Many companies, alarmed by the increasing size of payouts to resolve harassment or discrimination claims by employees, have bought insurance policies over the last decade to protect themselves.
Today, only a few banks are using sophisticated internal metrics that would lower the size of payouts to account for the riskiness of the bets.
But smaller companies are not doing as well, and although the size of payouts is growing, the actual number of bonuses is shrinking.In theory, Japan's private companies can afford to splurge.
To give the families an idea of the size of payouts, Mr. Feinberg established a table of "presumptive awards" ranging from a low-end figure of $300,000, for an unmarried 65-year-old who earned $10,000 a year, to a high-end award of $4.35 million, for a married 30-year-old with two children and an income of $175,000.
One big business, Austrian-owned Petrom, which faces lots of minor lawsuits, is trying in vain to get the courts to identify plaintiffs properly, to specify the size of payouts in judgments and to aggregate identical cases.Big corruption cases inch forward, as do some judicial reforms such as new criminal and civil codes.
Merck, he says, still has a $5 to $6 per share overhang due to the uncertainty of future litigation and the potential size of payouts.
The size of his payout was a "subjective" reward for that stand-in job as well, the Apple board said.
An increase in the bank's capital cushion during the first three months of the year has helped fuel expectations that the size of the payout could rise rapidly in the future.
The prime minister has threatened to take legal action against Goodwin over his pension and said he shared the public's "anger" at the size of his payout, saying he was "considering every legal means at our disposal" to get some of it back.
Artists including Thom Yorke and David Byrne have criticised Spotify and rival streaming music services for the size of their payouts to musician.
