Presidential Aircraft Found to be Target of Fraud

Vertigrate’s Client Wins Multi-Million Dollar Judgment After Five Week Jury Trial

When the plaintiff’s Boeing 707-100 series aircraft went in for its C-check, the plaintiffs thought they were being proactive and diligent in maintaining this one of a kind aircraft for their nation’s president.  Only a small number of this classic 1959 aircraft are still in operational condition.  Owners of this rare jet are avid aviators and include the likes of John Travolta.  Unfortunately for our plaintiff, what should have been a two month process took almost two years of runaway costs and resulted in an aircraft in worse shape than when it arrived. 

Vertigrate’s trial presentation services played an integral role in the award of a multi-million dollar judgment and recovery of attorney’s fees in this five week jury trial.  With over 1,400 exhibits comprised of 30,000+ documents, photographs, and videos, Vertigrate employed its battle-tested approach to build its standardized, yet highly flexible, trial database in TrialDirector.  Using TrialDirector’s advanced display capabilities, we quickly and easily displayed to the jury up to four documents simultaneously to demonstrate to the jury the heart of our case; the fraudulent nature of the defendants’ invoicing scheme.  Vertigrate’s adept use of this four panel display allowed the trial team to quickly and successively knock the defendants’ witnesses on their heels as they tried to explain away contradictory invoice amount, including both duplicative and phantom charges.    

Defendants’ counsel, on the other hand, struggled with its presentation of exhibits via an iPad trial presentation app.  Opposing counsel was plagued with display issues, application crashes, and missing exhibits throughout the trial.  iPad apps can serve a useful role in cases, but are often better suited for smaller exhibit sets and straight-forward presentations.  We often help attorneys use them for smaller cases, and in larger cases will leverage TrialDirector for iPad to deliver up-to-the-minute exhibit outlines or closing slides to attorneys in the war room, at home, or in the courtroom.   For a case with as much material as this one though, a tablet-based presentation often caused the jury to focus more on the defendants’ technical difficulties than any merits their case may have had.  

As a matter of best practice, Vertigrate stays within the bounds of its technology and tools.  We build solid databases that you can rely on in court.  We perform ongoing quality checks of those databases daily leading up to and during trial.  All of our databases are built on standard numbering formats, incorporate existing bates numbers for any productions, contain the exhibit list description for every potential exhibit, track admitted date, party and witness, and include full-text for every available page.  As is often the case, Vertigrate is brought in at the last minute just before the case goes to trial.  Our approach to building a TrialDirector database allows us to get up to speed on the various hot docs, while utilizing standard conventions for retrieving even the most obscure document based upon a single full-text query or bates number reference. 

For more information about our services, please visit our Trial Preparation or Trial Presentation pages, or download our white paper on cross-referencing Bates numbers, "Trial Linguistics: Bates Numbers Bridge the Communication Gap".