Ep. 273 – Non-Economic Damages Made Easy with Christy Crowe Childers

❗NEWSFLASH – instructing the jurors to put a value on non-economic damages is like asking someone to build a piece of IKEA furniture without the instruction manual. 

Jurors are practically BEGGING you for a formula, and without guidance, they often feel resigned to the task well before deliberation even begins.

**THE DAMAGES HOUSE HAS ENTERED THE CHAT**

🏠 The Damages House is a powerful visual approach that organizes each of your state’s jury charges into “rooms” in a house, providing jurors with a clear and logical foundation for your non-economic damages ask.

🤔 AND WHO, you ask, is the MASTERMIND behind this strategy? 

My brilliant friend, coach here at H2H, a leading lady in trucking law, and soon-to-be published author, it’s none other than…

CHRISTY CROWE CHILDERS

Ready to discover the game-changing strategy that will give you the upper hand?

Tune in and start building YOUR Damages House! 🛠

Xo,
Sari

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“By giving them this framework, we're creating juror epiphanies within themselves. So, I'm going to give them a house and put each category of non-economic damages in the same size rooms and then let the jurors decide which rooms are supposed to be bigger. And so, they're using it as language to trade and make rooms bigger or smaller, and of course that correlates with dollars.”

christy crowe childers

EPISODE 273 TRANSCRIPTION

Sari de la Motte:

Well, welcome everybody to another episode of From Hostage to Hero. I finally got my shit together and got the most amazing Christy Crowe Childers here today. Triple C, triple threat. You heard me talk about her last month in a podcast about designing with your judge . Every time I work with Christy, I learn something new, but today we are going to be talking about her absolutely mind-blowing, brilliant, just utterly trial-changing damages house. You've probably heard about it and if you haven't, well, you're behind because this is the new thing sweeping the nation.

Christy, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Thank you. I'm so excited to share this idea with more people.

Sari de la Motte:

Yes, absolutely. And you've got a book coming out on this too as well with Trial Guides, is that right?

Christy Crowe Childers:

That's right.

Sari de la Motte:

Any date that we know that that might happen?

Christy Crowe Childers:

So I have a year to write the book, so probably next fall.

Sari de la Motte:

Okay, that'll be way amazing. We'll have to do another podcast when it comes out. Christy is on the H2H faculty. She's our trucking expert. She runs a trucking case roundtable every month in the H2H Playground. Her calls are oftentimes better attended than mine, so that tells you a lot. And she's also a board certified trucking lawyer. The name of your firm, Christy?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Childers and McCain.

Sari de la Motte:

Childers and McCain. And she's also a former Mastermind client of mine, so she has been through the program with me, personally. So I love Christy. I love that you're here. Let's get into it.

Before we talk about what a damages house is, what is our problem with the damages in general, from your point of view, as trial lawyers? What are we doing wrong when it comes to damages?

Christy Crowe Childers:

So, as you know, putting a dollar figure on the things in life that don't come with a price tag is so hard. You know my story about, I called my dad and I was like, "Hey dad, I'm going to trial next week. I'm going to ask you a question. You have to answer. You can't say no." And he's like, "All right, what is it?" And I said, "Dad, if you had to put a dollar figure on my life, what would it be?" And he said, "I'm not doing that." I was like, "But you said. You said you would put a dollar figure on it." And he said, "Your job is strange," and then you know...

Sari de la Motte:

Why is it so true?

Christy Crowe Childers:

It's so true. And so then I go to my sister and she answered right away. She was like, "Well, I guess I would take what you make, how much money you make and multiply it by how long you'd be alive." And I was like, "No, no, no, no, not talking about money, the value," so I said, "Value," and I said it with more emphasis like that would work, of my life. And she's like, "Well, I don't know then."

And then I asked my little boy and he said, "Mom, all the money I will ever make," and he said, "No, all the money in the world."

And so to me that highlights the three main problems we have with jurors. Either they won't do it, they feel like they can't do it because they don't have a logical basis for it, or third, they just have no way and they feel like it's so hard to concretize the abstract principle of pain and suffering.

And so what we do is we use your price versus value, brilliant voir dire, and then in opening we bring that together with a framework. A framework that concretizes this abstract principle, so finally the jury feels like, "I can do that."

