Elawvate: The Trial Lawyer Podcast

Every trial training promises the answer. Sharif Gray spent four years attending them all — and discovered the real lesson is that there is no one answer, only the toolkit you build for yourself. A Virginia Military Institute valedictorian and UVA Law graduate, Sharif joined forces with partner Gray Broughton to build a seven-lawyer firm — five former JAG officers, six former prosecutors. He shares how he won a $...

Trial strategist and consultant Jessica Brylo built her career by shadowing jury selection pioneer David Ball throughout law school and watching videos of a rare 1996 study in which cameras were placed inside actual jury deliberation rooms. “Give us all the advice and philosophy that you can,” co-host Rahul Ravipudi asks to launch the episode alongside co-host Ben Gideon. “That's a big open qu...

Host Ben Gideon invites co-counsel Meryl Poulin to break down their $6.5 million med-mal verdict on behalf of a client who was paralyzed after a 20-hour delay in surgical care for cauda equina syndrome. With host Rahul Ravipudi moderating the conversation, Ben and Meryl explain why cauda equina syndrome cases are notoriously difficult to win and why they put their client, who has developmental disabilities, on ...

Washington, D.C.-based Gupta Wessler holds the highest win rate among the top five most active firms practicing before the 6-3 conservative U.S. Supreme Court firms. And they’re large, corporate firms “representing corporations that have done bad stuff,” says founder Deepak Gupta. “How do we do that? We do it by appealing – sometimes it's methodologically – to conservative commitmen...

"Bad is stronger than good" is a widely cited principle in social psychology – and one that trial consultant Bo Fraser has built his jury strategy around. “You're not going to win them with, ‘We're the good guy and here's why’ story,” Bo explains to host Ben Gideon. Bo considered a career in marketing before earning a PhD in social psychology and joining his mother at the consultancy firm...

Live from Portland, Maine, it’s Ben Gideon and Jeff Wright, the team from Gideon Asen taping a special edition of “Elawvate: Build and Grow Your Law Firm.” Ben and Jeff walk through 10 proven strategies for building a financially successful law firm, covering everything from dominating a niche and making data-driven decisions to scaling without losing your culture and building systems designed...

A jury once told Todd Schafer that they had decided the case in his favor before he stood up for opening statement. Why? Todd pulls back the curtain on his success with picking juries in this conversation with hosts Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravipudi. A second-generation trial lawyer and partner at Schafer & Schafer in Indiana, Todd reflects on that case – at the time, he was a young lawyer who &ldq...

Shanin Specter’s $25 million verdict against Boeing last November is just one example of his approach to tort: It’s not just about compensation and deterrence. It’s also about sharing important public information. The son of former Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, Shanin weighs the different avenues for effecting change – whether it’s in public service, like his father, or in the private sect...

A former JAG officer and federal prosecutor, Margaret Donovan is now an associate at Koskoff, Koskoff and Bieder and proud to promote her firm’s work suing the administration – including in this conversation with hosts Rahul Ravipudi and Taylor Asen. Leaning on her JAG experience, she dismantles the administration’s shaky legal argument for its strikes on alleged drug boats and explains...

From running a radio station in undergraduate school to running an “IP litigation ambulance” as a young lawyer to running a platform that fights the Trump administration’s attacks on law firms, Neel Chatterjee has had a remarkable journey. In this wide-ranging conversation with host Rahul Ravipudi, Neel shares insights about developing his nationally recognized IP practice, litigating in Big Law, and...

The list of wins is long: $363 million on a toxics exposure case; $148 million on a paralysis case, $79 million on a police pursuit case; $75 on a brain injury case. But the philosophy at Salvi, Schostok & Pritchard is short: “We want to try good cases and be great team members,” says Managing Partner Pat Salvi II as he visits with hosts Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravipudi. Tune in as Pat reflects on turning down $35 mill...

In med-mal cases, the defense often argues that a defendant couldn’t have anticipated a patient’s unusual problem. When a 15-year-old girl died from complications of undiagnosed lymphoma, the plaintiff’s team turned that argument on its head. “I think people think, ‘Well, if someone comes in with a really unusual set of circumstances, you ought to look into it pretty carefully, especially if it can be ...

Earlier this year, hosts Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravipudi welcomed a “force of nature” to “Elawvate.” She’s also known as Charla Aldous, founder of Aldous Law. The episode remains one of the podcast’s most popular conversations. Tune in as Charla reflects on her legendary career, offers advice to younger lawyers, and revisits the victories that have placed her firmly in the upper echelon of trial la...

"Anybody who tells you that leaving a law firm is an easy process is lying to you," says Ben Gideon. To lay out the unvarnished truth, Ben shares his experience leaving a 17-year partnership to launch Gideon Asen. In a conversation guided by Jeff Wright, the firm’s COO, Ben explains why departing from one firm to start your own can feel like a divorce. The duo discusses critical decisions around choosing business partners, fi...

“We had to say, ‘Hey, we're going to be honest with you here. For a long time, we had this wrong, and our experts had it wrong.’” That’s the theme that Chuck Hehmeyer and Elizabeth Kayatta emphasized in their med-mal case on behalf of a 4-year-old boy who was brain-injured after a routine surgery. As the boy recovered, experts initially diagnosed him with autism. That changed to a diagnosis of cortical...

Jeremy D'Amico describes how his authentic trial voice transformed difficult facts into compelling narratives that yielded major verdicts: $45 million for a speeding Marine who wasn't wearing his motorcycle helmet and $23 million for an autistic boy injured in a school bus accident. In this conversation with hosts Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravipudi, he also reveals how he developed his voice while working alongside his father, firm foun...

“Occasionally, we will introduce our listeners to a new product that's designed to help trial lawyers do a better job for their clients and their practices,” host Ben Gideon explains as he kicks off this episode about Supio, legal AI for personal injury firms. To make the introduction, he and co-host Rahul Ravipudi turn to Ed Kirk, who is Supio’s head of partnerships, and Will Davis, who has been using Supio for a...

“It is not easy to get substantial damage awards from Montana jurors,” says John Heenan of Billings-based Heenan & Cook. Yet conservative Montana jurors awarded $27.7 million in his negligence case against a private prison company. As he tells host Ben Gideon: “I love being in front of Montana juries, but I have developed a way…” Tune in for John’s “magic formula” that turns good...

Medical records meticulously documented the routine endoscopy that went wrong, ending tragically in the patient’s death. But when Chris Nace and Samantha Peters took the case to trial, they were confronted with the defense’s slick, well-produced timeline of events – vastly different from what the record showed. With hosts Ben Gideon and Rahul Ravipudi, the team from Nace Law Group unpacks what happened at trial, i...