Elizabeth Lenivy provides excellent, detailed representation in the areas of product liability, medical malpractice, and personal injury....
As a compassionate and dedicated personal injury, medical negligence, and product liability lawyer, Erica Blume Slater provides...
With a focus on personal injury cases, Amy Collignon Gunn is a caring, trial-tested lawyer serving clients...
As a compassionate and dedicated business litigation, personal injury, medical negligence, product liability, and class action lawyer,...
As a dedicated and passionate advocate, Elizabeth always goes the extra mile to ensure that her clients...
Published: | January 10, 2024 |
Podcast: | Heels in the Courtroom |
Category: | Career , Practice Management |
Jurors need legal guidance when deliberating a case because, duh, they aren’t lawyers. Jury instructions are their roadmap, and it’s definitely in your client’s best interest to be sure those instructions are as clear and concise as possible. In this episode, we discuss verdict directors, clean and dirty instructions, roving commissions, potential pitfalls and resources to create instructions that help the jury align their decision within the proper legal parameters.
Special thanks to our sponsor Simon Law Firm.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Heels in the Courtroom, a podcast about successfully navigating law and life featuring the women trial attorneys at the Simon Law Firm.
Amy Gunn:
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Heels in the Courtroom. I am Amy Gunn and today I am joined by Liz Lenivy, Megan Crowe and Elizabeth McNulty and Erica Slater. Hello ladies. Hello. Hi. Today our topic is going to be jury instructions. This is a very broad topic and we’re going to try to distill it down not so much into substantive law and the language of jury instructions, but the logistics of it and how we prepare our cases based on what we anticipate the jury instructions will be. First, I want to mention that in Missouri on November 23rd, 2021, our Supreme Court issued a 58 page memo indicating that there are going to be changes either to certain of our jury instructions in the MAI the Missouri approved instructions or comments to those jury instructions and they will be effective July 1st, 2022. So anyone who practices in the trial field in Missouri should be aware of that particularly changes to the comments on our exemplary damages, our MAI 10 regarding punitives.
We had a bill go through our legislature recently senate Bill 5 91 that purports to change the standard for punitive damages in a number of different areas of law including medical malpractice. Our jury instruction committee does not recommend changes to the language of the punitive damage instructions, but rather issues a committee comment that cautions that Senate Bill 5 91 does purport to affect changes to the law of punitive damages. The committee is not taking a position on the constitutionality of provisions of SSB 5 91 and states that case law will determine the extent of those changes and the impact on jury instruction. So at this point, there really aren’t any specific changes to the standard of punitive damages in the MAI, but it appears very clear that our jury instruction committee expects there to be Litigation on the constitutionality of SB 5 91, which I’m interested in, but also is waiting for some case law to what sounds like interpret those changes a little more specifically.
Again, if you practice in Missouri, be on the lookout for those changes. Take a look at that as it starts July 1st, 2022 and at the end of 2021 we were all feeling pretty good about getting back in the Courtroom. I think many of us had been in trial one or two times in the last part of 2021. We’re feeling kind of bad about 2022 right now, getting back in there, but nonetheless, we need to be sharp on our jury instruction writing, so that’s why we wanted to address this today. One bit of advice that I have, first and foremost, again, if you practice in Missouri where we have Missouri approved instructions or any other state that has approved instructions like many of our states do, the information available in that book, whether it’s in old form, which I have right here in front of me or electronically, is really priceless.
I would encourage everyone to read the book and I’m not just talking about flipping through reading the instructions, but the introduction of the book, the history of the jury instructions and some definitions and advice that it gives about how to write the instructions, how to argue the instructions, et cetera. I was tasked with drafting instructions last year on a very complicated trial with multiple defendants and I had not really start to finish drafted jury instructions for a number of years. I don’t know how you ladies feel about it, but it’s kind of one of those things that just want done, but it kind of takes a lot of brainpower, so you put it off except for the verdict director and we’ll get to that. But I knew that this case was going to be complicated and I started reading the instructions and started reading the introduction to those instructions and I found it very helpful. So I would encourage everyone young or old experienced or new to start with reviewing the introduction to those books. Liz, when you are tasked with drafting jury instructions for any particular case, do you have a method to your madness? How do you start?
