Interview with Medical Illustrator Annie Gough
People say that a picture says a thousand words, and this holds true when you have illustrations during the trial. That’s the power of visuals – they tell a story, simplify complex concepts, and educate the audience in the easiest and best way possible.
In today’s episode, Annie Gough, an independent Certified Medical Illustrator, talks about how medical illustrators work and what it means to you in your practice. With over 20 years of experience in traumatic injury, medical malpractice, wrongful death, and product defect cases, Annie provides anatomical and surgical illustrations along with visual exhibit consultation on demand letters, expert depositions, mediation, and courtroom presentations.
As trial lawyers, we want to be able to let the jury go into the story of the client. They may not have personally experienced going to the emergency room or having neck surgery. But being able to educate them with visual aids will help bring them into the experience your clients have had. Even just a single illustration can set the stage and turn it into a story or a movie so the jury can truly visualize it.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Annie’s path to medical illustration
- The most difficult things to educate people on
- The best way to show an injury
- The importance of animation in medical malpractice cases
- What it’s like to work with a lawyer
- How lawyers can benefit from reading her book
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Supporting Resources:
You can buy Annie’s book here.
Visit her website: www.agillustrations.com
Want to work with Annie? Send her an email at: anniegcmi@gmail.com
Episode Credits:
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their businesses and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome to a new episode of Trial Lawyer Prep with me your host, Elizabeth Larrick.
This is a podcast designed and dedicated to trial lawyers who wanna learn more and do better in the courtroom. This episode, we are going to have a guest, Annie Goff, join us. She’s a certified medical [00:01:00] illustrator, and she popped up in one of the cases I was working in. And I thought, what a great opportunity to bring an actual certified medical illustrator to come talk to us on the podcast.
Annie has over 20 years experience doing medical illustrations in Personal injury cases. So she brings a lot to the table. I’m excited about the conversation that I had with her and I hope you are too. So let’s jump right in. Annie, I am so excited that you are here on the podcast with us. And so certified medical illustrator, and you are going to help us meaning us trial lawyers that are all listening to understand, okay, how on earth do you work?
And what does it mean? Because We’re lawyers, we’re not doctors. So let’s just start it off. Like, tell me a little bit about how on earth you got started down this path. It’s a very interesting story. There are not very many medical illustrators in the world. A lot of us have a very similar career path. We grew up loving to [00:02:00] draw, being artists.
But we also like to dissect frogs, and we like the cadaver lab, and it’s a very unique mix of science and art. I actually started, I wanted to be an art major, and this story is actually on page 16 of my book. Anyway, I wanted to be an art major and my mother would not let me for many obvious reasons. And I said, well, no, it’s okay.
I’m great at art. I can be an art major and change my mind later. And she was like, no way, not having it. She’s like, what else do you like? I was like, well, I love my anatomy class. We got to go to the medical school. We got to work with the cadavers, blah, blah, blah. And she goes, why don’t you go pre med? I was like, cause I do not want to be a doctor.
I do not want to be a surgeon. And you know what she said to me? You can change your mind later. Of course. Of course. Thanks mom. [00:03:00] Yeah. So I finished pre med and then I spent about half a year doing autopsies for the County coroner. And still did not want to be a surgeon, but knew that somebody had to draw all of the pictures in all of the anatomy books that I’d studied from for years.
So all the way from gross anatomy to like molecular biology, how does DNA replicate? All of these things are all taught with pictures. And so it took a little while to find the path of medical illustration. Wow. That’s pretty crazy though. Like as far as working in a coroner’s office, at what point you decide working with the bodies is just not what I want to do.
Actually, that’s the part I really liked, which is really interesting, which is how I ended up working in law at the time when I went to graduate school. school. There were six medical schools in North America that offered a masters of medical [00:04:00] illustration. Then there were four and now there are five again.
But so to be a medical illustrator, and this is the general path for most medical illustrators. You don’t have to do it this way, but you apply to one of the medical schools that offers the illustration program. They take between eight and 12 students a year. And you go to medical school with the medical students for the first two years, learning all of your art and visual storytelling and 3D animation and all that stuff alongside that.
