Winning Trial Strategies: Top Tips for Defendants in Presenting Complex Scientific Principles to a Jury

You’ve toiled for years developing and litigating defenses for your client, a defendant in a product liability or toxic tort case involving complex scientific concepts. After all the discovery and briefing, you’ve finally made it to trial. You’ve mastered countless documents, prepared your fact and expert witnesses, and you know the science is on your side.

You rise to present your opening statement and explain to the jury how the science supports your client’s case — and you see their eyes start to glaze over and lids get heavy the moment you first mention “micrograms per meter cubed” or “standardized incidence ratio” or “differential etiology.” The key scientific issues — the very ones that should win your case — are going over the jury’s head!

The scenario outlined above grows increasingly common and more challenging in a world where science evolves and impacts our daily lives by leaps and bounds at a breakneck speed, and where jurors obtain their news in tweets and headlines and 90-second online videos.

Complex scientific issues, however, are frequently outcome determinative for the defendant in a variety of personal injury cases and often key to winning a case. Effective use of the following strategies, among others, will help you make your key scientific arguments in a persuasive and accessible manner, and also avoid juror confusion and malaise.