Liz Lenivy:
Well, the first thing that I do is try to find a similar case that has similar jury instructions and it can feel a bit tedious, but jury instructions are one of the most important parts of trial. You’re actually being tasked with something that is incredibly imperative to the trial and what’s going to happen in the case. And so really what I try to do is try to find a set that is similar, whether it’s similar facts or if it’s a situation where we have multiple plaintiffs or multiple defendants, I want to see what other people in the office have done. So I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel and Amy, you just talked about how there have been changes. What you have to do is make sure that whatever you’re drafting is the most recent version of it. And so what works out really well for me is at least what we do in our office, and I think most practitioners in Missouri do this, is we have what is called a dirty version and Erica, maybe you can explain dirty versus clean.
Erica Slater:
I wish I knew the answer to whether each state refers to them that way because I feel like I’ve definitely been local Counsel in cases where they’re like, what are the dirty and such? Should we talk about this? Anyway, so when you’re writing instructions for the court, the set of dirty instructions will have the citation to the MAI or whatever standard instruction in each state and then any case law that you’re using to support offering that instruction. It usually also has some details at the bottom about which party offered it, whether it was modified from its original form or the like. And the clean set is what would go to the jury, which are the text of the jury instructions without the citation on the bottom. So often, at least in Missouri are case management orders and instructions, pretrial instructions from the judge designate to file a dirty copy, which can get confusing if you’re not familiar, but it also becomes a little bit of a drafting nightmare because you have these two versions that you’re saving on your system and you’re always changing jury instructions as you go through.
They’re usually due to the court much earlier than you’re actually going to analyze and use them. They’re going to change throughout your trial prep. They’re often going to change throughout the trial, at least the verdict director. It’s such a good thing to do at the beginning of trial prep because it’s kind of getting your brain in exactly the mindset of what your proof has to be. What the jury is going to decide your case on is that set of instructions and if you can get in front of your eyes exactly what is going to be in front of the jury’s eyes, you kind of start seeing your evidence through that lens and I think that’s really helpful to preparing. It’s interesting because Amy, like you said, that you can kind of outsource jury instructions to other attorneys. Sometimes they get thrown on younger attorneys, but they can be really complicated, which on that recent case you had, they’re putting the most senior attorney on that task because they are so vulnerable to error and that is the most important thing about jury instructions is them being correct.
And unappealable, we talked before this recording and I think the statistic is that the vast majority of appeals after trial do have to do with instructional errors. So although one party may be arguing for a phrasing or a portion of a jury instruction, it’s kind of risky because if you win and the judge allows you to instruct a certain way over the other party’s objection, that is an easy way to create an appealable issue for the other side if you end up winning. So it’s a really kind of careful thing that any litigator needs to pay attention to and I would encourage anyone not to. If you give it to your young associate, find the brightest one and you are firm to do it right because it really is based on experience knowing how to put jury instructions together. It is extremely hard to understand how jury instructions work and how they function if you haven’t tried cases and had to argue them at the end of a case.
Amy Gunn:
Liz, with respect to your comment about reading ones that had been used before, I totally agree that is a great place to start because many of the instructions are mandatory, non debatable have to be given. It’s no problem. They do change occasionally. So you’re right to say I can cut and paste from a trial from 2019, but by golly you better be looking at the pocket part or the updated one online because even a couple of words can change here and there. On that note, in Missouri at least there is a companion handbook. Mary Wrights is a lawyer in town and she does so much work to go through CaseNet to go through the electronic database of cases to find, filed jury instructions and then pulls them out, organizes them and puts them in this big handbook. Then if you have a medical malpractice case, you can go to the beginning of the book, find me mal jury instructions and look at a handful of cases that are similar to yours.
