Last week, the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA) put on a full one-day mock trial in San Francisco in front of a large gathering of attorneys to show how the masters of trial do their trade. The mock trial turned out to be a fascinating study in contrasts between the plaintiff and defense in terms of style—both very good, but very different—and offered lessons for trial attorneys. The opening statement, which I’ll focus on here, boiled down to the iPad vs. the yellow legal pad. Read the rest of this entry »

In the same way that tax laws start off simple and get much more complicated over time, the process of figuring out what a plaintiff in a personal injury case actually receives after a verdict keeps getting ever more complicated.

Fear not—this article provides a downloadable Excel sheet that calculates all the values for you by simply putting in the total award amounts, percentages of fault and lien amounts. Read the rest of this entry »