Sarah Murray is an anthropologist, writer, teacher, and performance coach who has been working as a trial consultant since 1999. She studied at Bryn Mawr College and the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a DDRA Fulbright Scholar and conducted two years of field research in Indonesia before leaving to start her trial consulting career.
Before joining TrialQuest, she ran her own company, Trialcraft, managing a team of consultants and research assistants to provide litigation research and trial consulting in a broad range of cases in state and federal courts.
Over her career, Sarah has worked on thousands of cases, picked over 500 juries, prepared hundreds of witnesses, and worked on over two dozen trials from beginning to end, usually embedded in the trial team, helping to prepare witnesses, produce witness examination outlines, and producing trial graphics.
She has helped defend what was believed to be indefensible – for example, supporting a Korean chip manufacturer in achieving a total defense win in in a high-profile antitrust case when their executives had pled guilty in a related matter; and picking the jury that exonerated heiress Tiffany Li – who had already been convicted in the media - in the highest profile California murder case in the past 10 years.
She has also helped the underdog win big trial verdicts, such as helping a profoundly injured young woman win a $15.5 million product liability case against U-Haul – the first such verdict against U-Haul in the nation; and helping a commercial construction subcontractor recover over $65 million from their general contractor, who claimed her client had caused delays on their mismanaged construction project.
Sarah brings to your case a deep understanding of trial narrative and persuasive, non-polarizing communication. An early adopter of computer technology, she worked as a technical writer and trainer early in her career and also has an unusual ability to translate complex technical information into lay language and graphics.
Sarah focuses primarily on high-stakes, complex cases often featuring emotionally charged situations or parties who face high levels of bias.
These include:
- Employment defense in private, healthcare and public sector workplaces
- Criminal and civil antitrust
- School negligent hiring and supervision cases where teachers have committed sex crimes
- High stakes criminal cases, including murder, sex crimes, tax crimes, and fraud
- Patent, trademark, trade secret and other intellectual property disputes
- Contract and complex commercial cases
- Insurance coverage disputes
- Title insurance coverage and bad faith
- Escrow fraud and negligence
- Class action
- Medical malpractice defense
- Other professional negligence defense
- Asbestos, talc and other toxic tort defense
- High stakes product liability and personal injury cases
Sarah is known for her skill preparing both expert and fact witnesses, turning problem witnesses into powerful trial performers. She has helped prepare engineers, physicists, geologists, physicians, computer scientists, industrial hygienists, tax lawyers, financial experts and commodities traders, among others, to testify effectively to lay juries in a wide range of cases. She regularly prepares fact and party witnesses in medical malpractice cases, real estate litigation, and employment defense for a large university system, often helping clients resolve cases in the discovery phase.
Education
UC Berkeley
M.A., Anthropology
Ph.D., Anthropology (ABD)
Bryn Mawr College
B.A., Anthropology
Certificates in Litigation and Community Dispute Resolution
Straus Institute for Dispute Resolution, Pepperdine University, California
SEEDS Community Resolution Center, Berkeley, CA