It’s very helpful. I have used her handbook to argue to a judge, various ordering of instructions, various use of instructions, and it is very persuasive to a judge to say, well, this was done in three cases in the last number of years. It doesn’t necessarily say whether there had been an appeal or reversal, but at least it was some judge gave it somewhere. So that’s a very useful tool. When we are arguing instructions, which again we will address here in a minute, whether you’re the lead lawyer on the case or the third chair or the second chair or whoever is, you have to know a little bit about the case. If you’re the younger attorney that has been told to write the instructions in this case, you’re like, what? Take the time to say, okay, fine, but tell me what you’re thinking. Tell me what you think.
The important part of the case is, I just need to understand the case. And again, as with most states, Missouri has a number of mandatory instructions and it doesn’t matter what kind of case it is, but if you are getting to the damages, if you’re getting to the verdict director, you really have to know a little bit about the case regarding the verdict director. This is the instruction to the jury literally on how a plaintiff wins the case. For example, 2101 of the MAI is the one we use in medical malpractice. It says, your verdict must be for the plaintiff if you believe first defendant fill in the blank, and this is what you believe based on the evidence that you have discovered in this case did wrong. This is the medical error, this is the left a sponge in operated on the wrong area of the body.
These are the easy ones, folks, ours are never that easy, but you get my drift. And second defendant was there by negligent. So you have to lay out what you believe the defendant did wrong and you have to also have evidence that whatever that was was negligent, not that it just happened, that’s a strict liability standard, but that it was negligent. And third, as a direct result of the negligence, plaintiff sustained damages. So we’ve talked many, many times about in tort cases the three things we have to prove, liability, causation, and damages. There it is, liability, causation, damage, there it is. That’s the law in front of you. This is what the jury’s going to hear, the jury’s going to read and what you’re going to argue to the jury. So that’s what the verdict director is. It directs the verdict. Most cases, once you have your verdict director, the defense will have a converse and it will say, unless you believe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you must find for the defendant.
So it’s literally the converse. One of the big issues in the verdict director is that third paragraph that says, third as a direct result of such negligence, plaintiff sustained damage and we’re not doing our job if we can’t have that paragraph modified by 1901 and 1901 is the verdict director multiple causes of damage. And you might say, well, unless there’s literally multiple defendants committing errors that all culminate into an injury, how can you use that? And the answer is, our courts have interpreted this very broadly to mean if there’s anything else anywhere in the case that could have contributed to the harm done to this plaintiff, then we get the caused or contributed to cause language. In other words, instead of saying as a direct result of such negligence, plaintiff sustained damage, it should say such negligence directly caused or directly contributed to cause damage to plaintiff.
And that is a huge difference. You can imagine the argument as a defendant direct result of such negligence, think about all the other things that happened to this person. They didn’t go to back to their doctor or they fell down later or who knows what else could have potentially or there was a back problem beforehand, preexisting happening at the same time, post error, all those things. If there’s any evidence of anything other than the defendant’s conduct causing harm, you should get 1901 and you should argue for it. It allows you to argue in close that even if the jury believes the defendant’s conduct just maybe did a little bit of harm to the plaintiff, you win. So that is a really important thing to keep in mind.
Liz Lenivy:
It can also affect how you proceed with the case. For example, when you were taking the deposition of the defendant doctor or of the defendant, doctor’s, experts, how you ask questions, and this has come up time and time again where we ask the expert or whoever can you say to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that X, Y, Z conduct by the defendant did not directly contribute to cause. And I’ve had this fight with experts before of saying, I understand you don’t think it’s the sole causation. You think because he had diabetes or because he had this injury before or this illness before that that also contributed to the ultimate outcome in this patient’s injury or death or whatever. But can you tell me to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the specific act that we are here to talk about today did not contribute to cause because experts will try really hard and defendants will try really hard to weasel around that. And so when you know the actual language of the jury instructions and what is going to be in front of the jury, that is really important for when you are trying to get your evidence in your case through your depositions, through your discovery.