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah, because I think you're absolutely right is one of the things that, I just did a training in the crew yesterday on money and I was saying that price is how much something costs and value is how much we care, right? So something you value a lot because you care about it, your grandmother's brooch or your mom's recipe for something, I may not value because it's not valuable to me, but to you it has a lot of value. So they're two different concepts altogether. And what I love about the damages house is it kind of brings them together in a way that the jurors are like, "Okay, here's a frame, here's a way that I can think about this that uses another thing that's easier to evaluate and apply it to this situation."

What we try to do with price versus value is say they're two separate things, right? Your economic damages come with a price, and those are easy because you can check our receipts, you can check our math, you can check our invoices.

The other one's harder. These are things that don't come with a price tag, but that have value. And as we know, as plaintiff attorneys is the non-economics are where the money is and where the value is, honestly, not just more money in our pockets and our clients' pockets, but it's really the meaning. This is what this means to this person and this client and all of the things.

Before we go in, we talked about some details on the damages house and what it is. We also talked before we got recording here about how we spend so little time on damages. Talk to me about that and your thoughts on that.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah. I mean, like you said, that's where the money is. And myself included, I've done this in cases, we spend 90% of our time stressing about liability and preparing for liability. And then a lot of times in the past, it was almost like an afterthought, "Oh, I need before and after witnesses. Who have we listed already in discovery? Let's see who else we can get."

And so the approach that I'm taking now is whether you have me involved or you have somebody at your firm, have a damages specialist, somebody who is just focused on damages so the rest of your team can worry about liability while this other person is going out harvesting the stories from the client's people, the people who they care about to tell them the story so that the client doesn't have to shoulder as much of the story at trial, right?

Sari de la Motte:

I love that. And if you're not able to do that, you got to spend the time there, right? I can't tell you how many times as a consultant, I will ask the questions because someone comes into my office and I'm like, "Well, how are they defending this?", or, "What are they saying about that?" And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. You can give me the answers all day long. And then I'll be like, "Well, what does the client say?", or, "What is their life like?" And they're like, "Oh, you know, I didn't ask that."

"How long have they been married?" "Oh, you know what? I don't know." "What's the name of their kids?" "You know what? I never asked." And it's like, "Really?" I mean, that's the meat.

But I get it. I think it's very similar to the predicament that jurors find themselves in which they're like, "Oh, economic damages all day long. I'll give you those all day long. But non-economic, wait what? How do I do that?"

I think it's the same for attorneys. They're like, "Yeah, I can argue all day the argument, but when it gets to damages, it's like I don't really know what to do there or I don't want to be too dramatic. I don't want to play on sympathy," all of the things.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Right. And I think one reason maybe why we stay away from it is because it has been so abstract for us too as lawyers. And so my subtitle of the book is concretizing pain and suffering for not just the jury, but also the client and for you, and that's what I'm seeing it is turning on for lawyers. It's making it to where the dollar figure makes sense for them in a way that comes through in their nonverbals, which is what you teach.

Sari de la Motte:

Well, if it doesn't make sense to you, it's certainly not going to make sense to the jury, right? So it's the same kind of thing of if you can't own your number, the jury's not going to be able to own the number. Same thing here.

If you don't understand why or how you came to the number, the jury's not going to be able to understand that either.

We throw it on them and we hope that they just figure it out. And then when they don't come back with the number that we want, we are like, "Well, jurors are stupid and they're my enemy and they hate us." And it's like, "No, they're just as confused as you are. You set the tone at trial," so yeah.

All right. Well, we have teased them enough. They're like, "Okay," and if you are listening to this podcast, you're not going to be able to see this, but you do know that we have video podcasts as well that you could come back and watch this. We'll put the link on how to find that in the show notes wherever you listen so you can come and watch this. But share the metaphor with us first as far as why damages house. What do you mean by that?

Christy Crowe Childers:

I use something called the MUSE method. The M is mindset, which is totally from you. I added the M. It used to be USE and now it's MUSE.

Sari de la Motte:

I love it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Getting in the right mindset is always important. U is universal.

So when we use a universal image, it's like a cheat. We don't have to use as many words. When I tell you to think of the image of a house, everyone listening right now has an image of a house in their mind, right? And so I'm using that universal image of a house, but a house means so much more to us. A home is where we live. It's something that is the American dream to have a beautiful house. And if I tell you that I lived on a farm growing up, you have an idea of what I'm like just from me telling you that I lived in a farm house, right? And so it automatically embeds so much magic when you use a universal image.

