EP 609- Design Defect Strategy with Jake Plattenberger

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer (00:01)
Welcome to The Jury is Out, a podcast for trial attorneys who want to sharpen their skills and better serve their clients. Your co-hosts are John Simon, founder of the Simon Law Firm, Tim Cronin, personal injury trial attorney at the Simon Law Firm, and St. Louis attorney, Erich Vieth.

Tim Cronin (00:19)
Welcome to another episode of The Jury is Out. This is Tim Cronin. We are sans  John and Erich again here today, but I have invited a good friend of mine and a great trial lawyer here to do what he likes best, which is talk about himself. Jake Plattenberger from Tor Horman Law. Thank you very much for coming on. Kind of telling our audience a little bit about your background, yourself and your firm.

Jake Plattenberger (00:39)
Thanks for having me.

Yeah, so I work at Tor Herman Law and we have offices in Edwardsville and St. Louis and Chicago. And we’ve been around for God close to 20 years now. I hate to say we’re getting old, Tim. We are getting old. We started out. We all of started out at Simmons Cooper. Yeah, yeah. Tor and Jeff Cooper. Yeah, we’re college roommates, I think. ⁓ so Tor used to live in Chicago.

Tim Cronin (01:00)
Yeah, well we all

Yeah.

Jake Plattenberger (01:13)
And then Cooper called him and said, come on down here and work with me. So I started there as a clerk, actually. I was a remote clerk. I lived in Chicago.

Tim Cronin (01:22)
You’ve done the same thing as I am. I’ve been with John the whole time.

Jake Plattenberger (01:25)
career.

Yeah. I did a year at an insurance defense firm because I had an opportunity to try, I think I tried 35 cases my first year and by myself, really small stuff, property damage stuff. I got in court room. So then I went to work for tour. We started out doing almost exclusively these so-called mass torts, know, pharmaceutical cases, groundwater contamination, that kind of stuff. But over the last decade or so,

Tim Cronin (01:39)
Yeah, but you got in front of a jerk.

Jake Plattenberger (01:54)
have branched out and tried to do more personal injury and stuff like that, which we do. So that’s the firm. Yeah.

Tim Cronin (02:02)
And you know, I’ve gotten to know a lot of you guys in the last few years working with you on these baby formula neck cases, which we’ll talk a little bit about. Two of our favorite subjects. The way you guys have your firm set up is just really strategically well designed. So Tyler’s, Tyler’s a good friend of mine. He’s kind of a managing partner. And then you have Chad Finley, who is like, has a brilliant scientific mind.

Jake Plattenberger (02:20)
He’s like the managing partner.

science legal guy I’ve ever seen.

Tim Cronin (02:30)
and then your lead counsel for like all the cases that go to trial. Correct. Does fun tour stuff. ⁓

Jake Plattenberger (02:36)
He

does fun tour stuff and he actually has a brilliant legal mind. does. Yeah, he does. And everybody loves him. you know, there is politics involved in mass torts and who gets on what committees and stuff. yeah, tour does that.

Tim Cronin (02:41)
I’ve talked

And

Ken is, yes, his primary writer who I’ve read his stuff and it’s like fantastic. Yeah, I like to copy and paste it.

Jake Plattenberger (02:56)
Yeah, Ken’s our law and motion guy. So he does all the writing. And then we have Steve Davis, who manages our mass tort docket and helps Tyler manage the office. We just brought over Alan Holcomb to be another trial lawyer. I can’t say enough good things about Alan. Eric Terry, we have, who manages our personal injury practice. So yeah, the way it’s structured, we’ve all been there forever too, except for Alan, who’s recent.

Tim Cronin (03:21)
So Eric kind of works up individual personal injury cases and then you’ll come in right towards the end and then ⁓ Tyler and others are and Torb kind of strategically managing the mass tort stuff. then you’ll get involved in whichever one is heating up the most at the time is getting geared towards trial.