And my professors knew that I had a background in autopsies. And they knew that I had this like forensic twist. So when we’re all getting ready to graduate with our masters, my professor got a call from a lawyer that wanted an in house medical illustrator, a medical illustrator to work in his law office every day on all of his cases.
And they just came [00:05:00] straight to my desk. And they were like, Annie, you have to apply for this job. And that’s how I started in legal work. Oh, wow. And that was, that’s totally my question is like, how does that, cause I mean, what did normally medical illustrators, what kind of, after you get your degree, what do you do with it afterwards?
Like what kind of jobs do people normally go to? Most medical illustrators work in healthcare. So you imagine Every single graphic design thing you’ve ever seen in the world for a hospital or a pharmaceutical company or a surgical device company, medical illustrators work. There’s five medical illustrators at the CDC, and one of them created the COVID molecule that we’re also used to looking at now.
There’s medical illustrators at the National Institute of Health. Every teaching medical school has medical illustrators. The Mayo Clinic has amazing medical illustration department. They work in surgical planning, 3D printing for [00:06:00] facial prosthetics, you name it, veterinary work, and just regular publishing, like anatomical books, radiology books, oh my gosh, and gaming.
There’s a lot of medical gaming and virtual reality and AR simulation in teaching. And in the military, there’s a lot of medical illustrators that work in teaching medics. And creating solutions for treating soldiers in the battlefield. Yeah. It sounds to me like you already said, there’s a really limited amount of people in this world that have gone through the training and do it.
So it sounds like there’s a lot of positions for it. Are there, is there a need for it? Yes. So I think with, we graduate right now, 44 medical illustrators a year with the master’s degree. Okay. And we can estimate that there’s about 2000 medical illustrators and animators in the world. And only 20 percent of us do legal work.
So that’s about 400 [00:07:00] medical legal illustrators. And it’s funny when I was researching for the book, I was like, if there’s only 400 of us, how many lawyers are there? And I wasn’t able to get like a perfect answer, but the closest I could do through my research is that there are 94, 000. Injury lawyers in North America and 400 of us to do their illustrations.
Yeah. You got to think the number’s bigger than that too, because the stats or polls always just normally get the full time people, but there’s so many part time lawyers and that’s a little crazy. So how long did you work at the lawyer’s office? I was there for five years. And then you got the itch. I did.
Well, you know, it’s funny. I was working at the law firm and a lot of what I do is I work hand in hand with the medical expert that’s going to be testifying to make sure that we’re creating the right visuals to tell the right story. And the medical expert in the case asked me to [00:08:00] create something that I had not created before.
He asked me to create a digitized fetal monitor strip. And it was a birth trauma case. And immediately in my mind, I was like, okay, I can scan it. And this was a while back, obviously I can scan it in. And I was imagining how I could create it in my mind. And he goes, no, no, no. He was, you don’t need to recreate the wheel.
I know a company that does these. So you can just send the fetal monitor strip to them and they’ll digitize it. Yeah. So I contacted that company and ended up developing a little bit of a working relationship with them. And they asked one day, how much do you like living in Texas? Would you rather live in Colorado?
And I was like, Oh yeah,
they stole me away and made me their art director and I didn’t love it because I was just managing the other illustrators. I [00:09:00] wasn’t working one on one with the attorneys or the experts anymore. And I really wasn’t illustrating, I was just managing. So I didn’t stay that very long. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha.
So then. Now we’ve got your own. Yes. And so now it’s just me. So when you work with me, I’m not a salesperson. I’m not at an exhibit booth. I am the person that will read your medical records. I will review all your radiology images. I’ll work with your expert. I’ll create your images. I’ll walk you through the illustrations and your presentation.
And then I have to wear all the hats. So I also do the billing and everything else. So I’m a one girl show. I get it. I get it. I there’s so many Melissa’s podcasts that totally give it sounds to me like you really love working one on one with lawyers. I mean, that sounds to me like something that really fits with your personality.