And so what we're doing is we are weaving story, and that's what the S stands for in MUSE. So mindset, universal, story, MUS. And so we're going to use the storytelling techniques that you all have heard about all of that before, and we're going to use that in going through with little vignettes for each room in the house.

And then the E is the big one, the epiphany because as you taught me Sari, jurors don't like to be told what to think. They want to think of it on their own.

And so what we're doing, by giving them this framework, is we're creating juror epiphanies within themselves. So that a lot of times I'm going to give them a house and I'm going to put each category of non-economic damages in the same size rooms and then let the jurors decide which rooms are supposed to be bigger. And so back in the back, they're using it as language to trade rooms and to make rooms bigger or smaller, and of course that correlates with dollars.

Sari de la Motte:

Well, and I think what's so great about this too is that jurors are hungry. We know that when we've used the price versus value, for example, and we ask, "Are you willing to do this very difficult job?", that they're like, "Yeah, but how? But how? But how?"

They're just hungry for a way, a method, something that will help them do this. And the reason we came up with price versus value is they're using the formulas on their own, "Well, I guess I'll take economics and times it by three." That doesn't always get us where we need to go, and so that's kind of dangerous for so many of us.

Before we show what you're showing here on the screen, talk to me about mindset and why that's so important and part of now your system MUSE instead of USE.

Christy Crowe Childers:

So how you come to jury through your nonverbals shows up, as Sari taught me, so much more than anything you say.

And so with damages house, your mindset needs to be that there's nothing shameful about this number I'm asking for, and I have proven it to myself. I've spent time in each room and thought about how much would go in each room and I've casted characters for each one of these parts to tell the story of each room.

And you get so confident about it and also kind of excited when you get to that part of the trial, that that comes through in your nonverbals. And so that's the mindset that we always want. We don't want to feel like we're over asking or we're not prepared with witnesses for a category of damages. We want to come to that thinking, "Man, I got more than I need. I've got these rooms completely filled."

Sari de la Motte:

Well, and I think what's so great there too, is what I hear you saying, is this isn't just another technique or gimmick, meaning you can learn the damages house and you can go and do it, but it's not going to be effective if you don't have the right mindset.

If you're still ashamed of what you're asking for, just putting those numbers in these rooms isn't going to do you much good.

It all starts with this number's right and it's just, and I think working through the process also, which is the brilliance of damages house, gets you there, right?

So you've gone through these steps, that builds your confidence that this is the right number, and now you're sharing that number with jurors and taking them through the steps. So let's get to it. Tell us about damages house.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah. So I started in opening, and I say in every trial you're really just doing two things, trying to figure out what went wrong and deciding how to make it right. And as we talked about in voir dire, that can be pretty hard. But the good news is that you have each other and you have the judge, and we talked about the difference between economic and non-economic damages and the economic damages are easy, like medical bills.

And then there's that other kind of damages, non-economic damages that are a little bit harder. But the judge is going to give you a list of things to consider, and we're going to bring you witnesses and they're going to talk about each one of these categories. And then I show the poster. You want me to show it now?

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah, let's see it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

And so what I want you to see is that all I've done here is taken each one of these things from the list, and to your listeners, I'm showing a pattern jury charge. There's a little bit of a variation if it's a non-pattern situation, but this is if you have a pattern situation.

And so what I want you to see, jurors, is that each one of the things on this list, all I have done is put them into a room of a house. And if you're listening-

Sari de la Motte:

I'm going to pause you.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah.

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah, I was going to say, I was going to pause you just for the listeners, so those things are: interference with normal living, interference with enjoyment of life, loss of capacity to labor and earn money, impairment of bodily health and vigor, fear of extent of injury, shock of impact, actual pain and suffering past and future, mental anguish past and future, and the extent to which the plaintiff must limit activity. So this is right from the jury form, verdict form, correct?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yep. This is from the jury charge. And I've been doing this all over the country. I've made probably 15 or 20 damages houses for various states now, and a lot of states have something similar or they may have an other, and if they have other, then I take my favorite things from my Georgia pattern charge and I'm like, "Hey, let's use this for other."

