The statistics do not support that claim.
If you wish to make a more nuanced claim and discuss it, then by all means feel free to do so directly, without speculating about what WalterBright meant. It would be nice to do it on the basis of some kind of evidence though.
My own position was in my second to last paragraph: the US system sucks regardless of if you think it favors plaintiffs or defendants.
All the best to you.
Rather, you're now narrowing the debate to whether or not their "The prevailing atmosphere" is refering to "The US judiciary" - the subject of the previous sentence - or society at large. Which I read differently than you, but also doesn't matter.
Sooooo if you want to engage with my actual position, do so! What are your thoughts on adversarial legalism? Or if you want to keep playing debate cop instead, have fun, but... why?
If you assume the 95% of lawsuits that settle were 0% justified. On the other hand, I'll just assume that the guilt was so apparent there was no point of putting up a defense and wasting the money. So that means that a shocking 97.8% of personal injury claims are valid.
The rest of your post relies on your assumption being valid, which I vehemently disagree with. I don't really think it's 100%, but I do think it's closer to 100% than 0%.
I didn't interpret "don't make it to trial" as "100% settle" - my initial assumption was that they got thrown out instead. Probably it's a mix, that's a fair point.
Cases being settled, to me, though, still suggest that we would do better in a system where "bothering to fight it" isn't a question of deep pockets, and buying people off isn't an option, and things actually end up in front of judges. For transparency alone, vs confidential settlements.
According to the source the OP cited, the vast majority settle (according to the source's source, it seems like 10-20% are thrown out.)
They list the primary reason that cases settle isn't a question of deep pockets. It's that the plaintiff's attorney makes a case for the jury amount to be $X-$Y dollars and Y-X is a small enough spread that everyone would rather just settle the case than go through a jury trial when they are 90%+ (I made up that percentage) in agreement. That is, when they agree the defendant owes $XXX +/- 5%. Why waste the time on the last few thousand when they can split the difference and go home?
Meanwhile, if you're considered about regulatory capture, a jury and not a bench trial seem better. For what it's worth, the US system totally lets the judge decide the entire matter if both sides agree to waive the jury. It seems like that's the case in ~25-33% of cases that make their way to trial.
That's 56% of 5% of total lawsuits.
So that suggests that 97.2% of those lawsuits are unsuccessful.
From WalterBright's comments my guess is that his position would be something like "a ton of money and time is wasted lawyers and other legal stuff due to a system that accepts so many frivolous suits."
But another person could interpret that as "there are a lot of legitimate claims in that 97.2% that end up being unsuccessful because the US system is unfriendly to you if you don't have $$$ to pursue a case." Close to the complete opposite.
In terms of "how good the US judicial system for these sorts of liability cases," I'm not sure that actually matters much, though! In either case, there's a lot of waste and a lot of failures in the system. A system that relied less on adversarial procedures and each side retaining their own council and more on judges with independent fact-finders or arbitrators seems very preferable! If you're of the "it's rigged against the plaintiff" view, this system could be much harder to drown in paperwork and spurious procedural stuff like a large corporation can do to a small plaintiff today. And if you're in the "most of this shouldn't even get this far, it's too easy to file nuisance suits" camp, this system could toss out ridiculous things sooner.
This sort of "inquisitorial" or "nonadversarial" system is used in a few places in the US (like traffic court) and much more extensively in some countries.