Each Tuesday we issue a new Engle trading card featuring an attorney, trial, or firm from Florida’s Engle progeny tobacco cases. Our exclusive cards provide a light-hearted way to track important statistics throughout this landmark tobacco litigation.

Card # 6: Todd McPharlin

As we highlighted last week, ensuring a jury understands a suit’s narrative is one of the key goals of a trial’s opening statement and is a critical component to building a winning case. However, when the events and relationships underlying a suit are particularly complex, as is often the case with lawsuits against insurers, breaking down the narrative into a clear, cogent storyline can be difficult. In openings of Meyer v. Health Plan of Nevada, Robert Eglet, representing plaintiffs in a suit against their HMO, combines a descriptive timeline and eye-popping details in illustrate his claim that the HMO was responsible for the insureds contracting hepatitis C.

Each Friday we highlight the week's Engle progeny cases, examine their importance in the larger scope of the litigation, and look ahead to next week.

Each Tuesday we issue a new Engle trading card featuring an attorney, trial, or firm from Florida’s Engle progeny tobacco cases. Our exclusive cards provide a light-hearted way to track important statistics through years of this landmark tobacco litigation.

John Walker, of Jones Day's Atlanta office has represented R.J. Reynolds in the trials since 2010. Click here for a larger version of his card.

If you're a plaintiff's attorney in a personal injury case, it's critical that your jury understands the circumstances of the accident at the heart of the case from your point of view. Visual aids such as photographs and computer simulations can help highlight the events that caused the accident. But, as Marc Howard showed in his opening statement of McCray v. Ming Xuan Inc, sometimes the most effective way to explain an accident is to reenact it yourself.