Jake Plattenberger (03:40)
That’s right. That’s right. And we all kind of gravitated towards what we like to do, which helps, right? I nobody wants to be miserable at work. And if I had to do any of those other jobs, I would be miserable. And if those guys had to do my job, they would be miserable. So yeah, it’s worked out really well.

Tim Cronin (03:57)
How many cases have you tried, Jake?

Jake Plattenberger (03:59)
Man, mean, it’s got to be, it’s definitely north of 45. Yeah. Yeah.

Tim Cronin (04:05)
Do you mean on the plaintiff’s side? Like if you’re excluding the 35 that you did in the first year.

Jake Plattenberger (04:09)
That includes a 35. So I’ve probably tried a 10 or so plaintiff’s cases.

Tim Cronin (04:15)
And you’ve had a good number just in the last few years.

Jake Plattenberger (04:19)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we’re really trying to get to a point where we try cases. I mean, as you know, there’s a lot of people, especially in the mass tort business. And I’m not saying this in a negative way because it works for them. But there’s a lot of people that would rather avoid trial. Yeah. And we don’t. So it’s really been great. It’s been busy. have, I mean, I just got out of one, which I think we’ll talk about. I got another one in May.

And then I got a big one in October, and then I’m trying a ETO case in Atlanta in the first part of next year.

Tim Cronin (04:53)
Tell, explain what the ETO cases are. You’ve talked, you and I have talked about them a little bit.

Jake Plattenberger (04:58)
Yeah, so I think that they’re known to people in the business as the so-called stereogenics cases. And there have been several of them, some plaintiffs verdicts and some defense verdicts. And actually recently in Colorado,

Tim Cronin (05:13)
Was it color? I thought there was a defense verdict in Chicago. There verdict in Chicago. Which one was both both?

Jake Plattenberger (05:18)
So the first trial in Chicago was a big plaintiff’s verdict that was Salvy Jr. and it was 200 some odd million dollars. Great result. Then there was a defense verdict. Also great lawyers involved in that case on the plaintiff’s side. But recently, and I mean like last week, verdict came back in Colorado as a defense verdict. So these are airborne contamination cases. ETO is a chemical that is used or was used to sterilize.

things, medical instruments, certain food products, because it will basically kill any living organism it comes in contact with. So, stereogenics and there’s other defendants too, but they didn’t properly control these emissions for a long time. And they got out into the community and caused cancer clusters.

Tim Cronin (06:09)
And I mean, this is how it usually works in these mass tort cases, right? There’s alleged years of work that goes in to working them up. Some people can keep some in state court. A lot of them end up in a federal MDL. And then each side gets their, what we call bellwether picks, right? And so a number of cases get tried. Oftentimes there’s a few verdicts on each side and then negotiations happen.

Jake Plattenberger (06:34)
I mean, the aspiration is you set the floor and set the ceiling. Get a couple of defense verdicts or low number of verdicts. get a couple of plaintiffs verdicts, and then you negotiate in that bracket. Right. Yeah.

Tim Cronin (06:46)
So there’s a couple tries. So Jake doesn’t have to brag too much about himself. In the last month, he got a $25 million verdict in what I thought was a very difficult case with difficult circumstances. may be getting into some of them, maybe not some others, but that was coming off the heels of a $495 million verdict that Jake and his team and his firm

Jake Plattenberger (07:00)
Is it?

Tim Cronin (07:16)
got last July. So over half a billion dollars in the last eight, nine months. Yeah. I watched almost the entirety of your trial last July, because I had one about the same thing a few months later. And I just like watching you work, Jake. And then I came and watched your opening for the recent one. So let’s start with the recent one, understanding there’s some things you maybe can talk about and things you can’t. was the case?

Jake Plattenberger (07:42)
This involved the drowning death of a two and a half year old girl in an above ground pool in rural Missouri. And the case was a design defect and a failure to warn case, but primarily a design defect case. You know, this above ground pool.

