Kathleen Flynn Peterson, a veteran personal injury and medical malpractice plaintiffs trial lawyer at Ciresi Conlin in Minneapolis, said she’s noticed something while watching televised trials lately. 

“What we do for a living … it’s exciting to us. But when you watch even skillful people [do] cross-examination or doing direct examinations, it’s not as interesting as we think it is,” said Peterson, speaking as part of a webinar yesterday on trial presentation sponsored by the ABOTA Foundation. “You realize how it would be easy for jurors to become bored or impatient or distracted because it’s a very different way of communicating important information than we do in our fast-paced commercials and television programs with all the bells and whistles.”