Just Verdicts

Don’t ask prospective jurors if they hate lawsuits; you won’t learn anything about them. Don’t talk about damages early on; you’ll only rub them the wrong way. And don’t make rules like, “I never have ‘X’ on a jury”; you could waste a peremptory strike on a potentially great juror.

Renowned jury consultant Harry Plotkin, of Your Next Jury, has seen plaintiffs’ lawyers make these mistakes and others through over two decades of mastering the art of jury selection. In this conversation with host Brendan Lupetin, Harry offers solutions and insights on everything from an effective opening to the pitfalls of choosing jurors based on factors like gender, age, ethnicity, or jobs.

Harry and leading trial lawyer Dan Kramer are co-hosting a new podcast, “Picking Justice.” Tune in on Amazon Music, Apple, Audible, iHeartRadio, Pandora, PocketCasts, and Spotify.

☑️ Harry Plotkin | LinkedIn | Instagram

☑️ Your Next Jury 

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

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• Harry’s path to being a jury consultant began more than two decades ago with his background in psychology.
• Why Harry focuses on personal injury, employment, and product cases: “I do love doing victim-related cases and getting justice for the small guy.”
• Harry has seen lawyers make many mistakes over the years, but this one is the most common. It starts with “I have this rule…”
• Why Harry doesn’t like any opening that starts with “This case is about …” and the style he prefers instead.
• When to talk about damages and harms? At the end. Harry explains why.
• The significance of asking the jury to hold a defendant “fully accountable.”
• Harry’s strategy with mini-openings: Suck out all the good facts, leave jurors with the bad ones. Give generalities, and your jurors will be hyperfocused on them.
• When a child is involved, the plaintiff’s lawyer should lean not on sympathy but instead ask jurors to use their judgment, Harry suggests.

Ready to refer or collaborate on med mal, medical negligence, and catastrophic injury cases? Visit our attorney referral page at PAMedMal.com/Refer. We handle cases in Pennsylvania and across the United States.

The gods gave Clancy Boylan and his team at Morgan & Morgan a few gifts in their case against a truck driver and his employer. Clancy’s client was riding his mountain bike across a road when the truck hit him, leaving him with catastrophic injuries.

One gift was the defense’s tone-deaf examination of Clancy’s client. Another was Clancy catching a trooper’s inaccurate testimony about his client. Tune in as Clancy breaks down the case with host Brendan Lupetin. It went to trial after the insurance company offered $500,000. It ended with the jury’s gift of $29 million.

☑️ Clancy Boylan | LinkedIn | Facebook | Email | Cell

☑️ Morgan & Morgan | LinkedIn | Facebook | X | YouTube | Instagram

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

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• Background of Heath Wilson v. Donald Beiler and JM Lapp Plumbing & Heating, LLC, in which Clancy won $29 million for his catastrophically injured client.
• Physics hasn’t changed since the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head. Clancy’s accident reconstruction revealed the physics of the accident.
• Clancy has theories about why the insurance company offered $500,000, including the fact that the trial was held in a conservative Pennsylvania county.
• How Clancy came back from potentially damaging – and inaccurate – testimony that his client was cited for violating a Pennsylvania motor vehicle code.
• Clancy built the case around taking responsibility and emphasized evidence and facts in his opening.
• How the client’s girlfriend set the tone for trial as Clancy’s first witness.
• The framework for Clancy’s closing came to him at 4:30 a.m. that morning.
• How Clancy passed the burden of damages for his client to the jury.

Tom Bosworth and Ben Phelps, of Bosworth Law, took calculated risks in their case against a staffing company and the driver it hired, who was taking employees of a potato chip factory to work when his van rolled over in a downpour. Several workers were injured or killed.

They did not, for example, call an expert on economic damages. Nor did they put their clients on the stand.

In this case analysis with host Brendan Lupetin, Tom and Ben outline why those strategies and others worked. The jury awarded a total of $15 million in damages to the three plaintiffs. They also detail challenges, including the staffing company filing for bankruptcy and its owner suing the insurance company, claiming fraud. Tom’s team has separate claims against the insurance company in federal court. And while they did settle with the factory, they pursued trial against the staffing company when it repeatedly refused to accept responsibility. 

