Allen Smith's Simple, 3-Part Outline Breaks Down Complex Talc Case En Route to $417M Win

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The longer a trial runs, and the more evidence is involved, the more critical it is to provide jurors an outline or landmarks that can lead them through your argument. And in the most complex cases, sometimes the simplest outlines are the most persuasive. Allen Smith structured his complex talc case around an easy three-part outline that led to a massive verdict against Johnson & Johnson. 

Eva Echeverria contended she developed ovarian cancer from years of using Johnson & Johnson’s talc-based products. Key to talc claims like Echeverria’s are thousands of pages of documents concerning the link between talc and cancer as well as J&J’s conduct. 

Without a roadmap, it’s easy in such complex cases for a jury to become confused about the evidence, but Smith, Echeverria’s attorney, played on a straightforward outline he gave jurors in openings to keep them focused on his argument. Despite all of the evidence, he said, the case was simple. It was about whether J&J should have warned about talc, whether the company’s failure to warn caused Echeverria’s cancer, and whether the company should be punished. 

That outline gave jurors a way to place all the evidence into one of three categories and importantly, look at them in a light favorable to the plaintiff. 

And it served to mold Smith’s case during the nearly month-long trial. He ultimately returned to the three-part outline when closings began, using the same large notepad he used in openings, breaking down where each piece of the scores of documents offered throughout trial fell. For instance, on the failure-to-warn issue, Smith walked jurors through decades of internal memoranda that he argued showed J&J sat on information that its talc was carcinogenic. As he detailed the documents, providing exhibit numbers so jurors could refer to them once in deliberations and delving into statistics of complex epidemiological studies, he would return to the failure-to-warn issue that remained written in large letters on notepad next to him. The tactic emphasized for the jury the cumulative effect of each piece of evidence and its place in the three-part outline. 

The simple, yet powerful tactic allowed jurors to easily follow the mass of evidence offered in the case, and jurors sided with Smith’s argument, awarding $417 million at trial, including a $347 million punitive verdict. 

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