And it sounds a lot like teaching too. It’s very much like teaching and lawyers don’t go to medical school and they [00:10:00] don’t have the anatomy background. But the lawyer’s job is to teach the jury anatomy that they don’t have the background. So I spend a lot of time teaching the attorney how to teach the jury.
And that’s why the images are so important because they simplify it greatly. Yeah. And that’s, I was going to say, like when you’re teaching lawyers and you know, they’re to go teach. A lot of people who don’t have any medical training, let alone really like to go to doctors just generally. How do you weave that process in with the images and like just the education piece of it?
Yeah. Well, for example, I was working on a complex medical malpractice case with the lawyer and the client had a colloid cyst in her brain, which is a very unique ball of epithelial cells that hangs in the ventricle. And it’s technical and we needed to understand the technicality of it and the medical [00:11:00] terminology of it.
But in reality, the jury just needed to know that there was something in her brain that shouldn’t be there. And the doctor decided to take it out and he didn’t take it out. So what we did with the attorney, we went through all of the medical records, all of the radiology, all of the brain imaging, and we created the illustrations to where the cyst was accurately placed.
It matched her anatomy exactly the surgery exactly, but I colored it yellow and it was always yellow in every single image we showed. And we just called it the yellow jelly bean. And all the jury needs to know is that she’s got a jelly bean in her brain. The surgeon went to get the yellow jelly bean out.
He missed. He stabbed another very technical structure within her brain and later on said that and told the family that she was fine and she was in recovery and she was going to come out. And the truth is she’s still in the [00:12:00] hospital. He never even got close to the yellow jelly bean. He catastrophically injured her brain.
Wow. Okay. So where’d the yellow jelly bean come from? How’d you guys come up? Like that’s some creative work right there. Yeah, well, just whenever the terminology is really difficult or it’s hard to pronounce, it’s easier to just come up with a color or a thing that you can call it. An analogy sometimes works.
And then when the full slide deck presentation was created for trial, then we sat down to go through it almost like I was doing trial prep for the attorney. So I was prepping her and we recorded it. And then she was able to listen to the recording whenever she wanted. She had listened to it driving around in her car and keep saying in her mind, okay, colloid cyst, epithelial cells, thalamus.
Like how do you say these words? It’s just, it’s just super helpful. [00:13:00] Yeah, that’s such a great idea that I think it just bears repeating. Listen to it, record it over and over again. And it’s so helpful that you do that for your lawyers. Right. Preparation, preparation, preparation. I always say when I first give the attorney the set of slides, I’m like, please practice with this.
Look at it a lot before you really decide what order do we want to put the slides in? What do we want to delete? What do we want to label? And practice is key to everything. Yeah, absolutely. So I have a little bit of a challenge for you. What do you feel like as far as like the realm of injuries? What do you feel like is one of the most difficult things to educate people on?
The brain is very difficult, often because injuries to the brain are invisible. You can have a catastrophic brain injury and nothing show up on the MRI. That’s very difficult. And I think that if you tell someone my client was driving a motorcycle, he was hit by a truck, he broke [00:14:00] his leg and his femur was broken.
Most people maybe know what a femur is, but you can always say a broken leg. And that’s pretty easy to imagine. And that’s usually really easy to see in an x ray. That can be simple. You might not even need an illustration, but then if you have multiple injuries, like if it’s voluminous, if you have more than three or four injuries, I feel like that is when seeing it on one page really brings everything together and clarifies it.
Because if You’re standing in front of your jury and you’re like, okay, Mrs. Smith had a left femur fracture, a left tibial plateau fracture, a right ankle dislocation, a right distal fibula fracture, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get lost. And you can’t see it, but if you just have it all on one page, if there’s a lot to show, then an illustration is very [00:15:00] helpful.
Yeah. I think as trial lawyers, we want it sometimes like, Hey, I’m just gonna put this in a list form and it absolutely gets lost because it’s just word on a page. And I think from working with focus groups and doing trials, like sometimes one word can trip people up and they don’t get to the rest. Right.
