Pyle, J.
Statement of the Case
Hannah Wormgoor (“Wormgoor”) appeals the trial court’s order granting her prejudgment interest in the amount of $11,559.77 on her $67,168.52 judgment. Wormgoor argues that the trial court abused its discretion when it calculated her prejudgment interest based on a pre-trial stipulation in which the parties agreed that the ultimate verdict amount should be reduced to a fixed amount reflecting her policy limits instead of the jury verdict amount. Concluding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion when it awarded her prejudgment interest, we affirm the trial court’s judgment.
We affirm.
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Wormgoor first argues that “[a] pretrial stipulation of underinsured policy limits does not affect or have any relation to an award of prejudgment interest.” (Wormgoor’s Br. 11). We disagree.
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Our review of the record reveals that the stipulations agreed upon by Wormgoor and State Farm were very clear. The stipulation stated that “if the jury’s verdict is greater than $110,000, the Court should reduce the verdict to $67,168.52[.]” (App. Vol. 2 at 72). The parties reasoned that this reduction of the verdict amount was necessary based on payments that Wormgoor had already received under medical payments coverage, from Verveat’s insurance carrier, and for an advanced payment from State Farm.
Our review of the record reveals that the plain language of the pretrial stipulations provides that any jury verdict in excess of $110,000 should be reduced to $67,168.52. Thus, the judgment that the trial court used to calculate prejudgment interest cannot be the $1,050,000 jury verdict, because it was immediately reduced, pursuant to the pretrial stipulations, to $67,168.52. Further, INDIANA CODE § 1-1-4-5(a)(10) defines a “judgment” as “all final orders, decrees, and determinations in an action and all orders upon which executions may issue.” Here, the final order that constituted the trial court’s judgment was the reduced judgment of $67,168.52, not the jury verdict of $1,050,000. However, our analysis does not end here.
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Here, our review of the record reveals that the trial court, in its final order, laid out its reasoning in choosing to award prejudgment interest based on the stipulated reduced judgment instead of the jury verdict:
The Court finds that the measure upon which to base the calculation of prejudgment interest is on the reduced judgment of $67,168.52. The maximum amount that [Wormgoor] would ever receive is $67,168.52 and the parties so stipulated. The Court is not inclined to award prejudgment interest calculated upon a jury award that [Wormgoor] would never have received.
(App. Vol. 2 at 16). In doing so, the trial court exercised the broad discretion granted to it under the TPIS. In exercising this discretion, trial courts are to consider the purposes for awarding prejudgment interest: “to encourage settlement, to incentivize expeditious resolution of disputes, and to compensate the plaintiff for the lost time value of money arising from unreasonable delay.” Kosarko, 979 N.E.2d at 150. Based on these objectives and our supreme court’s holdings in Kosarko and Inman, we hold that a trial court has the discretion to award prejudgment interest upon a jury verdict, even when that amount exceeds a final judgment stipulated to by the parties. Here, the trial court granted the request for prejudgment interest. However, it based the award on the final judgment stipulated to by the parties, not the jury verdict award. The record supports the trial court’s decision. Here, the record reveals that the parties did not avoid efforts to settle their dispute and there is no evidence that State Farm took steps to unreasonably delay the case being decided at trial. In fact, the record reveals that much of the delay getting this case to trial involved COVID-19 emergency orders delaying in-person hearings during the pandemic. As a result, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in calculating prejudgment interest based on the stipulated reduced judgment instead of the jury verdict amount.
Affirmed. [Footnote omitted.]
Robb, J., and Weissmann, J., concur.