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Lessons Learned at Trial
By: Jordan Butler

Samantha Sweeney and I recently were given the honor of representing a mother, father and their child at civil jury trial in Vermilion County, Illinois. The case arose from a crash that occurred out on rural intersection. The mother and her daughter were heading home for dinner at the time. They were just .6 miles from their home when they were catastrophically t-boned by a fatigued farmer who blew a stop sign while he was also on his way home for dinner. The impact between the vehicles was so severe it knocked our clients’ vehicle onto its side and into a nearby ditch. The mother who was driving the vehicle was instantly rendered unconscious. Her 8-year-old daughter however remained very much awake and oriented to her surroundings. The child sat in the overturned vehicle scared, alone and screaming for several minutes for her mother to wake up. Eventually, her mother did wake up, but she would never be the same person again. Both the mother and her daughter were rushed to the local hospital. The mother had sustained a number of injuries including a closed head injury and a sternum fracture. Within a few weeks following the collision, she also began to experience intractable cervicogenic headaches. The defense disputed not only liability but also the causal relation of the client’s headaches to the subject motor vehicle collision.

From November of 2015 until her trial in October of 2021, our client received hundreds of trigger point and Emgality injections as well as consistently took a constant regimen of various medications to manage her ongoing cervicogenic and migraine headaches.

At the time of trial, the mother’s medical bills totaled $43,757.00. She was certain to incur future medical expenses as her providers opined with medical certainty that she would need monthly trigger point injections and Emgality injections every twenty-six days. The doctors testified that one appointment for trigger point injections cost the mother $377.00 and a single Emgality injection retailed at $1,355.99. The defense’s last offer prior to trial was $65,000.00.

The weekend before the trial was set to start, defense counsel pulled an audible and stipulated to liability thereby leaving the extent of the damages as the only remaining triable issue in the case. Three days and ten witnesses later, the jury found for our clients awarding a global verdict of $257,348.00.

Lessons Learned

1. If liability is still an issue in your case, have an alternative trial strategy in place in the event that the defense pulls an audible on the eve of trial.
2. If your trial involves future medical expenses, determine which of your client’s medical providers best explains the issues in simple terms to laypersons then collaborate with them to present compelling testimony of future damages via demonstratives, medical bills, and life-expectancy tables that can be recognized by judicial notice.
3. Get comfortable being uncomfortable, believe in yourself and give it your all. As a newer attorney, you’ll undoubtedly be faced with situations at trial and in preparing for trial that you’ve never encountered before. Embrace those situations fully and head-on to develop into the absolute best trial attorney you can be. If you believe in yourself and work as hard as you can for your clients, you’ll walk away from the trial with a tremendous learning experience regardless of the outcome.