About Marjorie Russell

Marjorie Russell of MARJury Consulting lives in Michigan. She specializes in holistic case development; client, witness, and lawyer preparation; and jury selection. Marjorie has been a law professor for many years. She graduated from Gerry Spence’s first Trial Lawyers College (TLC) class over 25 years ago. Marjorie has been on the faculty of TLC ever since training some of the best lawyers in the country.

About this case

Marjorie discusses a case of a 19-year old man named David who got into a car accident causing two broken wrists and neck and lower back problems. Four years later, he had undergone surgery and his hands were still injured and he was in pain. David was unemployed, living in his parents’ home, and drinking heavily. In depositions, he seemed lazy, greedy, and like he was waiting for a large payout from the accident. David’s lawyer felt the jury would reject him because he could not get David “to talk about himself in a way where he didn’t validate the picture that the defense lawyers wanted to paint.” He called Marjorie to help.

Marjorie tells the story of how she helped turn the situation around for the trial. She says, “I think my best help is connecting with people and helping them feel comfortable fully being themselves, especially about the things that people want to attack them for.” In reality, David was a good person who “had reached a point of hopelessness.” They turned the story around from David as a “bad, irresponsible, horrible person” into a story of David suffering because so much had been taken away from him. In the end, it was a winning trial and “a story of redemption” for David.

Results

Marjorie ends Trial Lawyer Talk with, “That’s my reward. When I see the healing and when I see the confidence. When I know that the lawyer has been able to take what we’ve discovered and make magic with it – that the jurors are lighting up with recognition. They know what that’s about. They understand that kind of struggle and that he did become a hero in his own life. And that is the bottom line for me. I want to know how has the person were helping become a hero in their own life, and how can we show that story?”

Transcript of Episode 61, with Marj Russell

Scott Glovsky:

Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talk. I’m Scott Glovsky. I’m your host for this podcast where we speak with some of the best lawyers in the country. Today, we have a real treat. We have one of the wisest, most thoughtful, and most strategic trial lawyers and trial consultants that I know. Marj Russell is from Michigan. She graduated from the first class of Trial Lawyers College and has been around TLC and teaching ever since.

That’s more than 25 years of honing, discovering the story, connecting with your clients, and really refining the skills that make us credible, genuine, and authentic. Today, Marj is going to share with us really a methodology for how to take the weakest aspects of your case, the ones that keep you up at night, the ones that you’re scared of, and voir dire, and turn those into part of our trial story.

Marj goes into aspects of discovering the story, of connecting with the client, of going to those places that seem the most dangerous, the most scary, and working through those and integrating those into the heart of our case, and then taking those issues and using them in voir dire.

You’re really going to enjoy this episode. There’s a lot of richness and a lot of lessons that Marj provides. So enjoy. And don’t forget, please subscribe to the podcast, I would really appreciate it. And if you could go on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and give us a good rating, because I really want other people to know about what we’re doing because I think these lessons are good for all of us. Let’s get going.

I’m very pleased and humbled and honored to be sitting with Marj Russell. We have a lot of brilliant folks on Trial Lawyer Talk. Marj is absolutely a genius. Marj is a trial consultant who has been a law professor for many years and has trained some of the best lawyers in the United States and is an absolute genius of trial strategy. Thanks for being with us, Marj.

Marj Russell:

Thanks for having me.

Scott Glovsky:

Marj, can you share with us a story of a case that had a profound impact on you?

Marj Russell:

The one I’ve been thinking about is a trial that we did recently within the last several months, and it came to mind because I think it really illustrates for people what I do. I get asked a lot. “What is it that you really do?” And because I work in case development, not just jury selection, it’s really hard for me to figure out how to answer that question. I always feel on the spot.

This case kind of crystallized for me a way to talk about it. I was able to see what really happens with how I approach things. The story is a simple case. A 19-year-old guy gets into a car wreck, and what a plaintiff’s lawyers don’t like to hear and defense lawyers like to say low-impact, or a a minor impact. What does MISD stand for?

Scott Glovsky:

Soft tissue.

Marj Russell:

Soft tissue. Okay. It actually wasn’t really soft tissue. He got broken up worse than that. Both of his wrists were broken and he had neck and lower back problems right away, so all of that did show. Ended up having to have surgery on one of his hands. It’d taken really a long time to kind of get through stages of recovery.

The story of how I get involved in cases most often is that a lawyer will call me and say, I’m really having trouble connecting with this client, or I feel like this client has some really bad stuff in either his behavior or in his history, and I don’t know how to handle it. I can’t quite get the stories out of them. Maybe jurors are going to hate him for it. I don’t know how to put this together in what legally is a good case, and as a matter of the damages is a good case. These things about this guy, or some little aspect of the story, make me afraid that the jurors are just going to get on that and not really see where justices is.

By the time they took depositions in this case, David had reached a low point, and it was about two years after the wreck. He had already had the surgery on his hand and he wasn’t working. He was living at his parents’ house with his girlfriend. He was drinking to excess, seriously to excess, and had reached a point of hopelessness. That’s the plaintiff that the defense lawyer met.

That’s what the plaintiff’s lawyer expected the defense to focus on. We’ve got a kid who got in a wreck and then just decided to go live in mom and dad’s basement, not work, wait for a payday. He wants to hit the lottery, and make him look like he was lazy and greedy and all those things. From what is actually in the deposition record, he looks like that. He really does.

So, when the lawyer called me, he just said, I don’t know what to do because I love this guy, and he’s amazing. He makes himself look bad. I can’t get him to talk about himself in a way where he doesn’t validate the picture that I know the defense lawyers want to paint. So, it’s not just what’s going to happen in cross-examination. It’s what’s going to happen. Even during direct exam. The jurors aren’t going to like him. I’m afraid they’re going to reject him for the things that have happened, and I don’t know what to do because he’s really badly hurt and there’s serious damages. He needs treatments and surgery. They found out that his discs in his lower back were actually torn and it hadn’t been diagnosed properly, or they hadn’t gotten to that stage of things. There wasn’t any error by the doctors. So, we have to take care of him.

We knew that on liability, even though they still hadn’t admitted it, that really was an easy case. Their driver was coming out of a parking lot, trying to cross six lanes of traffic to continue, it was a T-road, to continue on that road. He could see David coming and just went anyway, and David had no way of avoiding hitting him.

Fault was clear. We weren’t worried at all about that part of it. It was really the way we felt jurors would reject him, or at least the lawyer did and said, please, come help. What I’ve discovered is this, it’s kind of the essence of where I think my best help is in the before trial part is connecting with people and helping them feel comfortable, fully being themselves, especially about the things that people want to attack them for.

When they can get to a place where instead of wanting to deny being a forceful woman, for example, they can say, yeah, I am the kind of person that doesn’t want you ordering me around unless you’re my boss. I don’t see anything wrong with that. Instead of going well, I don’t know what you mean, or, you answering back or trying to deny it. If they can relax into it and own it as part of themselves or a piece of behavior. Own it as part of themselves that then when they believe that when they start realizing they don’t have to act like someone else they can actually say yes to everything that’s true about them without having to explain it away, without trying to explain it away, or defend against it. The lawyer sees it then the lawyer relaxes into the idea that we can tell the story that way, and it won’t backfire on us.

Sometimes that’s the harder project. That what’s been happening, is for instance, in this case, the lawyer is afraid of how they’re going to throw dirt at him because there is some truth in it. It’s true that he was living in his parents’ house and not working and drinking to excess, and his girlfriend was living there too. He didn’t get surgery or continue on wit