News
Trial Guides is announcing a new customer success story for one of the largest personal injury verdicts of 2023.
Trial Guides Founder Aaron DeShaw has obtained a $77.5 million verdict in a recent amputation case using multiple influences from Trial Guides. His $77.5 million compensatory damages verdict is the largest personal injury verdict in Oregon history, and believed to be the highest single leg amputation verdict in the United States. As with other customer success stories, we asked Aaron for some insights on how he obtained the verdict that might help other Trial Guides customers.
The following article is adapted from Carl Bettinger’s Twelve Heroes, One Voice: Guiding Jurors to Courageous Verdicts.
All too often, the question “What is your case about?” is met with responses filled with jargon, medical terms, and professional indifference:
“It’s a med-mal case for failure to diagnose breast cancer.”
“It’s a birth-injury case with CP.”
“My client is charged with being a felon in possession.”
We choose this language because it contains familiar shorthand that other attorneys will understand. But our courtroom audience is not a sophisticated legal audience; it’s a mishmash of teachers and tech writers, grandparents and grad students: people for whom common courtroom terms like plaintiff and defendant are often intimidating and ambiguous.
Eric Oliver has consulted trial lawyers for 25 years. The verdict: he knows what wins. Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame member, and Past President of the Inner Circle of Advocates, Paul Luvera, notes "Eric Oliver is the Babe Ruth of legal communications field. I buy, read, and put into action every book he writes and every article he publishes."
Trial Guides is proud to release Eric Oliver's newest book, Persuasive Communication: Twenty-five Years of Teaching Lawyers. This book collects the best of Eric's wisdom, laying out usable techniques and strategies that can be utilized in intake, deposition, mediation, trial and anywhere in between. Each topic the book covers is filled with useful nuggets that can be immediately implemented.
In Winning with Stories, trial lawyer Jim Perdue analyzes narrative elements in detail, showing how to craft a story with a strong beginning, memorable scenes, believable characters, a logical plot, vivid action, and a moving conclusion. Beyond this, Perdue demonstrates how to tell the story to maximum effect, with concepts as broad as giving soul to the story, and as specific as what the speaker should wear.
Many trial attorneys are acquainted with the idea of a case theme. Certainly all trial lawyers know the critical importance of establishing and reinforcing the strongest possible theme for your case story.
Trial Guides is proud to announce Eric Oliver's Facts Can't Speak for Themselves on Audiobook. This audiobook is an unabridged reading of the book by Eric Oliver himself. This is a 16 CD set.
About the audiobook:
Legal decision-makers construct their own version of the case story when they judge a case. In fact, they re-author their own version several times before arriving at the one they use to decide the case.