And so what I'm doing is I'm building damages houses, but the wonderful thing is how creative you can be with this. You don't need me... You can look at your charge and create your own damages house and maybe fear of extent of injury is a really big one for you. Make it the whole top floor and say, "As everything underneath her begins crumbling, as all these other rooms underneath her begins crumbling, that room gets affected the most." I mean, there's so many variations, and Sari-

Sari de la Motte:

Oh my God, you're so good with this. I love it. I love it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

I love it so much!

Sari de la Motte:

Because you can be so creative. That's such a great idea, not only to make it a big room, but also to talk about the crumbling underneath. And before you go on, I just want the listeners who are driving or walking, because I know so many of you walk and listen to me in the mornings, what we've got is a square that's been divided into nine smaller squares with a roof on the top. So right now what we're looking at is something that has nine equal rooms. But I love your idea of taking it for your actual trial and deciding which room is bigger or less. I love it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yep, or you could leave it up to the jury. And another way I like to... If you're listening, another way to think of it is think of a tic-tac-toe board, and then you draw a box around the whole tic-tac-toe board, and then you put one category of damages in each box and so-

Sari de la Motte:

You haven't written out the whole... I mean, you have, but in smaller... You have interferes with, and then really big, normal living is one of the rooms. And then you have interferes with, and then in big writing, enjoyment of life.

So it's really beautiful how you've taken something so, here's this list that they're going to see with a bunch of thousands of other words on this verdict form and put it into a house. I love it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah. And I make that part of it, too. I say, "And let me show you this." This is all pain and suffering. So when we're talking about pain and suffering, we're not talking about just actual pain and suffering because let me show you. Right here, is actual pain and suffering and it's just one room in the house. All of these things make up pain and suffering.

And something else I want to point out, is it doesn't say you can't enjoy life at all. They're going to show a picture of her going to the beach with her family. It doesn't say she can't go. Look at the top. It says, "Interferes with enjoyment of life, loss of capacity to labor and earn money." In this state-

Sari de la Motte:

You're so fucking brilliant, Christy. I just need to... Sorry, I just need to exclaim that.

Christy Crowe Childers:

I love you so much, Sari.

Sari de la Motte:

I love you.

Christy Crowe Childers:

But in this state, we value every bit of loss of capacity, not just complete loss.

Sari de la Motte:

I mean, just listen to what you just said, in this state. You just so wrap them up in a group now of, "This is what Georgians love and how we show that is by"... I mean, you're just wrapping it all in. I don't know how anybody ever says no to you. They shouldn't. They should be shot. But oh my gosh, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. So, then what else do we need to know?

Christy Crowe Childers:

So then we go into, and this is what we call our damages house, and it helps some people. And one way to think of it is like appraising a house. If you are going to have to appraise a house, and a lot of times, Sari, my guys on the jury or my engineer types, they really like this. And so a lot of times my women on the jury or my guys who are more prone to story, they like the vignettes. The engineer types like the appraisal analogy.

So one way to think about it is this. If you were going to have to appraise a house, right, you would have to put a value on every room in the house and you wouldn't leave any rooms out. And that's what we're going to ask you to do here.

Let's say the White House burned down, okay? The interns room in the basement is not as worth as much as the Oval Office. And that's maybe like what you decide back in the jury room. And then at the end, we're going to link it to each room to the evidence, and we're going to go in and we're going to say now, and Sari-

Sari de la Motte:

When you say the end, do you mean the end of opening or end of trial?

Christy Crowe Childers:

End of opening. So in the opening, I'm going to do my gesturing that Sari teaches, my good gesturing. And we don't repeat the rooms because the jury can see it and you've already gone through them, right?

You just gesture and look where you're gesturing to the room and you say, "The mother is going to show you this," and I'm gesturing in pretend to interference with normal living, "When she talks to you about how he can no longer use the bathroom alone and how embarrassing"-

Sari de la Motte:

And I love how now we're putting witnesses with the rooms. Here's who's going to tell you about this room. Oh my god, I love that.

Christy Crowe Childers:

And she's disfigured. And so you're going to have Dr. Smith come in and talk to you about that. And so the reason why I added the doctor there is I want you to also see that the doctors, not just your lay witnesses, but also your medical testimony can talk about actual pain. They can talk about disfigurement, scars, limiting of activities. Your doctors can also help fill your rooms.

