Emphasizing Important Exhibits for the Jury, Part 2

Following up on a previous post, I want to pass along another tip I heard recently from a lawyer who has tried many document-intensive cases.

In cases in which exhibits are numbered before trial--most document-intensive cases, in other words--there won't be any requirement that documents be received into evidence in the order that they are numbered. This means that you order and mark exhibits in whatever order you want.

How can you use this to emphasize your best exhibits to the jury? If the jury will be taking the exhibits with them to the jury room after the trial is over, Exhibit 1 should be the document you most want the jury to see. It will be on the top of the stack. Exhibit 2 should be the second-most-important document, and so on, through at least the first twenty exhibits.

Not a bad idea, but it means that the chief trial lawyer will have to have some input into the task of exhibit-numbering, which in large cases, is often delegated to paralegals or junior associates.
 

Comments

[Joe Bickley]

This is an absolutely wonderful tip. Even in a very documents intensive case there are gong to be a handful of critical documents the embody the theme of your trial. Put these at the juror's fingertips.

I think a chief trail lawyer should care enough about the case to be involved at this stage, and certainly every litigation firm should cultivate a culture that says trial preparation begins at day one. How else do you make trial lawyers out of junior associates if they are not thinking about the case?

[YGB]

Nearly all the cases I've been to trial on have involved well over 100 documents per side on the pretrial exhibit list, though not all were ultimately admitted into evidence. The difficulty is, as noted above, having the important exhibit not be lost in the mass of exhibit taken into the jury room. One technique I have seen used to good effect is to create demonstratives, large foam core boards for example, that are "blow-ups" of key documents or portions of those documents, or key summaries of documents such as a damages calculation summary. The large boards are hard to lose and hard to ignore (a brooding omnipresence in the jury room?). Moreover, they may serve as a useful device for jurors to present and make points clear to the other jurors during discussions in the jury room. The creation of demonstratives also provides an opportunity to emphasize certain aspects of documents through devices such as highlighting.