Emphasizing the Important Exhibits for the Jury

A lawyer I frequently practice with offers this tip. In trials with hundreds of exhibits, the jury will understandably have a difficult time sorting them out during deliberation and might even ignore them entirely. If you want to make sure they see the ones you consider most important, gather these into a stack and hold them up during your closing arguments. Tell the jury something like this: "Here are the the exhibit we think are the most important. I'm going to set them here on the rail. If you want to look at them later, ask for the stack of exhibits I set on the rail."

If you know the trial judge is going to send all the exhibits with the jury to the deliberation room, modify the procedure accordingly.

Comments

[Beldar]

Ditto what Evan said.

In fact, it's sometimes effective to pose a challenge to the jurors in your closing argument when you know there's some juicy tidbit in a document that hasn't yet been brought out to the jury during the trial:

"And if you don't look at a single other exhibit when you get back in the jury room, please, please look at page 26 of Plaintiff's Exhibit 8. Please read for yourselves what Nurse Smith wrote about Mr. Jones' explanation at the time for why his wheelchair went down the stairwell. And then you can discuss among yourselves exactly what those lines mean on the subject of who's tellin' you the truth and who's blowin' smoke!"

Even if your opponent has the chance to speak after you, by trying to respond about that particular exhibit or those particular lines in it, he's reinforcing your pitch and heightening the jurors' curiosity.

[Robert Williamson]

Outstanding post...and outstanding comment by Beldar. They fit well with David Ball's suggestion that the attorney's arm the jurors leaning his client's way with the information they need to sway neutral or recalcitrant jurors to their side.

[YGB]

Another thing I've seen people do is to make a large demonstrative (seeral foot long and high foam core boards) and move it into evidence. These can be demonstratives summarizing support for elements of a claim which identifies key source exhibits by claim element (I've seen these used in patent cases for infringement "claim charts") or, perhaps a summary damages chart breaking out components of a damages claim, particularly in a sort of balance sheet type format. If these are of a sufficient size, when sent into the jury room, the hope is that their sheer size relative to 8.5 x 11 pages will make them easy for the jury to find and use to convince other jurors.