☑️ Tom Bosworth | LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok 

☑️ Ben Phelps | LinkedIn | Instagram 

☑️ Bosworth Law | LinkedIn | Facebook

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

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• Background of Brown v. Global Solutions, in which Tom and Ben represented three victims of a rollover crash.
• Tom and Ben refused to give up when the insurance carrier for the staffing company that employed the van’s driver argued that its coverage included an “auto exclusion” – “which is insane because the only thing that this company did was drive people in automobiles.”
• The plot twist that sent Tom to bankruptcy court.
• How Tom and Ben navigated the “thorny” personal backgrounds of their clients when seeking damages.
• How Ben countered the defense argument that it wasn’t abnormal for the van driver to change lanes.
• Why the jury never heard that the driver pled guilty to a summary offense of reckless driving.
• How the team used the “tip of the iceberg” analogy when asking the jury to consider damages.
• How the jury’s $15 million award broke down for the plaintiffs.

Cheryl Pschirer was a lifetime smoker, at the end of her working life, adult children, no surviving spouse. “So some of the facts were stacked against us,” recalls Rudy Massa. “We had to, in essence, try to make this case about something more than that, and that’s where the early detection and the lost chance of life comes in.” 

Rudy and Devyn Lisi took St. Clair Hospital providers to trial for their failure to inform Cheryl that an x-ray had detected a mass on her lung. She wouldn’t learn of the radiology report for seven months. Eight months later, she died of lung cancer at age 66.

With host Brendan Lupetin, Rudy and Devyn discuss how they overcame defense attempts to blame Cheryl for her smoking history and arguments that, regardless of the delay, nothing would have changed the outcome for her. They read from their powerful pre-trial statement and closing. The jury responded by awarding a $750,000 verdict.

☑️ Rudy Massa | LinkedIn

☑️ Devyn Lisi | LinkedIn

☑️ Massa Butler Giglione & Dirlam | LinkedIn | Facebook  

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

☑️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

• Rudy believes the pre-trial statement should provide the judge with the essence of the story in the most economical language possible.
• Background of Pschirer v. St. Clair Hospital, in which 66-year-old Cheryl Pschirer died after a delayed lung cancer detection.
• How the “battle of the experts” turned into victim blaming because Cheryl had smoked for years.
• Rudy and Devyn argued that the emergency doctor and the hospital had a duty to inform Cheryl directly of the x-ray showing a mass in her lung. While the results were faxed to her primary doctor, “that duty doesn’t just go away.”
• The big role that personal choice played in voir dire.
• Sometimes, the blind squirrel can find a nut: that happened when an expert witness called the defendants’ behavior indefensible. 
• Rudy’s closing began like this: “As for the amount of damages, I’d like to talk to you a bit about that. So, what is the chance to live worth?”
• Two juror questions sent different signals to the team – one negative, the other positive.
• How Devyn pushed back on the primary care physician’s testimony that “I can’t say one way or another” if early diagnosis is good for treating cancer.

Dominic Guerrini of Kline & Specter discusses the $7.1 million verdict he recently secured for a young woman rendered legally blind after a radiologist misread a CT scan image. With host Brendan Lupetin, Dominic breaks down how he managed the case with multiple defendants, why he decided not call the defendant radiologist to testify, and how consultants prepped his client for testifying. Among other strategies, they had the 23-year-old woman write a letter to younger self to prepare herself for what eventually unfolded. Dominic read the letter at trial. “It was one of the most moving pieces of evidence that I have ever had,” he says.

☑️ Dominic Guerrini | LinkedIn

☑️ Kline & Specter | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook  

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

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• Dominic’s journey started at Kline & Specter three months into his legal career. “It’s been a wonderful ride.”
• The firm’s founders, Tom Kline and Shanin Specter, influenced Dominic with their own styles: Shanin taught the value of preparation; Tom taught the art of presentation.
• Great advice: A paralegal once suggested that Dominick smile more in the courtroom to show jurors his true self. “Years later, that has stuck with me.”
• Background of Mitchell v. AHN Saint Vincent Hospital, in which Dominic won a jury verdict of $7.1 million for his client who was rendered legally blind after a radiologist misread a CT scan image.
• How Dominic used sound bites of themes and theories for the jury to repeat so they stuck.
• When it came to trial, the radiologist and hospitalists threw off the gloves and the finger-pointing started. “And, obviously, when you have defendants who are pointing the finger at one another, it’s our best day.”
• How Dominic countered the defense “comparative fault” argument that his client bore some responsibility because she didn’t return to the hospital for three days as her vision worsened.
• Why Dominic leaned on consultants to help his client – in a cross between therapy and trial preparation – before she took the stand.
• How jurors broke down the verdict: 90% for the defendant and 10% for Dominic’s client.

