Pindar-sama is a lawyer, and I am aging/expiring law student.

No place in world has such huge amounts of compensation sums being paid to damaged persons like in America. There are several reasons for that, and we could go into hour long discussion, but it has a lot to do with judicial system, jury/judge relations and, at the very end, the legal practice that has been established. Americans are likely to continue living in such law system with enormous compensations for even the slightest injuries, if cards are played right, for indeterminable amount of time.

Also another strong possibility why in US such high money amounts go in courts is that the lawyers support such decisions, because their revenues are mostly fixed in percentage of the amount handled/ruled out, while in most other countries lawyers receive a fixed amount that is established by law, depending on the sort of case they are on.