For years I answered one set of questions for hospital IT departments: who touched this record, when, and what did they change. It took me longer than it should have to see that those are the same questions that decide medical malpractice cases — and that work is what I do now. So when Jon Lomurro’s new book landed on my desk, it stayed there. I am writing about it because it is genuinely good, and because it sits right next to the work I do every day.
Who Jon is
If you practice in New Jersey, you probably already know him. Jon is a certified civil trial attorney and board-certified in medical malpractice law — a combination rarer than it sounds. He chairs the New Jersey State Bar Association’s Medical Malpractice Committee, has written five books on legal practice, and lectures nationally on audit trails, electronic medical records, and courtroom technology. When Fortune published “Death by a Thousand Clicks,” its investigation into how electronic health records can harm patients, Jon was one of the voices it quoted. He has been thinking about the intersection of records, technology, and the courtroom longer than most of us have had the vocabulary for it.
What the book is about
Dropping the Digital Anchor (AAJ Press) is, at its core, about persuasion in a courtroom that has quietly gone digital. Per AAJ’s description, it is a practical guide to collecting, organizing, and presenting case information using modern digital tools. What makes it more than a software manual is the foundation Jon builds underneath it. He grounds the technology in two older bodies of knowledge: Aristotle’s rhetoric — the original framework for how human beings are actually persuaded — and Richard Mayer’s research on multimedia learning, the modern science of how people absorb information when words and images are combined well, or badly.
I am not going to reproduce the book here; read it for the specifics. But the through-line is worth stating: a slick exhibit is not the goal. Comprehension that survives the deliberation room is the goal, and the tools matter only to the extent they serve it.
Two halves of the same case
Here is where it connects to what I do. I am not a trial lawyer. I am the person you call to examine the electronic medical record itself — to pull the audit trail, surface the late entries, the post-event edits, the quiet deletions, and tell you whether the chart in front of you is the chart that existed on the day of the injury.
Those two jobs — Jon’s and mine — are two halves of the same case.
A jury that has been walked through a clean, well-built digital presentation still has to trust the record underneath it. You can assemble the most persuasive timeline of your career and watch it come apart on a single cross-examination question, if the other side can show that the entries behind it were created after the fact. The reverse is just as true: the most damning audit-trail finding in the world lands flat if the jury cannot follow what it means. The authentication work makes your timeline defensible; Jon’s book is about making it persuasive. You need both, and a lot of cases lose one or the other.
That is also why I wrote a separate, nuts-and-bolts piece on using the HITECH Act to get the complete record — including the audit trail. Think of Jon’s book as the persuasion half and that guide as the foundation half: get the real record first, then present it well.
Where to get it
You can find Dropping the Digital Anchor through AAJ Press. If you try cases that lean on medical records, electronic evidence, or any exhibit you are going to put on a screen, it is worth your time.
If the record itself is in question in a case you are working, that is the part I help with. You can read more about the medical-legal practice or book a 20-minute intake to talk it through. No pitch — just an honest read on whether an audit-trail analysis would change your case.