David DeRubertis

Post-pandemic, employment trial lawyer David deRubertis has achieved over $605 million in employment-related jury verdicts on cases in which the combined, aggregate offers totaled approximately $4.2 million. This string of 8 favorable verdicts against 1 defense verdict included verdicts of: $422.5 million; $42.2 million; $41.499 million; $34.7 million; $27.5 million; $20 million; $11.205 million; and $6 million. In every case in which punitive damages were available at trial, he obtained them with an average punitive damage verdict of $86,500,000 and an average non-economic verdict of $8.784 million. The cases were very different. They ranged from failure to accommodate physical restrictions, to whistleblower retaliation, to termination-related defamation, to micro-aggression and gender harassment. Through this outlier sting of verdicts, deRubertis has continued to refine, study and analyze his own methods to isolate the common strategies and approaches across all these cases. As shown by the disparity

between the pre-trial offers and the jury verdicts, these were not easy, cherry-picked, challenge-free cases. In this session, deRubertis will show and teach how to win challenging employment cases by telling a story that focuses the jury on the core strengths of the case while accounting for and dealing with the obstacles and landmines. At the core, deRubertis will teach how his guiding principle of trial work has become very simple reduced to two concepts: First, discover the true, authentic story of the workplace events and the life of your client; and, second, tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the courtroom. This session will help teach how to bring this unvarnished truth and authenticity into a courtroom as a path towards achieving true and full justice for your clients.

Attendees will learn topics, methods and techniques such as:

• Discovering, accepting and embracing the reality of what happened in the workplace as the first step of telling an honest and authentic trial story.
• Embracing, incorporating and reframing the so-called “bad facts” into your affirmative story rather than losing credibility disputing them.
• How do employment cases lend themselves to telling a traditional story-based narrative focusing on the employer’s bad conduct and the roles of the characters and the motives of the actors.
• Discovering the systemic wrongs that will drive verdict value making the case one of higher importance to the jurors than a one-off scenario.
• General principles of trial, persuasion and jury dynamics specifically in employment trials.
• Framing, structuring, sequencing, simplifying, theory and themes.
• Storytelling through examination of adverse witnesses.
• Big non-economic damages: Outside-the-box approaches to obtaining full justice through large non-economic damage employment verdicts.