February on a Connecticut roof by the ocean, a young Christopher P. Anderson put down his hammer and told his buddy he was done — he was going back to school to try cases. More than thirty years later, he is still doing exactly that. Anderson grew up in a trial lawyer household. As a teenager he watched his father — a respected Connecticut trial lawyer — try a devastating products-liability case, win every admission he needed from the defense expert, and still lose before a conservative jury. The loss crushed his father, who Anderson says never tried another jury case. It deterred the young Anderson at first. He drifted — construction, loading trucks, a roofing job by the water in February — before political philosophy pulled him toward law school in Vermont, where, in a program known for environmental law, he wanted only one thing: to get into a courtroom and try cases. There was also a band. Before he passed the bar, Anderson formed Pacing Jane and spent his nights playing original music to rooms of strangers. Standing in front of people singing songs no one had heard, he says, gave him the confidence to later stand before a jury and explain how a life had been changed through no fault of its own — and to ask twelve people to put a value on what was lost. From day one he tried cases, and he has done it for more than thirty years. When insurers, emboldened by the public backlash to the McDonald's hot-coffee verdict, resolved to try even minor soft-tissue cases to drive down settlement values, that pressure made trial lawyers of a generation of young attorneys — Anderson among them. He learned to pick juries, to choose which cases to push and which to leave alone, and to earn the kind of courtroom credibility that, he says, still shapes how his cases resolve today. That conviction shows up in the cases he remembers most. In 2008, with his firm carrying heavy debt and Anderson barely paying himself, he took a self-employed veterinarian's case to trial after the insurer walked out of mediation — and won a two-million-dollar verdict that put money in the bank and secured the firm's future. He is just as quick to talk about the ones he lost, including a brutal case in a rural jurisdiction he calls the “quiet corner,” where a jury found a farmer not even negligent for letting his cow escape. You learn more from the losses, he says, and he carried those lessons into a tighter, faster trial he tried this year. It is no accident that he renamed his practice Anderson Trial Lawyers — not, as he puts it, Anderson Settlement Lawyers. In his “Closing Argument,” Anderson makes a direct appeal to his fellow trial lawyers: keep taking cases to trial, because a verdict gives injured people a voice. Key Takeaways · Performing your own material in front of a cold, silent room builds the same nerve it takes to stand up and address a jury. · When insurers decide to try every case, the lawyers who know how to pick juries and choose the right cases are the ones left standing. · A single well-tried verdict can arrive at exactly the right moment and secure a firm's future. · You learn far more from the cases you lose than from the ones you win, if you are willing to examine every decision you made. · Jurors have less patience for long trials than they used to — a tighter, faster case often lands better than a two-week one. · A verdict gives an injured person a voice, which is why cases worth trying deserve to be tried rather than quietly settled. The Trial Lawyer's Journal is Presented by CloudLex and Lexvia.ai. TLJ Instagram TLJ YouTube TLJ LinkedIn