Tim Cronin (08:01)
And the defendant wasn’t the designer. It was just the manufacturer and you were able to keep them from arguing they didn’t design it.

Jake Plattenberger (08:07)
It wasn’t even the manufacturer, technically. and because of their corporate structure, they can say we don’t design it, we don’t manufacture it. But we did establish that they resold it and or in some way profited from the sale of it. So we were able to prevent them from making a so-called. What’s the phrase now? What do you want to blame the upstream? Innocent seller.

Tim Cronin (08:31)
And yeah, the innocent seller argument or empty. mean, it’s an empty chair argument. Really, it’s a jury nullification argument because in strict liability, it’s shouldn’t put it in the stream of commerce if it had a defect. That’s right. Yeah.

Jake Plattenberger (08:35)
So we didn’t have to deal with that.

And so we kept that out. But yeah, it was primarily a design defect case and it was in federal court here in the city in the Eastern District of Missouri.

Tim Cronin (08:51)
And we’re going to talk a little bit about your favorite fun things that you like to do in trial. You weren’t quite permitted to use your markers to the extent that you like.

Jake Plattenberger (09:01)
Correct. ⁓ And look, that happens sometimes. I mean, I’m a big fan of demonstratives. I’m a big fan of creating demonstratives.

Tim Cronin (09:10)
You create them live. Correct. With almost with all witnesses. Yes. Jake stands at the Elmo and with a marker and creates demonstratives live with a lot of times the witnesses picture might already be on it and then you create diagrams and then.

Jake Plattenberger (09:24)
So I go in

with blank pieces of paper with the picture of the witness in the upper left-hand corner. I have, yeah, I stole it from somebody else. And I usually do 10 in landscape and 10 in portrait because depending on what you’re gonna be doing, whether it’s a bullet point list or a drawing, sometimes you want landscape, sometimes you want portrait.

Tim Cronin (09:36)
stolen this from.

Jake Plattenberger (09:52)
And yeah, I find it to be, and I put it on the Elmo. Keeps the jurors engaged. know, as people that do trial work know, words are one way of conveying information. Pictures are an entirely different way of conveying information. Most people retain information better when they get it both ways. So I think it’s impactful. I think that, you know, when you put the pictures up there, depending on the length of the trial,

Tim Cronin (09:56)
Keeps the jurors engaged.

Jake Plattenberger (10:21)
you know, some, sometimes we, even as the lawyers forget that somebody testified, we’re like, my gosh, I forgot that person was on the stand two weeks ago. You can bring it back out and closing and the picture of the witness helps the jury remember. And then hopefully they remember what you did with the witness. So you bring it back and closing. And I think it works.

Tim Cronin (10:40)
So in that pool, how long were you in trial in that pool case? It ended up being less than a week.

Jake Plattenberger (10:44)
I’m telling you, it was like four days.

Tim Cronin (10:46)
And you got almost no voir dire, which is not uncommon in federal court. Correct. That’s just the reality. We, you know, we don’t like it. We’d like to talk to more, but that’s the reality often in federal court.

Jake Plattenberger (10:48)
I got 20 minutes.

That is

the reality. I got 20 minutes and didn’t even use four of it because it was going so poorly.

Tim Cronin (11:02)
And then only 20 minutes for opening and 20 minutes for closing

Jake Plattenberger (11:04)
20 minutes for opening, 20

minutes for closing, both closings. Yeah, it was very quick. I would have liked to have had more time for opening and closing, obviously. I think it worked out. Yeah, it did. But I gotta tell you, like…

Tim Cronin (11:18)
You

had to streamline down like what is what is truly important to convey what we need to convey.

Jake Plattenberger (11:24)
Yes.

And, you know, so you take the opening and closing out of it and just talk about putting on the evidence. There’s a lot, I don’t know about a lot, there’s interesting research coming out lately about quicker trials and how those are working out for plaintiffs. You know, where they call them. Some people refer to them as Tik Tok trials. Some people refer to them as Instagram trials. mean, for better or worse, you know, depending on the demographic of your jury, people’s attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and they don’t appreciate

being kept in the jury box for six weeks anymore.

