In the final episode of the first season of Ted Lasso, the Apple TV comedy starring Jason Sudeikis as an American football coach turned English Premier soccer coach, Ted tells the team that in order to beat Man City, they have to try something new, and that meant pulling out every trick play the players had ever come up with, in order to create “chaos and confusion.” Ted summarized that they were going to hit Man City with the “Chaos Hammer!” Besides providing an opportunity to reference my favorite show of all time, the “chaos hammer” made me think about

As a die-hard Seahawk fan, I have little trouble finding ways to ridicule other teams, but boy did the Detroit Lions make it easy for me the other day. Spot it? When you’re already one of the worst teams in the NFL, advertising it with a giant “L” for your logo doesn’t make a lot of sense.  It begs the question, who thought this was a good idea and why didn’t anyone stop them? There were probably a couple of factors at play, and those same factors could be contributing to poor decisions and outcomes like this one in your

“If you end up saying to yourself, I just don’t know, but it might be, then we’ve met our burden.” While I’ve listened to both plaintiff and defense attorneys frame their take on the burden of proof for years, this one made me go “hmmmm.” While the feather on the scale and the claim that you only need to be one tiny decimal point above 50% to vote for the plaintiff are tried and true plaintiff framing devices, this one struck me differently. I realized it was the additional phrase, “I just don’t know.” If you stop at that point,

Lately, we have been doing a lot of reading and writing about emerging “anti-fact” or “anti-expert” views and their impact on trial practice.  As we have discussed in previous blogs, people are much more inclined than in the past to use their own experiences as the only evidence needed for how the world works and the truth or falsity of particular events. A research article in the Journal of Political Psychology took this finding one step further and compared one’s willingness to accept scientific evidence to their political ideology. In a nutshell, conservatives were more likely to hold less favorable

I never thought when I had Colin Cowherd’s The Herd on as a much needed distraction from all the political news, that there’d be a litigation strategy gem. Cowherd was interviewing Matthew McConaughey about his recent memoir, Greenlight, when they had an interesting exchange about the process McConaughey uses when working with writers/producers on a new project. Here’s a bit of the exchange:  Cowherd began, “Years ago I thought about writing a screenplay, so I read a book about it called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder and he says to name the film before you start writing it; because

During a recent mock trial, when a juror expressed an opinion that was directly refuted by the evidence in the case and a few other jurors tried to tell him that he was wrong, two other jurors shut them down by asserting, “No, come on, let him talk; he has a right to his opinion.” This is not an isolated incident. Over the years, we’ve heard mock jurors express this sentiment, but over the last couple of years, it is much more obvious and impactful. While we’ve frequently written about the fact that jurors make sense of a case by

“Six months into the pandemic, trial-by-video-jury – at least in the civil context – is beginning to morph from experiment to expectation. And while lawyers aren’t totally sold on the concept, a growing chorus of judges is making it clear that it may be the only way to keep their dockets moving” (Law.com). Clearly, with the Coronavirus continuing to ravage the country, the need to explore and utilize other options for civil trials is necessary. And, while there have been several “successful” Zoom trials, there have also been dozens of legitimate concerns and questions raised about everything from how to