Defense Strategies for Preventing Massive Verdicts: Countering Reptile Theory, Anchoring, Large Number Bias
Course Details
- smart_display Format
On-Demand
- signal_cellular_alt Difficulty Level
- work Practice Area
Personal Injury and Med Mal
- event Date
Wednesday, March 1, 2023
- schedule Time
1:00 p.m. ET./10:00 a.m. PT
- timer Program Length
90 minutes
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This 90-minute webinar is eligible in most states for 1.5 CLE credits.
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The CLE webinar will provide practical techniques for overcoming the factors driving outsized and disproportionate verdicts in personal injury cases. The program will discuss how to address jury desensitization regarding inflated numbers and value, overcoming the jury's desire to punish, ways to countervail jury outrage, and how to persuade plaintiffs to recognize risk.
Mr. Gurbach is a diversified trial attorney that represents individuals and corporations in complex business litigation and product liability disputes across a variety of industries. He has extensive experience litigating high-stakes matters for both plaintiffs and defendants involving alleged trade secret misappropriation, intellectual property disputes, business torts, covenants not to compete, as well as claims related to breaches of contract, transportation and logistics, and product liability. Mr. Gurbach's product liability cases have involved a wide variety of products including, industrial machinery, recreational products, consumer products, and toxic torts.
Dr. Marinakis has 19 years of jury research, study, and applied practice in law and psychology. With homes in Los Angeles and Baltimore, she has assisted trial counsel during jury selection and with daily trial monitoring in venues across the country, helping clients obtain defense verdicts in notoriously difficult jurisdictions including New York, Baltimore, Miami, St. Louis, Oakland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and San Francisco.
Both the number of cases and the size of verdicts in personal injury litigation have increased at an exponential rate over the past decade. These are not simply large verdicts for significant and serious injuries, but gargantuan dollar amounts that dwarf reasonable compensation. The defense bar seems to agree on the factors and trends driving this increase but need to develop consistently effective solutions.
All of these trends and factors appear in each case and work in tandem to produce irrational and outsized verdicts. One particular challenge is that plaintiff's counsel, not the plaintiff, generates these conditions, while defense counsel must work through defense witnesses to overcome them.
Listen as this experienced panel discusses deposition and trial techniques for dealing with some of the most common trends and factors leading to extreme verdicts.
- Reptile theory
- Anchoring and adjustment
- Large number bias
- Availability heuristic
The panel will discuss these and other critical issues:
- How can counsel teach deponents to avoid answering reptile questions in absolute terms?
- How can counsel identify those jurors most susceptible to reptile logic and bias?
- How can defense counsel remove the plaintiff's anchor?
- How can counsel keep jurors from focusing on high number verdicts they hear in the news?