Erica Slater:
When you think about lay jurors deliberating and looking at the difference in that language, it just seems very different to be convincing each other 12 people in that room like, well, was it a direct cause? Did it directly cause it as opposed to, well, someone pointing out, well it says contributed to cause. So as long as it’s part of the reason why they got here, because even take a random example, you have a person who is rear-ended and they got a neck surgery, but that person has had five previous neck surgeries before that car accident. Well, the way that they’re left and the pain that they have after that accident and subsequent surgery has to do with that accident and the surgery that they had, but they also had a terrible neck to start with. So if a jury’s back there saying, oh, it has to be that negligence has to be the direct cause of the damages, which is the ongoing pain they have and all the jurors are saying, but she had a terrible neck without that language, the technicality slash semantics slash jurors who aren’t familiar with the legalese that we all use can be just ripe for a disaster.
Megan Crowe:
Exactly. I also think that aside from the contributed to cause language of 1901, looking at the jury instructions before you start writing a petition can be helpful in other ways. So the first part that Amy mentioned was of the verdict directors where you list the conduct that’s wrong, and I do a lot of car accident cases and the Missouri approved instructions have certain magic phrases that show what kind of driving conduct can constitute negligence. And so keeping those in mind when you’re drafting the petition, for example, one of them is failure to keep a careful lookout. Another one is failure to take evasive action and keeping those key phrases in mind that’s eventually going to be in the instructions will not only help you draft a really good petition, but ask questions in depositions that go to the heart of those magic phrases. That’s exactly right.
Elizabeth McNulty:
So I’ve been here for almost five years and I’ve never been involved in jury instructions until I guess three weeks ago. It’s a case in Florida, so not super topical to our current conversation. They do have standard instructions, so it wasn’t terribly difficult, but the case is pretty complex like Amy, I think yours was. So it was a difficult task, but I think that I can’t imagine drafting during instructions in a state where they don’t have standard instructions and you just have to go look at case law. That sounds very difficult. So I’m thankful that we’re in Missouri, but I don’t have, I’m learning a lot from this conversation and wish that I had listened to this about three weeks ago.
Amy Gunn:
What did you do to learn how to write the instructions in a foreign jurisdiction? Where did you
Elizabeth McNulty:
Start? I went to Google and I googled Florida standard instructions. I made a Supreme Court website. I think that it’s a lot like Missouri. They have instructions on how to start doing them and how to incorporate what they have. I don’t know if Missouri is like this, but they also have the instructions you need to put in that the judge will tell to the veneer panel before VAR dire even starts. So you had to incorporate that and then evidence instructions throughout the trial and stuff like that. And before I thought jury instructions just happened right before close, but you have to contemplate what the judge is going to instruct the jury throughout the entire trial, which I found to be pretty interesting. Let
Erica Slater:
Me pull the room real quick. Who took jury instructions as a class in law school?
Liz Lenivy:
I couldn’t get in. What it filled up so fast. I tried and I was at my computer ready. I had all the devices off in my apartment, so I had maximum wifi and it filled up in 15 seconds. That’s how important jury instructions are is that all of my classmates knew to get into that class.
Erica Slater:
I agree completely. I think it’s a really valuable practical skills course to take. So all of our law student listeners, if you want to litigate getting into a jury instructions class is really important because there’s nothing that you learn in law school that teaches you about jury instructions. It’s this little weird niche. The other thing is if you become a specialist in it, if you ask to do them in cases in your firm and you say, Hey, I’m happy to do your jury instructions. Let me do ’em, blah, blah, blah,
Amy Gunn:
That’s gold.
Erica Slater:
Yes, you will become known for that and it’s such a good skill to have
Megan Crowe:
Erica. I agree with you. I like doing them. But it wasn’t until Well, you’re
Erica Slater:
Also a nerd.
