The initial offer of $250K
Verdict win
Document record to focused voir dire
Russell & Lazarus Trial Attorneys is a catastrophic personal injury firm in Newport Beach, California, handling both pre-litigation and litigation cases, with a focus on trial.
The firm was already using EvenUp to write stronger demand letters and build treatment timelines when it discovered the platform’s power at the voir dire stage.
As a trial firm, they were also looking to incorporate Companion™ into their trial practice to give them that additional edge. They found that opportunity in a premises liability case resulting in significant injuries.
Rather than look for a new tool, Marc Lazarus, managing partner, and trial attorney Eric Wilson turned to the tech the firm already had, EvenUp’s Proactive Personal Injury AI Platform. The EvenUp team Companion™ helped the firm from jury selection through the final days of trial.
The first challenge was jury selection. Preparing for voir dire is hard, and organizing and reviewing prospective juror testimony to determine if they are the right fit for your case is time consuming.
EvenUp was able to help with both. EvenUp’s Companion™ drafted topic outlines and questions that the trial team could review and use, based on EvenUp’s review of the entirety of the evidentiary record, including depositions, discovery responses, and other evidence.
EvenUp also saved an incredible amount of time. The trial team could input the daily transcripts into EvenUp and ask it to summarize juror voir dire responses and even rank prospective jurors by their likely favorability to their case.
In trial, time is the one thing you never have enough of. EvenUp provided outlines and summaries that gave us more of that valuable resource. It’s a game changer.
Eric Wilson
Once the trial started, Wilson and his team uploaded each day’s trial transcripts to Companion™ and asked whether the record showed they had met their burden on the key issues. Companion™ evaluated the evidence in the transcripts and returned an assessment with citations to the relevant testimony; the team described the process as an “electronic focus group.”
The offers kept climbing: The defense had offered $250,000 pre-trial, and upped it to $1 million after closing argument. After a few days of jury deliberation, the offer hit $2 million.
Russell & Lazarus use Companion™ to help evaluate the evidence and analyze the defense’s arguments when deciding whether to push forward to a verdict.
EvenUp’s daily review of the transcripts linked back to the source of every conclusion, making it easy for the attorneys to evaluate the case. In the end, EvenUp’s evidence-based outputs gave the attorneys that valuable, evidenced-based second opinion that told them they were winning over the jury, which gave them the confidence to pass on the $2 million offer and hold out for a verdict.
Instead of trying to negotiate for a smaller amount, we were able to stay with it knowing that we had Companion™ telling us we’ve done our jobs correctly.
Marc Lazarus
The jury returned a $19 million verdict.
EvenUp’s ability to give the trial team that evidence-based analytical second opinion that proactively challenged their assumptions, identified important questions, and kept them grounded in the record. The results demonstrated that this platform has to be an essential part of Russell & Lazarus’s trial preparation and invisible second chair through verdict. The team now uses Companion™ to test its burden-of-proof position and stay focused on the evidence supporting its client’s claim, from voir dire to final outcome.
The partnership is also shaping the product itself. The voir dire skill EvenUp built with Russell & Lazarus is now available to all EvenUp customers in Companion™, so firms everywhere can start their trials with the same advantage.
If you are serious about finding every possible advantage you can realize in preparing and trying a case, EvenUp has to be a part of that equation… It’s not just easier, it's better.
Marc Lazarus
