Trial Magazine

A driver, texting on his phone, runs a red light and sideswipes your client’s vehicle. Your client, a young single mother of two, is catastrophically injured. After more than a year, she hasn’t been able to return to work and has trouble with basic activities, such as walking and driving. During her trial against the driver, you detail her economic damages—medical bills, lost wages, and extra child care costs. But how do you quantify her pain and suffering? Or how her family has been affected? As trial lawyers, we struggle with this all the time.

So how do we weave these issues into the larger narrative and convince jurors why they need to award damages for a defendant’s negligence? The answer is communication. Whether it’s through visual aids or expert testimony, we must convey the lifelong and devastating impact of our clients’ injuries. This month’s issue of Trial offers some ways for us to do that, including Kathleen Flynn Peterson’s guidance on anchoring damages (p. 34) and Howard Nations’s take on communicating with millennial jurors (p. 38).

Just like we communicate our clients’ stories to jurors, AAJ communicates to the public and legislators about the work that we do every day. Now, more than ever, AAJ needs your help to expand its communication plan.

One way you can help AAJ do that is through our voluntary membership assessment. We need broad-based ­support to fund an aggressive digital communications campaign to share the story of what we and the civil justice system do to protect the rights of all Americans. In a time of political uncertainty, communicating our message to the public and to Congress is more important than ever.

I am imploring each member to participate. AAJ members have received correspondence that explains the details of the assessment and asks for a small contribution based on the number of years you have been in practice.

It may not seem like a lot, but collectively, we can help AAJ get our clients’ stories told.

The 2017 digital communications campaign will include social media ­outreach, focus groups, polling and ­message development to reach a broad audience; joining forces with more pro-civil-justice coalition partners; and expanding our efforts at the grassroots level. All these initiatives allow AAJ to intensify its lobbying on the Hill so that our clients—and our practices—will be better protected.

This is not unprecedented. We did it in 2004, when we also faced an anti-civil-justice majority in Congress. During that assessment, the revenue that was raised enabled AAJ to conduct a campaign that helped both to beat back national medical malpractice tort reform bills and to bring public and media attention to preemption in drug and device cases.

We cannot sit on the sidelines with so much at stake—our clients and the very foundation of the civil justice system depend on our action. Please visit www.justice.org/fightback for more information or to donate.

Julie Braman Kane is a partner at Colson Hicks Eidson in Coral Gables, Fla. She can be reached at julie.kane@justice.org.