Tim Cronin (11:57)
You know, Jake, for the first good, like half of my career, it seemed like almost all my trials could get done in a week. And I was trying product cases, med mal cases. Nobody was going way overboard on too many experts. And then as people’s attention spans have gotten shorter, I’ve noticed that the number of defense experts and witnesses have gotten longer. And now I can’t seem to almost ever get a trial done. They all go into a second week or a third week. And I think it’s strategic.

Jake Plattenberger (12:26)
Yeah, I think so too. And that’s what I was alluding to earlier when I said the research is showing that the shorter trials are better for the plaintiffs. So I agree with you.

Tim Cronin (12:36)
So the two issues as I took them in that case, were two primary issues that for the jury to wrestle with and that they had to decide. one was how did this little girl get in the pool? And from listening to your opening, talking to you ahead of time, listening to the other side’s opening, I thought that seemed pretty common sense. And we’ll talk about it a little bit. The second one was where were the parents or grandparents or whoever, because that’s

Naturally, in any case that involves something like this, it’s, well, you have a two and a half year old, you have a pool supervising. And that was really the primary defense from the other side that they focused on is, you know, the sole cause of this is a lack of supervision that you had to fight against. On the how’d she get in the pool, you had an expert who had given an opinion about it and that opinion was not allowed to be given. Correct. And then you had a police officer.

Jake Plattenberger (13:21)
Yeah.

Tim Cronin (13:33)
who had done the investigation, who had given an opinion on it, and that opinion was not allowed to be given. Correct. ⁓ And I thought the way you did it with that police officer was excellent, Jake. The way it made clear what his opinion was without you in any way coming close to violating the order. Right. So explain how you did it and how it’s clear she got into the pool.

Jake Plattenberger (13:55)
Yeah, so it was clear to everybody.

Tim Cronin (13:59)
We might not have said the design defect issue yet.

Jake Plattenberger (14:03)
didn’t. ⁓ what was it? The design the design defect issue was that this pool and it’s a standard above ground pool that everybody has seen at some point in their lives, a standalone pool. you know, some of them have decks built around them. This one did not. It was a very large rural piece of property. But around the outside of the pool wall was a nylon strap that was about 14 and a half inches off the ground. And

the intent of the strap was to add support to the circle, to the pool so that it doesn’t just bulge out. So it was structural and it would hug the side of the pool until it got to the vertical support.

Tim Cronin (14:37)
doesn’t expand out.

which were like every three feet or four feet.

Jake Plattenberger (14:50)
three to four feet around the perimeter of the pool, right? You’ve got posts or poles. And when it got to the pole, the strap would separate from the pool wall and go around the outside of the post, which created a gap. And it was a step, essentially. And what we learned is very small children, two, two and a half years old, can get up this wall, scale this wall, get to the top, and then their center of gravity takes them over the

the top rail into the water, but they can do this in like a minute. It’s very, very fast. less. Or less, how quickly they can climb it. So that was a design defect issue. It was obvious to everyone how she got into the pool.

Tim Cronin (15:31)
The ladder had been taken out, which is they warn about in the game.

Jake Plattenberger (15:34)
Right,

which is a huge issue in like every pool case, right? Was the ladder in? the ladder in? Understandably. But that’s the deal. Like if you take the ladder out, the pool wall is not supposed to be climbable. The pool is supposed to be relatively safe, right? Nothing is 100 % childproof.