Yeah. So having this overall picture. I think always really solidifies like Whoa, this was a lot and holy. Cause I think some people don’t put it together. If you just tell them, well, they broke their right leg. They broke their left leg. They’re in the hospital for a couple of days. Okay. Then they see it and they’re like, Oh, they couldn’t walk for a couple of like, probably months.
And like, it’s like, Oh, like I think so much more comes to their brain because it’s like, You’re stimulating that visual part of their brains, right? It’s like, Oh, wow. It like broke through the skin and it tore the muscle. And when you see it, it’s just, it actually [00:16:00] holds an emotional value and emotional impact.
Sometimes that’s key to just getting the jury to pay attention. Oh yeah. And that’s, I was going to like, as far as getting them to pay attention, what are some of the things or tricks that you do to get people to like, Whoa, all of a sudden snap up and pay attention. Yeah. One of my favorite things, and actually I do it in all my cases now.
I mean, I’ve been doing this for 22 years and about five years ago, I realized that. The best way to show an injury is to first show normal. So what you do is you show the leg normal and then on the next slide you break it. So it gives this amazing 2D animation effect and you can go back and forth between the both slides as fast or as slow as you want.
and literally break the leg visually again and again and again. So showing normal, it also gives the attorney that opportunity to introduce the anatomy didactically, then begin the [00:17:00] story, introduce the client and then break that leg. And that really holds the jury’s attention. And they also like 3d models.
So a 3D print from radiology or just a 3D visual. We had a case one time, medical malpractice case. And the client was sent home after an abdominal surgery with a very high fever. She should never have been discharged. And she was accumulating a massive amount of pus in her abdomen. And they drove her literally to the next emergency room that was down the street.
And when they opened her up, they, well, they didn’t aspirate it. She spontaneously ruptured with 3000 CCs of purulent fluid. And you can say that. But what is 3000 cc? How much is that really? And it’s three liters of fluid. So I took a whole liter coke bottle and I took the label off of it and I filled it with, [00:18:00] I made like fake purulent fluid with, I used applesauce and shampoo and conditioner and coffee creamer and a little bit of chocolate sauce.
And I mixed it into this horrible fluid and we had it in this jug. And if you show that to the jury, they’re just like, wow, that’s so cool. So disgusting. And they never forget that fact of the case. Yeah. I love that. You get, you’re getting into it, right? Like, do you make fake blood? I want to know about this.
I do. I do.
Oh my gosh. Okay. Tell me, you got to tell me a fake blood story. Tell me how that came about. Okay. A medical malpractice case. It well, no, I have to, I have some really good ones. First. I had a medical malpractice case where a man, they, during his abdominal surgery, they ruptured his inferior vena cava. like the size of a nickel, a hole in there.
He started bleeding out, bleeding out and [00:19:00] they’re calling for more blood. They’re calling for blood transfusions. And as they were pumping him full blood, he just continues to bleed out and he bled out 17 liters. So we made 17 bottles of fake blood and use those. And then there was another one where a man, he was like a paratrooper or something.
He went in for a neck fusion that was not related to a jump or a car crash or anything. He just actually went in for a regular ACD. And afterwards he developed a post op hematoma. And so the hematoma started growing in his neck. It displaced his airway, cut off his airway. He’s complaining. I can’t swallow.
I can’t breathe. Blah, blah, blah. They’re ignoring him, ignoring him. The surgeon actually says, give him a volume. He goes into cardiac arrest. They take him into the surgery to remove the hematomas too late. He died. [00:20:00] And in most operation notes, and it’s important to look for this, if you work in my mouth, but look and see how much fluid was aspirated at the end of the operation note, it’ll say like the sponge counts were correct, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
There was 150 milliliters of fluid collected. Well, what’s 150 milliliters of fluid. So I took a baking, a little Pyrex. Glass jar that you use for measuring liquid when you’re baking and I took it to one of my special effects gurus So I have a friend that is like the king of making fake gore and he works for the Walking Dead And does zombie stuff and all these kinds of things.
That’s called moulage in the medical term. But I asked him, I was like, can you fill this little Pyrex measuring cup with 150 milliliters of blood clot? And we had the best conversation. He’s like, well, how much of it was liquid and how much of it was [00:21:00] congealed? How do you want the texture to look? And sometimes it’s really fun.
