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Criminal proceedings are beginning to reopen Florida’s courtroom doors a little wider, with more counties across the state summoning jurors and holding in-person trials, more than five months after COVID-19 emptied the state’s jury boxes. 

Medical causation is a key battle line in many tobacco trials, but the complex medical evidence at issue can overwhelm jurors if not properly presented. However, Jack Williams’s straightforward, compelling closing on a smoker’s cancer diagnosis helped clear R.J. Reynolds in retrial of a case that had delivered a $23.6 billion verdict against the tobacco giant in its first time before a jury.

Asbestos cases often turn on a paper trail as the most reliable evidence at trial, where memories of potential exposure and their sources from decades earlier can be hazy. Todd Suddleson used such a paper trail as the key to a strong closing argument that helped clear CertainTeed in a $5M-plus asbestos trial in 2018. Francisco Herrera v. CertainTeed Corp., CV2014-09632.

Joseph Wilson, of JL Wilson Trial Law, contends Loomis Armored delayed in admitting responsibility for the armored truck crash that fractured Kirche Hall's arm.

This is part of CVN's Trial Stories, spotlighting top lawyers and their standout trials.

“This is a case about a young woman who has a caregiver’s heart, but no longer has a caregiver’s future,” Joseph Wilson told jurors as trial opened over the armored truck crash that shattered a Georgia woman’s arm. 

It was a theme intended to resonate with jurors as they saw Kirche Hall, whose injury ended her career as a certified nursing assistant. But it also set up a larger contrast Wilson framed for the jury: the empathetic caregiver v. the evasive corporation. And that approach secured a $584,000 verdict in the type of case — because Hall had largely recovered from her injury — that carried the possibility of a much lower award.

Screen shot of proceedings in Griffin v. Albanese Enterprise Inc. Click here to watch the proceeding.

Jacksonville, FL— In another time, August’s roughly $354,000 award in a Florida battery trial may not have made a ripple in the news. Though the case's details were grim, an exotic dancer beaten by a pair of bouncers after being thrown partially clothed onto a cold nighttime street, the trial and its result would likely have been buried among the thousands of verdicts delivered by juries across the country before the coronavirus pandemic.

But this $354,000 verdict, handed down over Zoom video conference, made national headlines for what it represented. In a state especially ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic and where jury boxes have sat empty for months, that $354,000 award, believed to be the nation’s first binding verdict in a fully remote, state court jury trial, represented a pioneering return of civil jury proceedings during the coronavirus age.