Tim Cronin (15:38)
Understandably.

and you hammered an open everybody agrees with that everybody agrees with that that’s

Jake Plattenberger (15:54)
ladder was out that and that’s the gold standard. So the you know, there was mud around the pool and the little girl was was taught by her family. And this is all very sad. But it’s very sad. There was a bucket of water next to the pool that that the kids were told, you know, clean your feet before you go in. And so that we don’t get a bunch of dirt in the pool. Again, it’s a big it’s like a farm. Well, this

little girl did that. She put her feet in the water and then walked across the mud that led to the pool. Yeah, and you could see her little muddy footprints going up the wall of the… Right on the strap. you see two footprints on the strap and then you see left foot, right foot, left foot, and then her hand prints.

Tim Cronin (16:32)
10 feet away from

starting at the strap.

Jake Plattenberger (16:52)
were on the top rail. the family observed all of this and the responding officer. That’s right. Yeah, obviously nobody saw her go into the water, but, then the cops photographed it all.

Tim Cronin (17:06)
It was like three to five minutes is the longest period of time that nobody could account for her. That’s how fast.

Jake Plattenberger (17:11)
It was three and a half to five minutes if you give them all the benefit, the defense, all the benefit of the doubt. But yeah, it was three and a half minutes from the time, maybe five minutes from the time her dad last saw her till the time that he was removing her from the water and she was already deceased. So, yeah, that’s I mean, you know, we had the footprints, we we had the testimony from the police officer, we had the police reports and the police reports all said we conclude that this is how she got into the pool. Now, I couldn’t use those. Right. Those are all excluded.

What was also excluded was the officer testifying as to what his quote opinion was. So I had to sit down.

Tim Cronin (17:51)
And that’s commonly excluded because juries attach so much weight to a pit if they don’t personally see it.

Jake Plattenberger (17:56)
I was fine with all that. I I didn’t think, you know, I thought arguably the police report should have come in and maybe something should have been redacted from it, but whatever. So we put the officer on the stand and the guy, I mean, if you called central casting and said, send me a detective.

Tim Cronin (18:10)
You said that in front of the jury.

Jake Plattenberger (18:12)
I said, this is the guy that they would send. mean, he looks like the quintessential detective and he was a wonderful guy. And I sat down the night before and I don’t ever script out my questions. Yeah, I do not write outlines. I don’t write out my openings. I typically don’t write out anything. But because this had to be so technical and because I was I was worried about, know, there were several orders, motions and lemonade orders touching on what

this witness could say, I had to be really, really careful. And so I just scripted it out and just read the questions. And we were able to establish that, you know, it was pretty clear that this is what he thought happened.

Tim Cronin (18:55)
Yeah,

look, oftentimes the simplest, most straightforward way that lets the jury reach the obvious conclusion without somebody saying it is that it’s not shoved on their throat. Conclusion. And what Jake did is he just walked through the officer’s investigation from a high level from beginning to end with, okay, you got to the scene, you talked to the other officers who talked to people, you had a general understanding what happened. You started taking pictures and then you started from pictures from brought out.

Jake Plattenberger (19:05)
Right, and we’re-

Tim Cronin (19:25)
Right. then you just gradually got down to a close up of the footprints, what those appear to be, a little girl’s footprints, the hand prints. Right. And then ultimately, do you tend to focus your investigation over time on the area of most importance? Yes, I do.

Jake Plattenberger (19:28)
close up of the.

I said, did you walk around the rest of the pool? Yes, I did. Did you see anything that was interesting? Dude? No, I did not. You know, so yeah, you’re absolutely right, Tim. If you let the jury get there, you know, you, you walk them all the way there and then let them reach their own conclusion. I do think it was a mistake for the defense to contest this. mean, they, they did it a lot more than I thought they would. Yeah. It’s a classic mistake of just

Tim Cronin (20:07)
is going to talk about that.

I think they lost credibility by doing it.

Jake Plattenberger (20:14)
Totally. mean, we saw jury members, you know, having a physical reaction of like, you know, come on, kind of look when he was up there trying to argue like, well, we don’t really know how she got into the water.

Tim Cronin (20:26)
And your order of witnesses worked out really well to your benefit, not knowing that. I watched in, in, in, in day one. you had, you had voir dire the day before, even though it was short. in the first day, picked a jury opening defense corporate rep, police officer. so in.

