David Ball
Malekpour & Ball Consulting
David Ball who wrote trial advocacy’s best-selling strategy book – David Ball on Damages – and is a litigation researcher and strategist with North Carolina’s Malekpour & Ball Consulting (JuryWatch, Inc.). He is widely acknowledged as the nation's most influential jury consultant, communications expert, and advocacy teacher. His training is in science, engineering, and small-group communications, and he is a 30-year veteran of the professional theater.
Dr. Ball and his partner, NC lawyer/consultant Artemis Malekpour, consult on civil and criminal cases across the country. They’re routinely credited with turning the most difficult cases into significant victories. They are the nation’s only trial consultants qualified to safely and comprehensively guide attorneys with Reptilian, David Ball on Damages, and David Ball on Criminal Defense methods and strategy. Their hundreds of brainstorming sessions – “WorkDays” – have become the gold standard for case-strategy development.
In addition to David Ball on Damages, Dr. Ball’s other landmark advocacy books include Theater Tips & Strategies for Jury Trials, Reptile (with Don Keenan), Theater for Trial (with Joshua Karton), Reptile in the MIST, and David Ball on Criminal Defense.
Dr. Ball has taught law students at North Carolina, Wake Forest, Pittsburgh, Minnesota, Roger Williams, Loyola, and Campbell schools of law, at Duke Law as Senior Lecturer. He’s helped train public defenders around the country. He's an award-winning teacher for the North Carolina Advocates for Justice, and he has long been among the nation's most in-demand CLE speakers. His favorite job was taxi driver in the 1970s in Stamford, CT. David particularly appreciates good criminal defense attorneys because his Daddy was a Catskill Mountains bootlegger during Prohibition.
Dr. Ball is also a pioneer in adapting film and theater methods into trial techniques. His theater/film students have won Oscars, Obies, Tonies, and Emmies; his own plays have been staged at professional theaters off-Broadway, throughout North America, and overseas; and he’s directed more than a hundred shows. He helped to lead Minneapolis’s famed Guthrie Theater, as well as Carnegie-Mellon University’s theater conservatory and, as Chair, Duke University’s Drama Department. His best-selling film and theater training book, Backwards and Forwards, has been the field’s standard every year since 1984, and is now used by trail lawyers as well. His crossover books, Theater Tips and Strategies for Jury Trials along with the new Theater for Trial, are the standards for the use of film and theater techniques in litigation.
Dr. Ball also wrote the cult classic film Hard Rock Zombies, though he made up for it by writing Swamp Outlaw, a novel about Civil War Era Lumbee hero Henry Berry Lowery, recently optioned for a motion picture.
