Back in 2014, Paul Sinclair was sleeping in the cab of his truck at a designated truck stop when another tractor-trailer collided with his. Although he was able to continue his route in another truck, Paul began to experience nausea, vomiting, and headaches. A North Carolina doctor would later diagnose Paul with a traumatic brain injury, “which made him unemployable as a truck driver.”
A lawsuit was filed by Charles and his co-counsel, Bradley Beckman of Beckman & Marion, in Pennsylvania because Paul “couldn’t obtain jurisdiction over the defendants, First Global Express, Inc. and driver Yakov Melnikin, in North Carolina.”
The trial was recently covered in an article by NC Lawyers Weekly. The publication spotlights the uniqueness of the “virtual trial in which the judge, attorneys, parties, and witnesses were all scattered along the east coast.” From the article:
On Aug. 14, a virtual trial was convened on the issue of damages, with Ellis and Sinclair taking part from Greenville. Beckman, Placey, and the clerk of court were all in Pennsylvania, while O’Brien, the expert witness, was in Raleigh, and the defendants’ counsel participated from New Jersey.
Placey conducted the day-long trial via Webex. Evidence was submitted via Dropbox, and Ellis said that O’Brien authenticated not only his records, but those of Sinclair’s other treating physicians. Ellis said the trial was either the first, or one of the first, bench trials conducted virtually in Pennsylvania.
“The courts made it very easy and accommodating, and it was not as logistically difficult as I thought it would be, although I wouldn’t want to do it every day,” Ellis said.
You can read the entire article, here, behind the paywall.