Jake Plattenberger (20:39)
No, we did. ⁓ you did. in the first witness. I just didn’t. Right.

Tim Cronin (20:55)
the defense opening, they really, really hammered the two things we talked about. And I think not to be too critical, but took too strong of a position of they can’t ever prove that she got in the pool this way ⁓ and propose some alternatives that just.

Jake Plattenberger (21:12)
I mean, I’ll be critical. was, it was a terrible mistake. that happens, you know, it’s like lawyers, you know, they get in the bubble, they, they lose the perspective and they lost, like you said, they lost credibility because to anyone. And look, you know, focus grouped it and, and did all that stuff, which you guys do. We normally do. And like everyone who saw that was not the issue.

Tim Cronin (21:37)
clear

she

Jake Plattenberger (21:37)
Yeah,

that was not the issue in the case. The issue in the case was the negligent supervision.

Tim Cronin (21:41)
You

wanted to frame it as, look, if the jury believes this case is won or lost on, she get in the pool this way, we win.

Jake Plattenberger (21:50)
Absolutely. So that’s, that’s the old polarizing the case.

Tim Cronin (21:53)
You polarized it that way in opening and then the defense got up and polarized it that way too. And they took a couple like that she could have gotten in these other two ways. And you had as your very first witness, I don’t even think there was a break. No. The corporate rep of this company and you had your plan with him, which was to get some admissions you’d gotten from him, go over some things in the manual that were good. But you scrapped that in the beginning and went right after. Okay.

Jake Plattenberger (21:58)
They did a huge.

Tim Cronin (22:22)
Here’s what I just heard. You are here for the company. Here’s what I just heard about the other ways. ⁓ Explain to me how this little girl could have gotten in by standing on the bucket that was right side up and jumping up and balancing on it and getting it, but she couldn’t have gotten in by stepping on the nylon strap with the footprint.

Jake Plattenberger (22:40)
Yeah. I mean, it didn’t make any lot. The defense didn’t make any logical sense. And yeah, you’re right. I did the corporate rep first and just, was so, I don’t know if offended is the right word, but by what I heard in the opening that, I was like, let’s just deal with this right away. Yeah. And it did.

Tim Cronin (22:55)
Yeah, like,

I saw the jury kind of wrote like, yeah, this is right. And the way they talked critical of the family for not supervising, I thought it should have been done a lot more subtly. They did it with the parents sitting right there kind of too aggressively.

Jake Plattenberger (23:00)
Bye!

So

look, the supervision issue is a real one and not one that we took lightly. we were getting some feedback from our focus groups like this could be a real problem because when people hear two and a half old, that’s when you put a pool on your property. Second of all, this kid’s two and a half years old. The kid should be under near constant supervision. So we had to…

Tim Cronin (23:27)
Put a girl in your art, you know?

decide you better make sure.

Jake Plattenberger (23:42)
let the jury know, like, listen, this is a ⁓ big, loving, caring family, which was easy because they are. And when they testified later, they all did a phenomenal job. But this is a big rural piece of property where like, the road leading into it is a private road and everyone that lives on this road is part of this family. And these kids are out safely. I they’re not like living in the wild, but these are people that live their life outdoors. They hunt, they camp, they hike, they boat.

So, you know, that this child would be outside.

Tim Cronin (24:12)
Dad was working at home at the time. Mom was gone at work, Yeah. And then the other family.

Jake Plattenberger (24:18)
were seven adults

on the property when this happened and several of them were like 30 feet away from the pool and they had seen this child three and a half minutes before she got into the water. So the child was being watched. But you know, it could have been done much better. It would have been a lot more dangerous.

