John Gismondi has never said to an associate, “You’re just going to work as my caddy for a few years, and then we're going to start to give you your own cases.” That goes for his son JJ. Just four months after JJ passed the bar, he joined his father in representing a 60-year-old woman who suffered a ruptured aneurysm due to a missed diagnosis. In this case breakdown with host Brendan Lupetin, the father-son team reveal how they faced a critical ruling that prevented an ex-defendant’s testimony from being read in – “the tipping point,” as John describes it. “It kept JJ and me up until literally two o'clock.” Tune in to hear how they made it over the tipping point to secure a verdict split equally between the wife's pain and suffering and the husband's loss of consortium.

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• The case involved a 60-year-old woman whose abdominal aortic aneurysm was missed by a radiologist and eventually ruptured.
• The case was tried in Mifflin County, where court personnel informed them that "this was only the second civil trial of any type that had gone to a jury in 12 years."
• The crisis day defendants who delayed transferring the patient and getting her to surgery settled before trial, leaving only the case against the radiologist and his practice.
• The defense radiologist dropped his cross-claim against the vascular surgeon on the morning of trial—a strategic move to prevent the Gismondis from reading in favorable deposition testimony from the vascular surgeon.
• After the judge ruled that the vascular surgeon's deposition testimony couldn't be read in, the Gismondis had to show increased risk of harm based on the radiologist’s testimony.
• The team successfully argued that proof of increased risk provides the factual basis for the jury to determine causation and that the failure to detect an aneurysm was so obvious that expert testimony on causation wasn't required.
• John used innovative technology by having the radiology expert use Zoom's annotation tools with a laptop to walk through CT scan images in real-time, giving the expert complete control and demonstrating exactly how a radiologist would review the images.
• During closing, John focused his liability argument on one word—"coronal"—to emphasize how the defense never addressed the coronal views of the CT scan that would have shown that the aneurysm wasn't a loop of bowel.

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