And so anyway, we did, we made the fake blood in the measuring cup and we were able to pass that around to the jury. And they could imagine like literally holding their hand, the size of the clot that was stuck in our client’s throat. Wow. They cannot get it out of their brains. That’s so awesome. And I mean, yikes.
So that just makes me too. Holy crap. We’ll go all the things you guys that you can do. Do you just like absolutely love being super creative and being like, Oh yes, let’s try this. Let’s do that. I do. Sometimes I love a good break from just doing a bunch of car wreck cases or a bunch of broken ankles.
It’s nice to have a break and be able to be creative. There was also a testosterone overdose case. And so we came up with these three jars that we filled with different colored M& Ms based off the different levels of testosterone that were found in the [00:22:00] blood. Sometimes it’s just really fun. And it’s fun to figure out how exactly are we going to act this out in front of the jury.
How are we going to play it out? That’s why I love, I went to one of the Mark Lanier conferences and he gets so excited and I walked in one day and he’s got this water balloon wrapped around his neck and he’s talking about this case and broken seals and stuff. And I’m just like, I love this. This is what storytelling is about.
Oh yeah. And just. Absolutely. Getting them involved, right? Like you want them to pay attention, but that gets them involved in the story and visualizing it. So question. A lot of times people talk about animations. Tell us a little about that. I’m sure you’ve run into that quite a bit. So tell me. Yeah, so medical illustrators also animate illustration and animation.
They all were all the same people. We come out of the same department. But what I find is that animation is very critical when time is a factor or three d motion is a factor. [00:23:00] Other than that, animation is very expensive. I do believe in animating car crashes. I believe in animating different steps of a surgery if it’s medical malpractice.
But because I’ve been doing this for so long, and some of my attorneys I work with, I’ve worked with some of these people for 15, 18 years, and I’m not going to try and sell them on a really expensive animation if we can do everything with drawings. And if all of your illustrations are in a PowerPoint.
And you practice with it and you know how to page up page down between your slides, you can actually create 2d animation. So a lot of my exhibits work like animation, even though they’re not 3d animated. Yeah, no, that, that makes sense. And also worked a little bit with animators on things. And there’s a lot of space between what you want and what they actually create.
So tweaking it is. A lot. Like you said, it takes [00:24:00] a lot of time versus I got to assume you have a drawing, like there’s not as much time and effort and software or whatever that goes into tweaking things. Yeah. Animation can be very laborious and very expensive because. You’re probably changing a 3D model and you’re changing the camera angle in your changing lighting source, and then it has to render through the computer.
The other thing that’s really tricky with the animation is if the other side objects to it and gets thrown out, it’s gone. But if you have a slide presentation with 60 slides and the other side objects, you might still get to keep some of your slides. You can always throw one away and the jury still has something to look at.
If you put all your eggs in the animation, you might end up with nothing. So it’s just something to be aware of. Yeah. It’s super scary because you know, they’re going to object to it. And so it is [00:25:00] correct if that’s all you’re going to have. Well, that leads me to like, how do you, like, how do you normally work with lawyers?
I mean, you’ve given us some great examples of how you do it. Like the creativity and the, here’s how I teach them how to do it. So tell us a little bit, walk us through kind of the steps of what normally means to work with you. Sure. What usually happens is a lawyer will email or call or text nowadays or an Instagram message sometimes.
And they’ll tell me that they have a client and hopefully they won’t tell me that they’re going to trial in a week because that usually means that they’re not prepared and anything that I spend all night preparing for them, they still will not be prepared to use. So typically the attorney will call, they’ll tell me that they have a client that’s been injured Or malpractice.
And we will talk about dates. First of all, have you already designated an expert? Do you have a deposition? Do we want to create something for your expert deposition? When’s your [00:26:00] mediation? When’s the end of discovery? All of these things. When do you have to exchange exhibits? Then I will get all of the key medical records.
