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Continued > Page 6 - Lessons from LA Law

6. Limit yourself to a maximum of 30 minutes for opening statement, no matter how complex the case. If you think you can't do this, it's because you haven't taken enough time to distill the case down to the key facts.

Trial lawyers are familiar with the use of videotape and liability and damages presentations. I put this venerable tool to another use in the Washburn case: sorting out evidence most essential to maintain a dramatic pace and persuading jurors. I had my cameraman videotape all liability and damages witnesses and give me the preliminary edit and transcript. I then edited and re-edited the video down to the most powerful and persuasive lines. You get a completely different perspective on your case when you view it on a video monitor. I ended up with a 45 minute synopsis of the case - 20 minutes on liability and 25 on damages.

The results of this process radically transformed my view of the case. The 45 minute tape was paced like a TV program, albeit not as polished. This distillation said it all and said it well. Why, then, should I take weeks of the jury's time to try this case? All I really needed was on the tape. This gave me a very helpful perspective on what points were the most persuasive and how to pace the testimony to maintain a high level of audience involvement.

I also showed the expert witnesses their edited performances which crystallized exactly what information I wanted to elicit from each. This demonstrated how to streamline their testimony far better than any purely verbal coaching could have done. The experts saw themselves on the TV screen making points in a concise edited way that would be the most instructive to the jury.

I did not try the case in 45 minutes, but working with the videotape preview did help me complete it in four days - far short of the time it would have taken otherwise.

Occasionally I worried about cutting out too much information and coming up short in the juror's eyes. It was a risk. For example, I did not use an economist, but just put in Mrs. Washburn's testimony about what her husband had earned before the injury.

As another example, I put on an engineering expert for only 30 minutes. Another plaintiff's lawyer in a companion case out of the same explosion that hurt Norm Washburn, had spent five hours on the same engineer. I decided to cut out all scientific explanations by this expert: despite their soundness, they bored me after I switched perspective from a " lawyer" to a "consumer".