as that share is 50 percent or less, and bars recovery once it crosses 51 percent. The meaningful difference at trial is who decides that percentage: a jury hears the actual evidence and assigns fault directly, rather than an insurance adjuster estimating it during settlement talks, which is often the more favorable forum for a plaintiff whose case has been undervalued by an insurer’s internal fault assessment.

Prejudgment interest is interest calculated under NRS 17.130 from the date your complaint was filed through the date judgment is entered, added on top of the jury’s award to account for the time the case took to litigate. It’s a recovery that generally isn’t part of a negotiated settlement, since settlements are agreed dollar figures rather than court judgments, which makes prejudgment interest one of several financial differences between resolving a case through trial versus through settlement, not just a procedural footnote.

Punitive damages, available under NRS 42.005 when a defendant’s conduct involved fraud, malice, or oppression rather than ordinary negligence, are decided in a separate second phase of trial that only happens after the jury has already found liability and awarded compensatory damages. The defendant’s financial condition is inadmissible evidence until that second phase begins, which keeps a jury from being influenced by a defendant’s wealth before liability is even decided. The jury is also never told about the statutory cap, three times compensatory damages above $100,000 or $300,000 below that threshold, since the court applies that cap to the verdict afterward if the jury’s number exceeds it. None of this bifurcated structure exists in a settlement negotiation, where punitive damages are simply folded into a single negotiated number.

In most personal injury cases that reach trial, yes, the plaintiff testifies, since a jury generally needs to hear directly from the person who was injured to understand what happened and how it affected their life. Before trial, you’ll also likely be deposed during discovery, meaning you answer questions under oath outside of court so both sides know in advance what your testimony will be. Your attorney prepares you for both of these before they happen, and the goal isn’t to memorize a script, it’s to be ready to answer honestly and clearly under questioning from the other side’s attorney.

Trial involves real costs that a quick settlement doesn’t, expert witness fees, court costs, and the time investment of discovery and trial preparation, and under a contingency fee arrangement, a firm typically advances those costs on the client’s behalf rather than billing for them upfront. Nevada’s offer of judgment rule under NRCP 68 adds another layer to this calculation, since it can shift the other side’s post-offer costs and fees onto whichever party unreasonably rejected a reasonable settlement offer and then did worse at trial. The financial risk of trial is real, which is exactly why a firm’s willingness to absorb that risk, rather than push every case toward a fast settlement, says something about how seriously it’s actually evaluating your case.

It varies significantly by case complexity, court calendar, and how contested liability is, but discovery alone, the evidence-gathering phase that includes depositions, medical record requests, and expert reports, often takes many months on its own. Cases involving extensive medical evidence, multiple defendants, or disputed liability typically take longer to reach trial than straightforward claims with clear fault, sometimes well over a year from filing to verdict. That timeline is one of the real tradeoffs of taking a case all the way to trial rather than settling earlier in the process.

No, and by a wide margin. The national data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics put the trial rate for tort case dispositions at about 4 percent, meaning the large majority of cases resolve through settlement, dismissal, or other means before ever reaching a jury. That same survey found that personal injury and property damage tort trials, the small fraction that do happen, are decided by a jury rather than a judge alone about 90 percent of the time, which is part of why trial preparation still matters even though trial itself is the exception rather than the rule.

Nothing negative happens, and this is a common misunderstanding. Demanding a jury trial under NRCP 38 preserves your legal options, it doesn’t commit you to actually going through with a trial. In practice, the large majority of cases that formally demand a jury trial still settle before that trial happens, often specifically because the demand, combined with visible trial preparation, strengthens the negotiating position enough to produce a better settlement offer than would have come otherwise.

Yes, but only on specific legal errors made during the trial, not simply because you disagree with how the jury weighed the evidence. Appeals from a Nevada district court go to the Nevada Supreme Court or the Nevada Court of Appeals, and appellate courts give substantial deference to a jury’s findings of fact, reversing those findings only in limited circumstances. An appeal is realistically about correcting a specific legal mistake, like an improperly admitted piece of evidence or an incorrect jury instruction, not about getting a second chance to retell the same story to a different audience.