So I’ll want operation reports, radiology reports, EMS reports, any like police statements, descriptions, video surveillance, if there is photographs, if the family took pictures of the person in the hospital, like even if it’s just pictures of scars, a lot of times that’s helpful to know the length of incisions and things.
So I’ll ask for all the key medical records, definitely the radiology images. So these are very tricky, bothersome little files that come on a CD ROM from the hospital that are called DICOM files. I’m going to want all of those because sometimes we can find stuff that has either been covered up or not shown, or we can find a black and white smoking bullet.
Like, it’s awesome. And so [00:27:00] photographs, Anything important to the case, I’ll review that. And then I will usually have a phone call. This is what I’m imagining, or if it’s really straightforward, I’ll just create the illustrations and then we’ll go over them together. We’ll find, tweak them, and then we’ll send them to the expert and then we’ll find, tweak them for the expert.
And. Yeah, if the attorney wants to record a walkthrough, we just did one yesterday. The attorney called it a guided tour. So we all got on a zoom together, the illustrators, the expert, the attorneys, and we did a share screen and we went through all the illustrations. We did a guided tour and that can be recorded and you can listen to it again and again.
So People may have this thought in their minds, like, okay, well, is any really going to create something specific and special just for my case? So she just have a file where all the ACDF surgeries are and she just gets it out and just [00:28:00] puts my client’s name on it. I don’t sell any stock and the library of old work that I have, I would only use to open and change and make clients specific to your case.
So I try to put your client’s face. on all of the illustrations, and I find that that makes it very personable and it brings the jury directly into that person’s body, especially if they see them sitting there in the courtroom and then they see their face. with their spine, with the surgical tools, they can imagine more what the person endured.
I’m not a fan of stock art for multiple reasons. I have a good story, a good chapter in my book about what happened when an attorney was getting ready for trial and he bought some stock art and all of the images of the anatomy were drawn over a white male that looked like [00:29:00] a Ken Barbie doll. And his client was And I think it’s a fairly well fed Hispanic man that didn’t look anything like the illustrations and the attorney knew it was a problem and he didn’t use them.
He’s like, I can’t even use these. And we did, uh, oh my gosh, emergency helped me out and made everything client specific. And I think it can make a difference. or break the sympathy of the jury towards the client to know that it was really them and that the attorney spent the time and the money to have illustrations that are truly about the case.
Yeah, I think personalization definitely gets them more involved in the story. I mean, that’s what we’re always trying to do is get them involved in the story. And I also in doing focus groups, no, like juries actually really expect us to do like the CSI kind of stuff, like the pictures and actually have it look like the person.
So that’s their expectation. We really should meet it. Right. Yeah. [00:30:00] The CSI effect is true. Yes. Yes. Yes. I’m always impressed. And so you have a book. So tell me a little bit about the book and what made you decide to put it together? I lecture a lot to it. Well, I don’t lecture that much to attorneys. I feel like I should be lecturing more to attorneys.
I do a little bit, but I teach a lot to medical illustrators. And to law students, and I’m always teaching the exact same thing. So when you have a very unique profession, like medical illustration, you almost have to describe it once a day, like, Whoa, what is a medical illustrator? And so I’m teaching the same thing a lot again and again.
And I was thinking I need to write all of this down. And what I should do is I should just take like my 10 best cases and make 10 chapters. And it would be a book that I would give to the law schools. Okay. where a law professor could pick it up and be like, okay, I’m going to do a summer elective for all the law students that are interested in injury.
And we’re going to go through these 10 cases and we’re having any [00:31:00] come in and teach us basic anatomy. And I was so excited. I’m like, okay, I’m going to write this book. This is what I need to do. I need to educate young lawyers and I need to be teaching basic anatomy to look to young lawyers. And then I realized why I really need to be promoting the profession to other medical illustrators.
And I need to be letting, um, medical students know that if you’re a medical student and you’re going through four years of medical school and four years of residency and all this stuff that you really just want to animate or you really just want to make games, there’s a whole other profession for you that nobody knows about.
So I wanted to promote the profession. I wanted to teach law students. And then I started writing the book and it got really autobiographical. And then it started to get very gory and it got very funny. So I did create the book. I published it with CRC Press, which is the same as Routledge Textbooks. And the book is broken up into sections.