Megan Crowe:
Yes. And it wasn’t until I actually had the privilege of going through a trial and seeing how they worked out before I had been to trial, I had drafted a few and it was tedious, it was annoying. I didn’t understand what I was fully doing and I hated it. But then once I realized how it played into the whole thing of what we were doing this entire time, I gained a new appreciation for how they work and I feel like now going forward, I understand with purpose and I can better manipulate them to be the strongest for our case. And it was just a really eyeopening experience going through a jury instructions conference at trial.
Amy Gunn:
I think the most important instruction is the verdict director and the most important paragraph of the verdict director is paragraph first. And I don’t know why they don’t use paragraph one, two, and three. Okay, y’all, it’s first, second, and third. But that’s the way it goes. And that is the act of negligence. When we file petitions and complaints, it is incumbent upon us to pretty much file almost anything we think the defendant or the defendants did wrong. So failed to do A, B, C, D or did EFG, whatever bad acts, because you want to give in the initial pleading stage the defendant as much information about what you think they did wrong as possible. That’s what you have to do. Then you’ve got months if not years of discovery to whittle that list down or add to that list depending on what you find out when you get to trial. This is it. This is what your evidence has revealed was an error, was a bad act, was negligent. Because I’ll tell you one of the first cases I tried not knowing anything and not having anybody helping me, I basically cut and paste the allegations of negligence from my complaint into the verdict director and the judge was like, Ms. Gunn,
Megan Crowe:
Are you serious?
Amy Gunn:
I mean look, you live and learn. And in that process and the years that have followed, you really have to take the time to find out what’s your strongest point. You may have four or five really strong acts of negligence, but you think about what a jury wants to do with that. It only takes one. So in the verdict director, your verdict must be for the plaintiff if you believe first the defendant insert four strong things and each one of those is in the conjunctive. It’s an or you must believe the defendant first failed to read the X-ray correctly or failed to follow up on the x-ray or failed to inform the plaintiff of the results of the X-ray and second defendant was thereby negligent and third, as a direct result or the cause or contributed to cause language. So it can be any one of those things and you win. You only need one to win.
Erica Slater:
And they each have to stand alone.
Amy Gunn:
Exactly.
Erica Slater:
And to have had evidence presented at trial of each of them.
Amy Gunn:
Yes. And they have to be sufficiently specific or else you’re going to get the roving commission argument, which we will talk about in just one second. My point is pick your strongest acts of negligence. You do not, don’t make the mistake. I did that was like, well gosh, I mean I have a little bit of evidence. All these things, I’m just going to throw it in there because the jury’s like really, I mean you lose credibility. Pick the two or three things that are strong and don’t be afraid. And I learned this the hard way. I was afraid not to include a whole lot of ’em or at least more than two. I’ve gotten much more disciplined about relying on and trusting that one to two to three is all you need as long as the evidence is strong on those one to two to three areas of negligence. The last one we tried, Liz, in the October case, I think we just had two. Was it two action negligence?
Liz Lenivy:
It was just two, but they were pretty creative. It wasn’t just he did the surgery wrong. One of them might’ve just been sort of broad. He did the surgery wrong. But the second one, if I’m remembering correctly, was very specific to the way that he or used the instrument, I think.
Amy Gunn:
Yeah, contused the cord with the surgical instrument.
Liz Lenivy:
Yes, it was specific. And what’s nice about that, instead of having sort of the kitchen sink approach of just throwing as many acts of negligence as you can when you only have one or two or three, then when you’re in your closing and you present the verdict director to the jury and you say, look, this is the law right here in front of you is the law, this verdict director, and you’re going to look at this potential act of negligence or this potential of negligence, either one. If you find that it happened more likely true than not true, then plaintiff wins and then you can pick them apart and give all of your evidence, have a PowerPoint, have a poster board, have something so that you can have all of your different bullet points under each of your two or three points of negligence showing all of the evidence in your favor. And I think that that is much stronger than throwing a bunch of different things and saying, you can pick any one of these as opposed to saying, here’s a couple of ’em, but here’s all of the evidence that it’s not more likely true than not true at this point. It’s overwhelming how much the plaintiff should win in this case.
