Discrimination Case Yields LTC client $16 Million

September 2006

Cleveland attorneys Chris Thorman and Peter Hardine-Levine of Thorman & Hardin-Levine Co., L.P.A. , (www.thllaw.com) were headed to trial against New York Life in an age discrimination case in Federal Court. They knew they were in an uphill battle. Poised for this type of trial, they armed themselves with the aid of one of the country’s preeminent trial consultants, Tim Piganelli, to employ the latest technology tools to manage and present their case. Their efforts paid off when the jury, in the United States District Court, Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division agreed with their client Tommy Morgan, formerly of Aurora, Ohio, and awarded him $16 million in compensatory and punitive damages - one the largest awards ever in an Ohio discrimination case, according to Thorman.

The case, Tommy Morgan vs. New York Life Insurance Company, Case No. 1:05CV02872, was tried before the Honorable Judge James S. Gwinn. “Judge Gwinn limited each side to a 30 minute opening, 5 hours to present our case and a 25 minute close” said Peter Hardin-Levine. “We had over 2,000 exhibits and thousands of documents to sift through in preparation for trial”. Once we knew we had to narrow down our presentations, we knew we needed help”. Thorman and Hardin-Levine, on a referral, contacted Tim Piganelli, founder of Legal Technology Consulting, Inc. (www.ltc-inc.com) to assist. “We needed someone who could get us ready for trial in less than two weeks and assist us with the strategy of presenting a complex age discrimination case to a jury in less than 6 hours.” Piganelli, a veteran trial consultant, Certified Summation Trainer, and an expert in trial presentation strategies, arrived in Cleveland just 6 days before trial began.

The trial team of Thorman, Hardin-Levin and associate Dan Novel, argued that their client, Tommy Morgan, was a victim of age discrimination. Morgan was a managing partner at New York Life Insurance Co.'s Northern Ohio office when he was fired in October 2005. He was 52 years old and had a stellar work history. “Morgan was fired within three weeks of a company e-mail that announced ‘a new generation of managers’," Thorman explained. The jury unanimously awarded Morgan $5.5 million for economic losses, $500,000 for his pain and suffering, $10 million for punitive damages and an undetermined amount for legal fees.

Upon arriving in Cleveland, Tim took the existing Summation case and migrated it into Sanction trial presentation software by using the built in scripting feature that Sanction has developed in working with Summation. In doing this, it was easy to load the existing images from Summation into Sanction, giving the team all of the exhibits in both applications. This allowed Piganelli the ability to find any document they needed using the searching capability of Summation. Once they found what they wanted, it was easy present exhibits in court from Summation and onto Sanction’s Presentation mode. Once the trial exhibits numbers were added by the court additional coding was done directly in Sanction. Trial Exhibits numbers replaced the document bates names and the individual page bates numbers were kept as is. This allowed easy access to exhibits if anyone wanted to use the newly named trial exhibit number.

In addition, Piganelli used advanced features of Power Point to develop animated demonstratives of timelines and document “tear outs” to focus the jury on specific language within key trial exhibits. Using PowerPoint slides and giving lead trial attorney Chris Thorman a handheld remote to advance slides, Thorman was able to easily advance from one document to another and then in and out of a timeline. “It made it very easy on me, as a trial lawyer giving an opening statement, to simply hit a remote button to advance from one graphic to another with built in animated effects”.

“I must admit, I have not been a big fan of technology for trial presentation. Tim has now convinced me otherwise,” said Thorman, “There is no way we could have done as efficient a job in presenting as many documents as we did, nor could we have summarized our case in opening or closing, without Tim’s assistance. He was indeed a big help.”