And so I literally suggest that people take pictures of every one of their witnesses and their doctors, get it from the internet or from your video depo and in a PowerPoint or however you want to do it, have your damages house in the middle, have your witnesses around it and draw lines to show who's going to go into which room to keep you oriented.

Sari de la Motte:

Do you have a picture of that? I know you have in the past.

Christy Crowe Childers:

I do.

Sari de la Motte:

Oh, do you? Great. I would love if you would show that. This is just so well thought out.

Christy Crowe Childers:

It may take me a minute to find it, but I'll bring it up.

Sari de la Motte:

No, that's just beautiful. As you're looking for that, let me ask you this. Are you assigning a number? I know you've been saying this several times here is, "Or you can let the jury," so you can do it both ways I guess is what I'm hearing from you?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Right. So part six is assigning value to the rooms. This is part six of the damages house opening.

And I say "at the end of the case, we will suggest to you a value that, after having been on this case for years, we place on each room. And it's going to be a big number, folks, because as we will prove, the things that don't come with a price tag, are the most valuable of all. And in this case, to us, that number is $90 million."

And of course some of you're probably thinking, 'I don't get to do that. I can't say that in the opening,' and so just leave off the last one. Just say, "We will prove that the things that don't come with a price tag are the most valuable of all."

Sari de la Motte:

But most people can do it. Most jurisdictions you can and people just don't want to, so I'm just going to say do it if you can. Do it if you can. I love it. I love it. Okay. So do you go through each room then in opening and go, "We value this at 50,000 or five million?" I mean, are you actually assigning the number to each of the rooms or are you just saying 90 million?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Okay, so in opening I just say the number and then at the end, I assign a value to each room. And so we're putting a number in each room and then at the end, we say, "And that totals $9 million."

Sari de la Motte:

And you mean at the end again-

Christy Crowe Childers:

Closing, end of closing.

Sari de la Motte:

Closing. Okay.

Christy Crowe Childers:

So I do not assign the value to each room until closing.

Sari de la Motte:

Got it. Got it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

But I'm not wed to that. And so many of you out there that are using it are saying, "Hey Christy, I did this and I changed it up this way." I just love hearing all the variations.

Sari de la Motte:

I love it too. I mean, I learned so much from all of you. People are like, "This method is amazing." I'm like, this method couldn't have been made without all of you and me being in your cases and learning all the cool things you guys were doing. Do you have it yet? If not, I'm going to ask you another question. Have you found it yet?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yes, I did. I just got to figure out how to screen share. There we go. Can you see it?

Sari de la Motte:

Yes, it's small, but we can see it. So I love this. So talk me through this one.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Okay, so this is when I consult with people, this is how I lay it out for them. So what I've done is I've gone and I've done full-blown interviews of each one of the before and after witnesses, and I've note carded it. So I've got it down to where it would just sit on a note card so you can have them up and down super quick as your witnesses on direct. And what I've done is I've drawn a line to remind you which room this witness is going to prove, and how they go together.

And so at trial, you will not have lines on this pointing to each room. Instead, those are going to be your hands. You're going to use your hands to show that. This is just to keep you aware of what goes where. This is not something I would show the jury at all. It is just something that's used to orient you to which room it applies to.

However, we did use this in a focus group and it was one of those focus groups where you send it in writing and we used it to do damages house in the focus group to get them to apply money. And so many people talked about the house and some of them said, "I didn't really think this room had anything in it, but I liked this one," and they still came back at $15 million. And I'm like, "That's fine.", you know?

Sari de la Motte:

However you get there is fine with me.

Christy Crowe Childers:

That's right.

Sari de la Motte:

Yeah, absolutely.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah, just leave that room out, man.

Sari de la Motte:

Well, so what you just showed us was something that you can do for yourself and as you're prepping and really thinking about who's going to speak to which room. You also talked about how you use damages house to help prep yourself for the witnesses. Can you talk a little bit more about that? So it's not just a presentation tool, it's really something that you use to prepare for trial, yes?

Christy Crowe Childers:

That's right. Yep. So I use a number of different tools. A lot of them are tools that writers use. I start with plot mapping. I go and I interview all these people. I note card it down, and then I use the damages house to make sure that I've got a witness for each room.

