A witness looked the jury in the eye and lied. Our trial team had until the end of the lunch break to prove it.
For most of my career, that is a fight you lose. Not because the lie is not there. It almost always is. You lose because you cannot reach it in time.
That is the part of trial work nobody warns you about. "Try your lies" is the oldest advice in this job. You do not win a hard case by polishing your own side of it. You win it by putting the other side's dishonesty in front of 12 people so plainly they stop believing a word the defense says.
The lie is usually buried somewhere in thousands of pages of sworn testimony, and you almost never have that contradiction in hand the moment you need it. You need it at the worst possible time: the witness is on the stand, looking at the jury, daring you to prove him wrong before they move on.
This spring, for the first time, I could.
Our case came out of a retaining wall that collapsed at a plumbing supply facility in Hendersonville, North Carolina. One worker was killed. Four others were badly hurt. The trial ran close to six weeks.
The man who we alleged was in charge of the job was on the stand the morning before lunch. The defense walked him through the site surveillance video. On the video that was played for the jury, he is standing near the wall, on his phone.
He testified, with real confidence, that he vividly remembered the call. He had spoken with the workers' employer, he said. The employer had signed off on backfilling the wall.
It was not true. He had given three days of deposition testimony, and our team was certain he had sworn the opposite.
So I asked Eve, in plain language: find every place in this witness's deposition where he discusses a call with the workers' employer, and give me the volume, page, and line.
The answer came back within seconds, well before the jury filed back in. I pulled the transcript, and there it was in his own sworn words: no such call. By the time the jury filed back in, our team had our plan. We would not call him a liar. We would let the jury reach that conclusion on their own. While I spent time with Eve, my co-counsel was able to focus on the remaining areas of his cross-examination. He was able to calmly prepare while I set up the lie.
After lunch, my co-counsel walked him back through the call he vividly remembered. He held the line. With Eve’s precision, our team was able to pull the synced video and play it for the jury. Same subject, under oath, answered the opposite way. No call.
There was no way for him to explain that away. You could watch the jury stop taking notes on what he said and start taking notes on who he was.
The lying does not only happen on the stand. It happens in the fine print, on the same bet: that you are too buried to catch it.
At one point we uploaded both sides' proposed jury instructions and asked Eve to find every difference from the pattern instructions. Eve flagged one word. The defense had changed a "must" to a "may."
That single word is the kind of thing that decides an appeal, and it is exactly what a trial team on no sleep misses at midnight. We caught it in minutes and let the judge know.
Multiply that across six weeks. The defense is not just hoping their witness is more likeable than yours. They are counting on the fact that you cannot check everything in the time you have.
That used to be a safe bet. It is not anymore.
This is where people misunderstand what AI does. It does not read the case for you.
You still read every deposition and every document. You still know your medical records cold. If you have not done that work, you will not even know the lie is there to go find.
What AI does is close the distance between knowing and proving. We still had to remember that this witness had denied the call under oath. My memory used to be where the fight ended. Now it is where the fight starts.
We already knew he had lied. What I never had before was the ability to prove it thirty seconds later.
That jury came back with $101 million, which we believe is the largest personal injury verdict in North Carolina history.
I do not think the number came from a clever argument. It came from six weeks of the jury deciding who had told them the truth and who had not. Once they trusted us and stopped trusting the defense, the size of the verdict followed on its own.
Try your lies. It is the oldest advice in this job. For the first time in my career, I can do it in time to matter.
Meredith Hinton is a trial attorney at Ricci Law Firm in North Carolina, where she has tried cases for more than two decades. She was part of the trial team behind a $101 million wall-collapse verdict believed to be the largest personal injury verdict in state history.
