When a loved one dies, you have no visible injuries to show. No expert can calculate the cost of maintaining a life in absence of a child, a wife, or a brother. Instead, your client's losses are invisible, difficult to quantify, and often incomprehensible. How do you communicate those intangible damages to a mediator, a judge, or a jury?

Grief and Loss: Identifying and Proving Damages in Wrongful Death Cases brings expert knowledge from one of the country's leading trial attorneys specializing in wrongful death cases, Robert T. Hall, and from noted grief therapist Mila Ruiz Tecala. Together, Hall and Tecala teach you about the stages of grief, how the loss of a parent, a child, a spouse, or a sibling differ from each other, and how losing any loved one is a lifelong, life-altering experience. Applying the strategies in this book, you can show jurors that a family who experiences a death has not one loss, but a network of losses. Learn how to convey to the jury and decision makers that a death in the family is the death of that family.

Your job, as counsel, is to communicate that an untimely death is a damage just as tangible and real as wage loss or medical costs. This book can show you the way. Additionally, Hall and Tecala help you navigate the difficult waters of sorrow—various family members grieve in different ways, on different schedules, and sometimes in conflict with each other. What may seem like irrational or inexplicable behavior may in fact be a part of mourning that a therapist would expect. With this book as a guide, you can become more understanding of your clients' pain, and more effectively communicate that pain to a mediator, a judge, or a jury.

This book is accompanied by a CD-ROM that contains the wrongful death laws in all fifty states, sample closing arguments by Hall and other notable trial lawyers, sample direct examinations of wrongful death beneficiaries and a grief counselor, several checklists, legal briefs, and other information on wrongful-death related topics.

This book is strongly recommended by David Ball as essential for presenting damages in wrongful death cases.