. When you are faced with handling a case with major personal injuries, a different approach from a less serious damage case should be considered. Among the many issues involved in major damage cases, here are a few basic rules I followed. Not every lawyer uses the same approach, but here are the fundamentals that worked well for me. My first rule in major damage cases was to apply Shakespeare’s advice: “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to…
. . . One September morning in 1959 Skagit County’s only two superior court judges, Charles Stafford and Arthur Ward, administered my taking the oath to become a brand new lawyer. Also taking the oath was David Welts. There weren’t more than thirty-five lawyers in the county and less than 3,000 in the whole state. The practice of law wasn’t very complicated at that time. The state statutes fit in two binders compared with the volumes of law today….
Most attorneys who work in civil litigation are familiar with the “anchoring effect,” and know that suggesting a number has an influence on damages. Numerous studies have shown that the amount of a juror’s damages decision is strongly affected by the number suggested by the plaintiffs’ attorney, independent of the strength of the actual evidence. Research has repeatedly demonstrated that, independent of the evidence, asking for more in trial raises the chance of getting more on the verdict form. And the…