Reflections from the Michael Koskoff Lecture Series — Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association Annual Meeting, June 8, 2026 by Ryan Daugherty, Attorney at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, P.C.
At Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder, the Michael Koskoff Lecture Series is not merely an item on the CTLA program. It is a reminder of what this work is supposed to be. Michael Koskoff did not just try cases — he set a standard for what a trial lawyer owes to the people who walk through the door. When his name is on a lecture, every attorney at our firm pays attention. Not out of obligation. Out of gratitude, and something that feels a lot like responsibility.
On June 8, 2026, Peter Tragos — known across the trial bar simply as “Lawyer You Know,” which has to be the best nickname in the profession, second only to whatever they’re calling me behind my back — delivered a presentation that earned its place in that series. His talk, The Modern Jury World: How Cameras Are Changing Trial Advocacy, offered something rarer than a clever argument: a genuinely new way of thinking.
The insight is deceptively simple. When a trial is streamed live, thousands of ordinary people watch — and they talk. They comment in real time. They get confused by the same things jurors get confused by. They ask the questions your cross-examination never did. They notice when your expert sounds like he’s testifying for the other side.
That running commentary, Tragos argued, is intelligence. The people posting why didn’t anyone ask about the timeline? are not armchair lawyers. They are your jury. They are telling you, for free, what your $500-an-hour focus group consultant should have told you three months ago.
We should be reading those threads. Not for entertainment — though some of them are genuinely entertaining — but because clarity is a discipline, and the public has no patience for anything less.
I sat with that idea longer than I expected to. Several of my own cases have drawn media coverage, and I have spent time watching Tragos’s videos — the ones where he distills a full day of testimony into an hour or two of the rulings and exchanges that actually matter. That is not a small skill. Compressing a day in a courtroom without losing what the day was about takes judgment, and Tragos has it. He is also good — genuinely good — at fielding viewer questions live, in a way that helps the public jury understand what is actually at stake in a ruling or an exchange they just watched.
Listening to him, I felt inspired to put myself in the spotlight and to do something both humbling and enlightening: I went back to the news coverage of my own cases and, for the first time with real purpose, read the comments. Not to feel good or bad about them — to learn from them. What were people confused about? What questions kept surfacing that our filings hadn’t answered? Where there was an opening to respond to a misunderstanding, I started drafting that response.
The deeper lesson, the one I keep returning to, is this: lawyers read evidence like lawyers. We are trained to. We spot the issue, find the rule, build the argument. A juror — or a member of the public reading about the case over coffee — does none of that. They react to what they see, in the order they see it, without the framework we carry into every file. Tragos’s point was that we should not wait for twelve people in a box to teach us that gap exists. If the case is in the news, the gap is already visible, in the comments, today.
That requires some humility. It means accepting that the way we understand our own case is not the way it lands on the people who will ultimately judge it — or judge our client in the meantime. For cases receiving media attention, that gap is not theoretical. It is sitting in a comment thread, waiting to be read.
When your trial is being watched, the public is not just an audience. They are a second proceeding running in parallel. The narrative that hardens there — the one with no bailiff, no rules of evidence, and an unlimited jury pool — matters for your client. Harnessing it begins in preparation, not after opening statements, and for cases already in the news, it begins now.
The camera has entered the courtroom. The public is in the gallery. The question Tragos left us with is whether we are going to use that reality, or simply be subject to it.
I know which answer Michael Koskoff would have given. And I know which answer the lawyers who carry his name are obligated to give.
About Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder P.C.
Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder P.C., based in Connecticut, is a nationally recognized law firm that has achieved landmark verdicts and settlements in cases involving defamation, medical malpractice, civil rights violations, dangerous products, governmental negligence, and catastrophic personal injury. The firm is committed to fighting for justice on behalf of individuals and families harmed by preventable wrongdoing. Learn more at www.koskoff.com