Amy Gunn:
And that tells you in your discovery, in your depositions of the experts and of the witnesses focus on a few things, you really need to drill down on a few really clear, concise, bad things because the jury’s going to hear it ad nauseum if the first time they hear the words contused, the cord with a surgical instrument is enclosed in your verdict director, they’re going to be confused. And that goes back to the best practice is to write your verdict director before you even file your case. It’s hard. It’s hard. It takes a lot of discipline. I don’t always have it. How about before
Erica Slater:
Expert depositions there you Gogo? Can we do that? Maybe party depositions if it’s
Amy Gunn:
Clear cut. Very good. I think that’s a good compromise. Okay. But roving commission, so we talked about the very specific act of negligence. In that case we just tried, which was contuse the cord with the surgical instrument. If we had just said, performed the surgery poorly, which is true, I mean let’s face it, it was a really bad job. But then the defendant would say, well, that’s a roving commission. And you would say, what the hell is that? So let me tell you, because it’s part of the introduction to the MAI. It says A roving commission occurs when an instruction assumes a disputed fact or submits an abstract legal question that allows the jury to roam freely through the evidence and choose any facts which suited its fancy or its perception of logic to impose liability. And that is from a case. It also says a roving commission is presumed prejudicial error.
So two things. Number one, it’s basically too vague to really nail down. And number two, it scares judges because of that second part that I read, a roving commission is presumed prejudicial error. So defendants commonly and consistently say roving commission about pretty much any act of negligence that you write in your verdict director. And you understand why, because a judge is going to be like, oh, it’s presumed prejudicial. I had to be really careful about that. So the more specific you can be in your acts of negligence, the better off you’re going to be to avoid or to win this roving commission argument. But you can’t be too narrow to the point where you’ve jury’s only heard that phrase like one time during the whole trial. So it’s definitely a balancing act, but don’t go into a jury instruction conference without understanding what a roving commission is because I don’t think I’ve ever been in one, particularly in medical malpractice and more complex Litigation where I haven’t been accused of drafting roving commissions in my verdict directors.
Erica Slater:
Well, and Amy, based on the example that you gave just now, when you were talking about medical errors on X-rays, which fit the case you did the instructions on last year, an example would be you said, so it’s a nurse practitioner who reads a chest X-ray. She doesn’t tell the doctors that she’s working with, nor does she tell the plaintiffs, right? Correct. If you instructed and said the defendant, meaning the nurse practitioner was negligent because she failed to inform regarding the X-ray results and that was your entire phrase, defendants would’ve a good argument that that’s a roving commission because it’s failed to inform who. And if a jury has that allegation back in the jury room, one person is saying, well, she failed to inform the plaintiffs, the patient about the results. So that fits. And then another juror is saying, well, yeah, and she also failed to inform the doctors that were working, that she was working with of that too, and they could have acted on those results. And if you can interpret it two different ways like that, then it’s probably a pretty good argument that it fits into that realm of roving commission. So just that extra specificity in any sort of allegation like that or you guys identifying that the court was contused with an instrument as opposed to hit with a retractor or something when they’re getting into the space that would,
Amy Gunn:
Or an epidural hematoma, which was the defendant’s argument. Exactly. Exactly. Let’s talk about jury instruction. Conference rule 70.2 E, which is also listed in the instruction book at the introduction indicates that jury instruction conference has to be held on the record. And effective in 2018, which wasn’t that far ago, it was amended. And the rule allows the trial court do conduct informal discussions on the instructions with Counsel before the instruction conference and then the instruction conference must be on the record. So a lot of times what happens is nobody wants the whole darn thing to be on the record because there’s a lot of back and forth, a lot of argument.