When David Kwass represented the estate of a golf pro who was killed during a fierce storm that swept through the Philmont Country Club, he faced at least three significant hurdles. Was Justin Riegel’s infant, born out of wedlock to Justin’s girlfriend, really his heir? Who was Justin’s employer? And was an “act of God” responsible for the storm?

But the biggest question David faced was how could an 83-foot-tall, 36,000-pound tree – the tree that killed Justin when it toppled onto a cart storage building where he was sheltering during the storm – be both healthy and hazardous?

Tune in as David joins host Brendan Lupetin for a behind-the-scenes look at how he navigated all these challenges to secure a $9.1 million verdict.  

☑️ David Kwass | LinkedIn

☑️ Saltz Mongeluzzi Bendesky

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

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• David’s focus on catastrophic injury, wrongful death, and construction accidents, especially those involving a crane or large equipment tipping over.
• When he worked on the defense side, David was a “square peg in a round hole.”
• Background of Hannon v. Concert Golf Management, in which David represented the estate of golf pro Justin Riegel, who was killed when a tree fell at the club where he worked. 
• David’s legal theory in the case: The tree that fell during the storm should have been removed before the storm hit and the club’s weather preparedness program should have been more robust.
• The issue that a focus group outlined and that David hadn’t expected: Was Justin Riegel the father of his girlfriend’s infant, born just weeks after the accident? 
• The other complicating issue: Who actually controlled the club where the accident occurred?
• How David’s team prevailed on the issue of who employed Justin Riegel.
• Was the storm that felled the tree an “act of God”? David’s team prevailed in getting “act of God” off the verdict form.
• The biggest problem: The tree was healthy. How to convey that a tree can be both healthy and a hazard?

Despite challenges including an absent plaintiff, an expert witness’ last-minute withdrawal, and a death certificate identifying Covid as the cause of death, Reza Davani secured a $1.5 million verdict for pain and suffering. In this conversation with host Brendan Lupetin, Reza shares how he exposed the nursing home’s negligence that led to the death of a patient – not from Covid, but rather from staff’s failure to properly turn the patient in his bed, which caused pressure wounds. Reza discusses how he centered his strategic opening and closing on principles of right and wrong and how he trusted the jury to use their common sense when presented with the facts. 

☑️ Reza Davani | LinkedIn | Phone

☑️ KBA Attorneys | LinkedIn | Instagram | X

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

☑️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

• Reza’s path from mass torts to lead exposure to his current focus: nursing home cases.
• Why Reza enjoys mining documents to secure victory in nursing home cases 
• How documents often reveal the true story that Reza wants to tell
• How Reza ensures that the defense steps on its own landmines
• Background of Nelson Anderson v. Alice Manor, in which a jury awarded Reza’s client $1.5 million for pain and suffering based on the death of a patient
• Reza’s litany of woes: the death certificate that identified Covid as the cause, the out-of-state plaintiff who couldn’t attend trial, the lack of pictures of the injury, the wound expert who failed to show
• How Reza leveraged staff’s assessments that proved the patient was in pain
• Reza’s strategy of giving the jury the facts, and letting them use their common sense
• The question Reza asks himself when crafting his opening: DoI have an explanation for what happened and why? If he doesn’t, “the story sucks.”
• Why Reza focuses his closing on what is right and wrong rather than evidence

Almost 6,000 pounds of copper wire falls on a railroad electrician, causing debilitating personal injuries. Defendant Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority admits liability. The catch? The injuries aren’t clearly visible, and the defense leans into this. How does the plaintiff’s lawyer convey the catastrophic extent of the injuries to the jury and go on to win a $15 million verdict?