So there’s a section about what in the world’s medical [00:32:00] illustration. There’s a section about, okay, who am I and how did this happen? And how do you become a medical illustrator? Then there’s an entire section that’s all just for lawyers, like these are ideas for certain cases, and these are good solutions that happen for specific problems in cases.
And then in the end, there’s another section where I talk about emotionally engaging the jury and sort of the more emotional and finer points of what it’s like to work in injury law every day and almost deal with the secondary trauma. Of all of the injuries and all of the horrible things that happen to people constantly.
It feels like something is constantly horribly happening in my life because it’s all I’m working with. Sure. It’s you draw on it every day, right? I’m sure every other day, at least. Yeah. Awesome. Okay. So. I’m sure the other question people are [00:33:00] wondering where to get the book, which I’ll a hundred percent put all the links and everything in the show notes, but it sounds like this would be something if let’s say you’re a trial lawyer, or maybe you’re just going back to trials.
Like this would be a good resource to say, maybe I’m not a hundred percent sure about medical illustration. Like this would be the book for them to go by to learn like, Oh, this is the problem that it solves for me. This is how it helps me. Right. The book will definitely help you solve problems. Visually figure out when you need something visual to tell your story better, and it will inspire you to maybe.
Oh, maybe I can make a bowl of spaghetti for this case, and it’s going to help my jury understand something. So I have food analogies in there, but it’s inspiring. Of course, it’s a bunch of war stories. But it will help you think about your trial prep. I know we talk about like war stories and sometimes we end up going to see these and it’s just a bunch of war stories, but we as human beings learn from stories like we gather [00:34:00] so much from everybody else’s experience.
So I’m all about learning from other people’s stories. And I think that’s how we like. That’s how we gain some of these things that we may never happen to us. We can still know that. And that’s what the jury does too. Like they may never experience having to go to the emergency room or having a neck surgery.
You said it brings them into the story and then also brings them into that literal experience of the clients have had. Right. And even just a single illustration can set the stage. And turn it more into a story or a movie like they can truly visualize it. There’s a cool quote in the book. Actually, it always makes me think of this.
There’s a PhD named Marshall Hennington. And he says, without visual aids, counsel counts on each juror to imagine the information presented. With 12 jurors, There are likely to be 12 pictures, [00:35:00] so if you have 12 jurors and you’re telling them a story, they’re all going to see it differently based on their own experiences.
But if you show them a picture, all 12 of them are going to be thinking about that picture, and it gives you control of your story. Absolutely. And I love that you made it super simple because I know again, talking to other people and in how to work with illustrators, like sometimes it’s like, Oh, you have to use this many and this many slides and this many and the simplicity of just having one can really make the case.
Exactly. Fantastic. I think we’ve talked about everything that you do, which is pretty amazing. Jelly bean spaghetti, liters of blood. Is there anything we haven’t covered that you do? 3D printing. So we can always do a 3D print from your client’s actual radiology or CT, which can be Super effective. I also do just traditional trial boards.
So back in the day when we just took a big poster [00:36:00] board and illustrated on the poster board and put it on an easel, there are still certain venues in certain times when that is really effective and having a lot of experience and using a poster board. When is that good and bad? So If you’re convinced you want to walk around with a small board and approach the jury closely and talk about the anatomy or if you just so this is something that happens in court.
If you have these giant trial boards, they’re really bulky and they’re really heavy. You never want more than three because you can’t lift them. But They’re hard to hide. There’s sometimes nowhere to put them in the courtroom. And so I suggest taking your favorite slide out of your slide deck and printing it on a large board and just having it in the courtroom so that the juror that’s bored, that has the wandering eye, that’s just like looking around, wishing he was on his cell phone.[00:37:00]
They have that giant board to look over at. And so they’re still seeing what you want them to see, even if it’s not on the screen at that moment. So 3d printing, super awesome. I love the idea of having boards because I’ve definitely been in venues where it’s a projector. It is not, does not look good.
