We Lost at Trial

We're all guilty of it. We know something is wrong. But we minimize or ignore it.

Then something happens that brings it into sharp focus. Nothing's changed. But the reality of the situation can't be ignored or repressed.

President Biden's performance at the debate provides a good example.

For the last X years we've all known that he was either chronologically or metabolically too old to be President of the United States. If not in this term, then certainly for a second term.

We either ignored the truth or pushed it away with justifications and rationalizations. Then the debate brought what we already knew into painfully sharp focus.

The same thing happened to us.

We just finished trying a case. There was an extremely strong correlation between event and injury. But there was a lack of mechanical causation between the event and the injury.

Correlation and causation sound similar. And they have similar meanings. But they don’t mean the same thing.

For the past three years we went through all sorts of machinations to keep the case alive and to repel the defense's efforts to get it dismissed.

We succeeded in getting the case to trial. But we were never going to be able to convince 12 people to believe our causation theory.

It took the jury about an hour to determine that – despite the expert testimony we offered – the event could not have caused the injury.

My ego tells me that we can and will get every case to trial. But that’s a blueprint for self-inflicted injury. If cases have fundamental problems, time, effort and other resources should not be invested in keeping them alive.

Just because a doctor has the ability to keep someone alive, who has no chance of living a satisfying life, doesn't mean that she should do so.

The best thing for everyone in these situations is to acknowledge the reality and allocate resources to some other, more viable objective.

Lesson (hopefully) learned.