And when I'm interviewing people, I'm like, "What are they really passionate about?", because some people you can just tell it really upsets them to talk about a particular part of the case and that's what they're passionate about. And so we assign them a room. We give that person this figure-

Sari de la Motte:

You're like, "Ooh, they'd be perfect for this room." I love this.

Christy Crowe Childers:

And then we timeline it.

Sari de la Motte:

I love it. Just keep going. Keep going. I love it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Then we timeline it out, and so I call that my family timeline, although it includes more than just family. And on the timeline we are looking at which in the order of proof before, during, recovery, after, who tells that piece of the story. And that's going to be a visual that we use with the jury, to orient the jury as to those persons.

Sari de la Motte:

And we don't have time to get into that, but Christy has the most amazing timelines. They're not what you think of. They're different types of timelines that don't just go from left to right, and so there's a very unique way that you deal with things in time as well, because you're brilliant.

So talk to me now about how you bring it back in closing. You're using it to prep, you're using it as you're interviewing witnesses and you're thinking about who should be in what room. Well, before we get to closing and before we even get to opening, between the interviewing process and organizing all your thoughts, how do you come to the number, the 90 million or whatever? I mean, I'm assuming this will also help you figure out what the right number is for the case, yes?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Well, usually I talk to you about it and then you're like, "Double it."

Sari de la Motte:

Always.

Christy Crowe Childers:

And then I start thinking about like, "Okay, can really I go there?" because you're always just encouraging us to think bigger. And what we've seen is you don't get if you don't ask and asking for a bigger number a lot of times in one of the focus groups we did, it showed that they found more liability, which was super weird to me.

But they found a greater degree of liability on the defendant when we asked for more money. So we know that there's something there.

But yeah -

Sari de la Motte:

It's always my thing, right? If I tell you one graphic designer charges $50 an hour and the other one charges 150 - who's better? Without even looking at their work, you're immediately going to say, "Oh, the $150 an hour gal," right? So same thing here. It's like the bigger the number, you feel like, "Wow, they really must have done something wrong and bad." It drives the message home.

Not that I don't want y'all to be wealthy, but that's not the reason why I say double it. It's because that's what this is worth. Send this big message even though if you don't have punitives. Anyway, go on.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah, so that's how I get there. Sometimes it's what I want the number to be and then how do I divide it between the rooms. And so I really sit there a long time staring at a house, and I think to myself, "If there's a $15 million room on here, what would it be? Which room would that be? And then how would I divide the rest of them? Well, I'd do three, three, three, three, three.", you know? And I just move it around between which rooms I think the jury might find more impactful than others.

And sometimes we throw away rooms. We're like, "Okay, yeah, she's a hard worker and they're going to bring that up that she's kept working this whole time. You know what? Give her nothing for that room. Penalize her for being a hard worker, but don't take that away from this category, which is a 10 out of 10."

Sari de la Motte:

Oh, I just love this. It's so brilliant and it's so great to see. Yes, it's great for the jury, but I'm just thinking for the attorneys out there that are like, "I have no idea how to even approach this in my own brain." It's such a great container for throwing everything in and then helping organize it in your own mind. Even if the jury ends up doing something different with it, it's so great for that.

All right, let's talk about... because you don't do damage his house in voir dire. You're using the price versus value there to start that conversation, yes?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Correct.

Sari de la Motte:

All right, so we use it in opening. We throw the big number at them in opening. How do you bring it back in closing?

Christy Crowe Childers:

So in closing, you have the house and you're talking about just key moments. I mean, Sari, you're the one that teaches that closing doesn't need to be going back through all the evidence, right?

Sari de la Motte:

Lord, help us.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Right. And so in closing, what we do is really it's about now we're going to put a number on each one of these rooms.

And so I'm going through and I'm literally, with a big marker, I will write on top of the room the words, for listeners, like the words mental anguish are in the room, and I write on top of that number, the number five and five means five million, and I put a five in the next room and I write it in a big red marker, five. And I'm filling up all my rooms with the numbers. And then I say, "And together that is $90 million," and so-

Sari de la Motte:

I love it. I love it.