Grainy Elmo kind of situation. I know there’s a lot of courtrooms in the Southern part of the United States. are still in the back on technology. But it sounds to me also like you’ve got a pretty solid network of people. If there’s some kind of creative thing that you guys are thinking of, you probably know somebody who can help.
For sure. Yeah, my network is huge. And I spent four years on the board of governors for the Association of Medical Illustrators. And even though we’re 2000 people were only 2000 people, so I very often can find someone to do something if I cannot do it. Like I said, I don’t animate, but I know a [00:38:00] ton of animators and I know animators that excel in birth trauma.
And I know animators that are really good at crashing planes. So whatever happens, I can usually find someone to do it. And when I’m very busy, I also have other medical illustrators that are very talented. and trustworthy. And sometimes I will give an entire case to them and I can you can decide as the attorney whether you want me to art direct with that other medical illustrator or not.
And essentially it can be put together anyway you want. And with anyone that we need to use within the network. Yeah. And the other thing I want to point out that you talked about too, when you know, how to work with you and the timing of things is you talked about mediation, getting somebody involved like you early.
So you can bring that to mediation. I mean, That’s gotta be powerful. I’m sure you get calls from attorneys that say, Oh my gosh, Annie, like we [00:39:00] settled because this amazing illustration like totally sealed the deal for us. Right. And during mediation is your opportunity to be slightly inflammatory. So you can show everything.
There’s a beautiful quote that says don’t save the gold for trial. So if you know you have an opportunity to go to mediation. Show the other side, show the insurance adjuster that you’re completely prepared for trial, that you have all this cool stuff to show the jury. They’re going to be engaged.
They’re going to be excited. They’re going to see this horrible, gory thing, or they’re going to see this. And often, If you are preparing everything for mediation and you are that well prepared, even if you don’t settle trial feels like a breeze because you’ve already, you have all of your weapons.
assembled and in mediation for the other side to see that you are that well [00:40:00] prepared, lets them know that they are not prepared and can also force a settlement. Absolutely. I love the idea of let’s not reinvent the wheel. Like also let’s make an exhibit for my expert who’s going and then I get to use it there.
I can use it mediation and then I’m gonna use again at trial. Like I’m getting a lot of bang for my buck here. A lot of miles for this. A lot of attorneys are concerned about demonstrative aides. Not being able to go back into the jury box. They want it all to be demolished of evidence And so if you use your medical illustrations in your expert depositions and you have your doctor mark on them, they become an exhibit to the deposition.
And then when you introduce those in trial, they are demonstrative evidence. So anything you have your expert work with during a depo can go into the jury room. Usually if you present it if you are thinking in advance how you’re going to present your exhibits, you can get them in as evidence. Yeah.
Fantastic. [00:41:00] Awesome. Did we miss anything? No. The most important thing for an attorney to know is if you are, have voluminous case or intimidating medical records, just call a medical illustrator sooner than later. Let them in on the case. Even if they just review the case with you and don’t end up creating anything, it will be so incredibly valuable to understand your medicine and your anatomy and your case from someone that is.
It’s prepared and trained and visualize some fantastic. Tell us again where we can go get the book on Amazon, Amazon, of course. Of course. Awesome. I just want to let everybody know who’s listening and tuning in. We’re going to have all of Annie’s information in the show notes along with the link for the book, which I encourage you to get it.
If you haven’t already. I’ve never tried or use a medical illustrator, any idea what they do. I’m gonna put a link to her website too. So you can go see some of her work, but I know firsthand, I’ve seen it myself. We’ve used it in focus groups. Like [00:42:00] it is really helpful and it is so easy to work with Annie.
So again, Annie, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much, Elizabeth. It’s been really fun. Awesome. Glad to have you. Thank you. Thanks again for joining us with this episode, interviewing Annie Goff, our certified medical illustrator. All of her information and contact will be in the show notes, but I want to take a moment to say thank you so much for listening.
I appreciate your support of this podcast and would love it if you could rate and review it on your own. Podcast platform. These reviews and ratings really help other people find this podcast. And also if you could share it with somebody who would enjoy it. Thanks again.