Erica Slater:
Horse trading.
Amy Gunn:
Horse trading, yeah. I mean it’s not heated usually. Sometimes it is, but usually it’s just a lot of talking. And judges prefer to have the jury instruction conference where you can say, okay, instruction one is 1.012 is blah, two three, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the other side, because plaintiffs usually do the bulk of the submissions, the judge will say Any objection to instruction number one, yes or no, yes or no. So that part’s on the record, but there are times when there’s not a jury instruction conference on the record because you’re just not thinking about it. And I’ve been there, all I can remember is a two hour jury instruction conference. Dang, was that not on the record? Wait a minute. So you have to be cognizant of the fact that it has to be on the record and that’s for the appeal.
And you can ask if you’re afraid that the discussion is going to be contentious and you’ve got a lot of questionable jury instructions and you’re worried about the evidence or whatever it is, you can certainly ask for the whole thing to be on the record. No one’s going to love it. But it is certainly important that everything be available on appellate review. If you’re really worried about it, it goes on to say that Counsel is required to make specific objections during the instruction conference. The court may correct clerical errors at any time prior to the verdict. Now that’s important because you’re all the way through the drafting of the instructions, you’re through the evidence, you’re through your jury instruction conference, you’re at the end in Missouri, we read the instructions prior to closing argument. You’ve got the stack in front of you. If you’re the one giving the closing argument, you’re thinking about your closing argument.
You don’t want to listen to an instruction that’s four pages long that you know every word of, but you really need to or have someone on your team read a long because if there’s an error, and you’d be surprised at how often one word can throw something off. If there is an error in the reading of the instructions, it’s problematic. It could throw the whole thing out. So you need to have someone on your team listen to every word the judge is saying. And I’ve seen this before where a judge for the first time after two weeks of trial and multiple jury instruction conferences and multiple revisions is reading an instruction and it’s wrong. So it’s also important to see that all the way through. And then you certainly don’t want to be in closing argument using a verdict director that isn’t the one that the court just read. So you just have to absolutely be eagle eye about all those instructions. Okay. So having gone through a lot of the logistics and advice, does anybody have any hot tips for going forward?
Erica Slater:
Okay, I have learned, I guess the hard way from doing multiple sets of jury instructions. I remember I had one case that had nine different versions depending on how the claims came in, and that’s what was so difficult. There were agency claims which changed several instructions. Those might be admitted. So we made versions that prepared for that. So we kind of had versions that prepared for every contingency, and the judge for some reason wanted dirty and clean versions filed before the case at the pretrial, which makes no sense. You don’t need the clean ones until you’re reading them to the jury. And anyone who’s done this, it’s a drafting nightmare to then remove the citation. So here’s my hot tip. Don’t remove the citations in your clean copy. Go through, just highlight them and turn the text white and then you don’t have to do anything to move around a reformat. And you’re welcome.
Amy Gunn:
Nice. That’s actually really smart.
Erica Slater:
Hey, live and learn.
Amy Gunn:
Alright, well, so on that ending hot tip. Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Heels in the Courtroom. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us at heels in the Courtroom Law and we’ll see you next time.
Speaker 1:
Amy Liz, Mary Erica, Elizabeth, and Megan. Would love to hear from you at comments at heels in the Courtroom Law. And if you love heels in the Courtroom, check out the other legal podcasts in the Simon Law Firm Library. John Simons The Jury is Out podcast focuses on lifelong learning to elevate your practice and dive into the legal drama behind America’s first medical malpractice case against opioid over-prescription in results. Don’t lie. Subscribe today.
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Heels in the Courtroom |
Heels in the Courtroom is a fresh and insightful podcast offering the female lawyer's perspective of trial work with six wonderful hosts Amy Gunn, Erica Slater, Liz Lenivy, Mary Simon and Elizabeth McNulty.