Christy Crowe Childers:

It's just one part. It's the ask, but it's also at that same time, I do want you to walk a little bit back through the rooms and just do highlights-

Sari de la Motte:

Absolutely.

Christy Crowe Childers:

... of key moments, right?

Sari de la Motte:

Yep. And what I love too is that you're not doing 5,000,000, right? Because the jury sees all of those zeros and it just feels really big. But when you're doing five, just number five-

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah, just five.

Sari de la Motte:

Right? It just feels like, "Oh, five."

Christy Crowe Childers:

Five out of five.

Sari de la Motte:

Five, right? So it feels much more... I know a lot of times I've seen defense attorneys put up numbers and they will put the cents on there too just so the number looks really big, "Well, this is what the plaintiff is asking," and so this is actually, if they're even thinking that far ahead, but this is the opposite and I think that really serves you as well.

Anything else we need to know about the damages house? I could talk about this all day. This is just so fucking brilliant.

Christy Crowe Childers:

I just think the key takeaways are to have a damages specialist on your team, someone who is just focused on that so you can worry about the liability, somebody you can go and collect all these stories, get them involved early so that this becomes a major part of your work.

Play with it. Let it help you become creative. I love seeing your creative ideas. Let me know how you changed it. And then lastly, I would say just go with it and see where it takes you.

Sari de la Motte:

I love it. I love it. It's hard to screw it up. I think you've made it so easy.

Are you consulting with people on damages house? Is that something that you're doing or are you just putting this information out there and going, "Hey, use it and have fun with it"?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah, so as you said, I'm a board-certified trucking lawyer, and so my cases that I have myself are trucking typically. However, I'm damages counsel in all kinds of cases. The case that I'm trying next year is a medical malpractice case. Especially in those cases, our lawyers need to focus on liability so I can go and do my thing on damages. And so any of case I get brought in as damages counsel and the lawyers then don't have to worry about damages at all, and I typically do the ask in closing as well, so that they don't have to worry about asking for the money.

Sari de la Motte:

I love it. And so how can people get ahold of you if they want you as damages counsel?

Christy Crowe Childers:

Well, they can email me, christy@childersmccain.com or give me a call or they can join the crew, where they can talk to me anytime.

Sari de la Motte:

That's right. I was just going to say, if you're in the crew, you get access to Christy. She's also active in our Facebook group when people have questions.

And so yes, that's obviously you go to sariswears.com/play and get on the wait list for when we open again. We'll put Christy's contact information in the show notes as long as she's okay with that. And I'm telling you right now, I'm going to steal Christy to come and do... She's already done a training for our crew, but I think you should do a whole video course on this step-by-step, and we should just get it out in the world. I think people would just love that.

If you're not watching and you're listening, then you do not see that Christy is in her closet, which is my dream closet. It's amazing. But the one thing I'll say is what is up with all the fucking beige and black shoes? You have nothing in there that is excitingly shocking pink or anything, and so that is my next assignment for you is get some shocking pink shoes. Forte, that's my old business name. H2H pink, which is right behind me. So any of those colors would be fine, Christy. You can get any of those behind me.

I love you. I love this. I think it's brilliant. The one thing I will end on is I know a lot of you are already using this and some of you are even talking about this in CLEs and how you used it. If I find out that you are doing that and you are not crediting this most amazing woman, I will come and find you myself, and I do not want to stay on a podcast what I will do to you. Stop stealing credit for this. I know it's great, but give credit where it is due.

Christy is the most generous person out there... I am too. We want you to take all this shit and go out there and win everything you can possibly win. None of us are like, "Don't use this stuff." That's why we're sharing it with you. But give credit where it's due, people. Don't make me come after you. Nobody puts Christy in a corner. Nobody. So give her credit when you use this most amazing thing.

Christy, thank you so much for being here. I love you. I adore you. Thank you for this gift that you are giving to plaintiff attorneys. It's amazing, amazing stuff. Thank you so much.

Christy Crowe Childers:

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Sari de la Motte:

You're so welcome.

Have you ever wished you knew what the jury was thinking? Well, grab a pen and paper because I’m about to give you instant access to a free training I created for plaintiff trial attorneys. It’s called Three Powerful Strategies to Help You Read a Juror's Mind, and it will help you understand what the jury is thinking so you can feel confident and trust yourself in the courtroom. 

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