The Snake Attack Phenomenon: The Courts Must Stop Overlooking and Facilitating the Continued Poisoning of Our Jury System

Our jury process has been below assault from an ever-rising tidal wave of improper demo tactics that have no position in our courtroom rooms, but have directly brought on the final decade’s cascade of nuclear verdicts.[1] These methods began two decades ago, but mushroomed into prominence in 2009, when, in a remarkably profitable advertising and marketing plan in the type of a e book, they have been re-branded as the “Reptile Theory”.[2] Although the so known as Reptile e-book (now marketing on Amazon in paperback for $1,683.99) is not the only how-to or Bible for these techniques, its vivid imagery stands out in the forefront, producing it the byname and catchall for this breed of inappropriate tactics. In trying to keep with the plaintiff bar’s clear rejection of mammalian trademarks, from this point onward we will refer to the entire swath of these incorrect practices as the “Snake Attack Phenomenon” or “Snake Attacks” (besides when specially speaking about a reptile-primarily based merchandise). We contact it a phenomenon just simply because of the extraordinary reality that it should really never have existed in the 1st put.

In a nutshell, the Snake Attack Phenomenon is this: enterprising customers of the particular injuries bar took a range of practices and themes intended to poison the sanctity of the jury box with improper and punitive factors that courts had very long precluded from the courthouse—on the combined bases of relevancy and prejudice—and successfully re-promoted and re-branded numerous of them with a new pseudo-scientific label to provide them with an unwarranted patina of propriety. Even a lot more importantly, this amazing re-marketing and advertising phenomenon was formalized and undertaken in plain sight in a 2009 how-to booklet,[3] alongside with subsequent seminars and pamphlets, released to (a) sustain the pretext of legitimacy, and (b) be certain that it would be accessible to, and used by, plaintiff lawyers nationwide.