Mecca Anderson on the 1st-Chair Triumvirate & Rebuttal That Won a $3.5M Verdict in Club Shooting Trial

One of 2017’s headline-grabbing verdicts, for two women injured in a shooting outside an Atlanta-area nightclub, was won on an unusual power structure: a first-chair triumvirate, according to a lead attorney on the case. Canaday v. Jay's Place.

“The lead was really shared among the three of us,” The Cochran Firm’s Mecca Anderson said of her work with co-counsel Peter Brogdon and Omari Crawford. “Prior to the trial, we broke out our responsibilities and pretty much stuck to them from the beginning of trial prep. And we each… ‘first-chaired’ those roles.”

Anderson, Brogdon, and Crawford represented Syria Canaday and Tamika Johnson, injured in a 2012 shooting outside of Jay’s Place, a Stone Mountain, Georgia nightclub. Jurors awarded the pair $3.5 million and found the club 70 percent responsible for injuries they suffered at the hands of a still-unidentified shooter.

The trial was Anderson’s first as a lead attorney and she told CVN the collaborative approach between the three, while unusual, allowed each lawyer to go in-depth into their portion of the case. “All three of us rose to the occasion and brought our A-game, and so that’s why I think the formula for joint leadership worked very well,” Anderson said. “Of course, you’re working so hard and so closely with these people for such a long time, it definitely fosters an amazing relationship, and I would love to try a case with these guys again.”

A key to Anderson’s portion of the case was the closing rebuttal, or close of the close. In it, Anderson hammered the defense, comparing each side’s credibility and arguing the defense team had thrown a range of irrelevant issues at the jurors, such as the club’s responsibilities under the lease, in an effort to distract them.

Much of Anderson’s rebuttal was honed with an eye toward the jury’s in-trial reactions. “I watched the jury like it was a movie with subtitles,” Anderson said. I paid so much attention to them the entire time. I looked at what they noticed, what they believed, what their responses were, when they leaned forward, when they leaned back, what they were bored from, what they were excited about, those kinds of things.

“I used their non-verbal responses to guide what I thought they needed to know more of, [and] I kept that in mind the whole time.”

It was also that in-trial analysis that helped drive several of her team’s themes for case, Anderson said, including comparing the defense’s courtroom conduct with Jay’s Place staff. “My trial partner, Peter Brogdon, is really a fan of the rules of evidence,” Anderson said. “He made a lot of objections throughout the trial. And I thought that it became sort of a sub-storyline. And it fit into the fact that neither the defense counsel nor their clients were [fans] of following the rules, so we were… able to make those links throughout.”

In her rebuttal, Anderson also sharply criticized the defense for breaking what she said was a promise to treat Canaday and Johnson respectfully. It was an argument, Anderson said, she considered from the trial’s first day.  “Our opposing counsel said in her opening statement that our clients were true victims and that neither she nor her client would ever paint them or portray them as anything other than true victims,” Anderson said.  However, “I suspected that wasn’t going to be the case based on her questioning in depositions. And she was pretty aggressive with them on cross, and pretty disparaging of them in her close. And so that needed to be addressed. I think the jury was upset to see that, and I definitely wanted to address that.”

The damage request formed a central pillar of Anderson’s rebuttal, with the decision made long before trial that Crawford would tell the case’s story in his portion of the closing, while Anderson would deal with damages in hers. Anderson said the decision on who made the damage request stemmed in part from how the team’s other responsibilities were divided, including the fact that Anderson would be playing a key role in jury selection. “I knew for a fact going into it that I wanted to be the person to ask the jury for the damages because I was the person who talked to them during jury selection, and got to know them,” Anderson said.  “And, I think that that mattered. To me it would, anyway, as a juror.”

The jury’s award roughly equaled Anderson’s damage request for the two clients. “This result came due to so many things all working well,” Anderson said. “I think all cylinders were firing. And that’s why we were able to get the result that we were able to get for them.”