Tim Cronin (24:39)
a very, very real chance of losing the

Jake Plattenberger (24:43)
Absolutely. that was our opinion as well. But it wasn’t done well. They focused too much on how she got into the pool, the defense did, which was dumb. And then really kind of mangled the examinations of the family members. And it just went really well for us. The family came across as believable and sympathetic and really as victims.

themselves, right? Not as some kind of, you know, like part of the problem, which, you again, if it had been handled differently, it could

Tim Cronin (25:19)
They were being victimized in the trial. That’s right. So those are the only that first day, which I thought it seemed like it was probably the most important day, the one I saw. I’m going to choose that it was since it’s the one I saw. It was. Yeah. I didn’t see the parents testify. I was like, what?

Jake Plattenberger (25:34)
It heartbreaking, It was heartbreaking.

Tim Cronin (25:37)
So you closed on Thursday.

Jake Plattenberger (25:40)
We closed Thursday early.

Tim Cronin (25:43)
And I thought you had to you closed you were arguing about jury instructions like all day and you didn’t get to start your closing till after 5pm.

Jake Plattenberger (25:52)
That is right. Yeah. So actually, yeah, I mean, we were done early Thursday with evidence. Yeah. And then we had the jury instruction conference, which took most of the day. And we started closing the case, I think, like 5.45 or something.

Tim Cronin (26:04)
and then both did closing, the jury stayed.

Jake Plattenberger (26:07)
jury stay till 730. Yeah.

Tim Cronin (26:10)
And then they came back the next day and they were asking questions about it, like indicative of thinking about how she got in the pool.

Jake Plattenberger (26:18)
Yeah, the

first questions that came out, which were the first night of deliberations were bad.

Tim Cronin (26:24)
I remember talking to you and you guys were worried it was bad and I was like it sounds like they’re deciding the case based on how she got in the pool now it’s concerning that they’re questioning how she got in the pool but if that’s the question they’re answering you know we read too much

Jake Plattenberger (26:36)
Yeah, like anything, you

never know. you could look at it that which is why I like talking to you when I’m in those. I like talking to people who aren’t directly involved in the case, but who understand who are trial lawyers because I called you and you’re like, and I was freaking out. Yeah. And you’re like, yeah, look, you know, look at it this way. so, yeah, who knows? But the second day, the questions that came out, you you can tell sometimes or you think like.

Tim Cronin (26:56)
Which you wanted them to decide the case on.

Jake Plattenberger (27:04)
You know what the elements are in the jury instructions? And so when they start asking questions about the elements that are like in the second set of, you’re like,

Tim Cronin (27:11)
⁓ We got that or otherwise we’d be gone already.

Jake Plattenberger (27:14)
because

if we lost that, we’d be out entirely.

Tim Cronin (27:17)
They

got to causation maybe.

Jake Plattenberger (27:19)
They were asking for the manual. ⁓ So they had gotten deep into the warnings case. If they didn’t think that she had gotten into the pool the way that we thought she did, it would have killed both of the claims. yeah, once they started asking about the manual, I was like, we should be good.

Tim Cronin (27:29)
at your

Yeah. How much did you ask? How long did the jury deliberate?

Jake Plattenberger (27:39)
15 to 25 million.

Well, it was about an hour the first day and then it was from like 9am to 1.30pm the next day with lunch. So what is that? Six and a half?

Tim Cronin (27:52)
half

hours. Now, when you ask, are you, I assume like me, when you ask for a range, you don’t expect the jury to do, if you win, you expect them to probably pick something at the bottom of your own range.

Jake Plattenberger (28:04)
Yeah. I mean, that’s, that’s a thinking you anchor them with the high number and you, know, yeah, I think that’s No, they gave us the full amount or 25 million.

Tim Cronin (28:10)
That’s not what happened. You got a verdict.

What a great result, Jake. That was absolutely fantastic. We’re going to take a break for a minute and we’re going to come back next time and talk about the neck case and verdict that you had. But we’re going to break for now. Thank you for coming on and thank you for agreeing to come on next time. This has been another episode of the jury is out. I’m Tim Cronin. We’ll see you next time.

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