Moe Levine was a New York trial lawyer remembered less for any single verdict than for how he spoke to a jury about a hurt human being. The trial bar still studies his summations.
The ordinary way to try a damages case is to itemize. A leg here. A back there. A count of surgeries, a list of scars, a column of visits. Levine’s insight was that a person is not the sum of separate parts, and that a jury asked to price a list will price it like a list. So he refused the list. He argued that you cannot injure part of a person, you injure the whole person, and he tried the whole person, the life before and the life the defendant’s conduct left behind.
His most repeated summation grew out of a small thing. During a recess in the trial of a man who had lost both arms, the story goes, he had taken his client to lunch. He told the jury about it plainly. He had sat across from a grown man and watched him unable to lift the food in front of him. He did not describe an amputation. He made twelve strangers feel the ordinary act it had made impossible.
That is the craft, and it is not theater. It is proof of the hardest thing to prove, the part of the loss that never shows on an image or in a billing record. The law calls it mental anguish, loss of enjoyment of life, the noneconomic harm. Juries have always sensed it is real. Levine’s gift was to make it visible without ever arguing that it was large. He did not tell the jury the loss was great. He showed them the loss and let them take its measure.
The lesson carries straight into a modern courtroom. Do not reduce a client to a diagnosis. Do not apologize for the noneconomic part at the charge conference, and do not try it as an afterthought to the medical records. Build the record so the whole person is visible, the day before and the day after, the specific ordinary things that are gone. Try the human being, not the parts.
Moe Levine (1908 to 1974), a New York trial lawyer of Mineola, Long Island, remembered for the “whole man” theory of damages and inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame. This is general information, not legal advice.