In this episode of Just Verdicts, Daniel Purtell, founding partner of McEldrew Purtell, tells host Brendan Lupetin how he did just that, using the defense’s strategy against it to prevail.

Tune in as Brendan and Daniel discuss how to frame the jury’s damages paradigm and reframe the defense’s surveillance video theory. They also share strategies for harnessing the power of focus groups and offer a bonus mini masterclass on building a firm business for maximum growth.

☑️ Daniel Purtell | LinkedIn

☑️ McEldrew Purtell | LinkedIn | Facebook |X| Instagram

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

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• Daniel’s mini masterclass on turbocharging a personal injury firm’s growth
• How Daniel uses referrals, and just referrals, to grow his firm
• The power of delegating to add value to the practice
• Breaking down the firm’s $15 million win for William Meszaros against the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) 
• How Daniel conveyed the severity of a non-diagnostic injury to carry the day
• Turning around the defense’s attempt to use surveillance videos to show the plaintiff was uninjured by juxtaposing it against all the dead footage conveying that plaintiff was incapacitated 
• Using the “Man in the Black Suit” argument model effectively at closing
• The art of persuading a jury as it considers damages
• Using data studies in settlement positions
• Achieving “phenomenal success” with focus groups

“Come and get me! Come and get me!” That’s what the 34-year-old man suffering from a mental health breakdown told state troopers responding to his family’s call for help.

At least that’s what one of the troopers testified during cross-examination in federal court. Attorney Noah Geary brought civil rights claims against the trooper, arguing that he used excessive force when he fatally shot Anthony Gallo during that tragic encounter in 2017. 

In this unique episode of Just Verdicts, Noah and host Brendan Lupetin dramatically re-enact the exchange between Noah and the trooper, Chad Weaver. 

“When did you come up for the first time with this new claim that Gallo said, ‘Come get me! Come get me!’” Noah says, reading from the transcript.

“Uh, just the other day,” says Brendan, reading for Weaver.  

Tune in to hear details of this case, including the roadblocks that Noah overcame to a $21 million verdict. 

☑️ Noah Geary | LinkedIn | Email    

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

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• Why Rule 12, qualified immunity, poses a challenge for plaintiffs’ lawyers in civil rights cases 
• Factors motivating the increasing rate of excessive force by police 
• The constitutional basis for civil rights claims
• Noah’s case against a state trooper who fatally shot Anthony Gallo as he was going through a mental health breakdown
• The “total sham” of a coroner’s inquest and the “nauseating” state police investigation
• What the defendant’s state police personnel file revealed about his behavior
• “This guy's going to kill somebody”: Four women reported their fears about the defendant after a disturbing interaction with him nine days before the Gallo killing.
• Noah’s opening: “I let it all hang out.”
• Noah’s message to the jury on punitive damages: “Folks, this is a death case.”

Gasoline is refined from crude oil that contains benzene, a known carcinogen, but oil companies have long considered removing benzene from the gasoline manufacturing process a “dollars-and-cents” decision. Jurors considering whether ExxonMobil’s gasoline caused a Pennsylvania man’s leukemia made this decision: $725.5 million for the plaintiff.

Andrew DuPont, partner at Locks Law Firm, won that verdict by framing his argument as ExxonMobil’s failure to warn consumers about benzene’s health hazards, even though its dangers were known by the time his client was using gasoline as a solvent to clean automotive parts in the 1970s. Breaking down complex scientific evidence in a way that would stick with the jury, Andrew fended off ExxonMobil’s defense that “gasoline’s not benzene, gasoline doesn’t cause cancer.” Tune in to hear Andrew share his successful strategy with host Brendan Lupetin.

☑️ Andrew J. DuPont | LinkedIn | Email

☑️ Locks Law Firm on Facebook | LinkedIn | X | YouTube

☑️ Brendan Lupetin | LinkedIn

☑️ Lupetin & Unatin, LLC

☑️ Connect: Facebook | LinkedIn | YouTube

☑️ Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

• The history behind benzene and its link to cancer
• How defendants try to distract jurors in cases involving benzene exposure
• How the oil and gasoline industry protects profits over people
• The background of Andrew’s case against ExxonMobil and his $725 million verdict
• How Andrew leveraged ExxonMobil’s “significant mistake” in its opening statement