Randi McGinn
Plaintiffs’ Trial Practice · Product Safety · Medical Harm
The Storyteller Who Went to Law School
McGinn has described trial work in storytelling terms: “Trials are won and cases are settled based on who tells the best story.” She was a storyteller before she was a lawyer. She worked as a journalist first, then earned her degrees from the University of New Mexico and the University of New Mexico School of Law — and started her legal career by giving birth to her daughter, Heather, the day before the three-day bar examination. She passed.
Over more than four decades and 135-plus trials — trucking collisions, workplace violence, medical malpractice, products liability, civil-rights and criminal matters — McGinn became the first woman president of the Inner Circle of Advocates. She was inducted into the Trial Lawyer Hall of Fame and joined five other women from across the country to form Athea Trial Lawyers, the first all-female national trial firm. She wrote Changing Laws, Saving Lives: How to Take on Corporate Giants and Win and has taught trial practice for the National Institute for Trial Advocacy and the National Criminal Defense College.
Her courtroom signature is demonstrative evidence: high-tech and low-tech, animations and toy trucks, life-size human blowups and three-dimensional models of roadways and a mountain hillside. She once left a pretentious Beverly Hills doctor standing before the jury covered in post-it notes and clutching a grapefruit to his chest. She exposed a world-renowned polygraph expert who had been polygraphing his own sperm cells in the dead of night. Her cross-examinations are famous enough that a local SWAT unit, after one hard-fought police-shooting case, put her face on its Christmas piñata.
The Open Span Beneath the Trailer
McGinn represented Riley Hein's estate in litigation arising from a May 2015 New Mexico collision, in which the young man's car became trapped beneath a semi-trailer and was dragged down the highway until it caught fire. The estate alleged that a side-underride guard could have engaged a passenger car's crash structure before the trailer entered the occupied space.
Side underride presented a mechanical problem different from an ordinary frontal collision. A passenger car can slide beneath the higher trailer rail before its front structure absorbs the load for which it was designed. The proposed guard had to be evaluated as part of two vehicles interacting: the sedan's approach, the height and stiffness of the trailer, the point of engagement, and the space the structure was designed to protect.
That distinction made geometry the heart of the case. McGinn and her trial team used engineering testimony, measurements, reconstruction, and demonstrative evidence to show the trailer height, approach angle, vehicle movement, proposed guard placement, and expected deformation. Jurors could follow the trailer rail, the path of the sedan, and the proposed guard's function as parts of one physical sequence.
The demonstratives also tested the plaintiffs' own theory. Dimensions, approach angle, vehicle speed, guard placement, and expected deformation had to agree with the reconstruction and physical evidence; a model that failed those measurements would expose the weakness before cross-examination. McGinn's method made the proposed safety feature visible while requiring the theory supporting it to remain mechanically exact.
In 2019, the jury held Utility Trailer responsible, producing an $18.9 million recovery against the company. McGinn's trial team connected the manufacturer's design and safety decisions to the mechanics of the collision and presented the negligence evidence in a form the jury accepted.
The case also entered a broader public record on side-underride safety. A Government Accountability Office study found an annual average of about 219 reported underride deaths involving large trucks from 2008 through 2017 and warned that inconsistent reporting probably concealed additional crashes. Federal rules addressed rear underride protection, but no universal side-guard requirement governed the design at issue. NHTSA later opened a formal inquiry into side guards and their costs, benefits, and engineering challenges, and Utility began offering a side guard as an optional upgrade.
A Hip Implant at the Junction of Two Metals
Michael McDonald's modular hip prosthesis paired a cobalt-chromium femoral head with a titanium trunnion. At a bench trial, the plaintiffs presented evidence of movement and corrosion at the mixed-metal junction and identified a ceramic head as an available alternative compatible with the implant system.
The trial did not turn on a generalized criticism of hip replacement. It turned on the particular component pairing and the availability of a different design. The court heard evidence that a ceramic head satisfied the manufacturer's requirements while avoiding the metal-on-metal junction — not an ideal device imagined after the fact, but another component capable of performing the same function.
Alternative-design proof required more than showing that ceramic existed. The comparison had to address the same intended function, compatibility with the remaining implant system, expected loading, and the corrosion mechanism attributed to the mixed-metal junction. That analysis connected a materials-science dispute to a concrete design choice the court could compare.
The district court found a strict-liability design defect. McGinn and Katie Curry represented McDonald on appeal, and the New Mexico Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment, leaving intact the finding based on the component materials, their interaction, and the ceramic alternative. A medical-device case can generate thousands of pages and a vocabulary of metallurgy, orthopedics, pathology, and regulatory history; McGinn's task was to find the decisive junction, explain what occurred there, and keep the medical consequences connected to the engineering evidence.
Sowards v. Biotronik: Following the Money
In Sowards v. Biotronik, the plaintiffs alleged that an unnecessary pacemaker had been implanted and pursued claims concerning the physician, the device company, training, company influence, and the decisions leading to implantation.
The disputed mechanism was not confined to a piece of hardware. Training materials, communications, timing, physician testimony, company involvement, and medical history had to be placed in sequence. The physical object was a pacemaker, but the case concerned the decisions surrounding implantation — the incentives moving among the participants before the treatment decision ever reached the patient. It was McGinn's follow-the-money discipline applied to medicine: her team organized the record to show how information and financial motive traveled through the network around the operating room.
McGinn, Kathy Love, and Michael Sievers represented the plaintiffs through a full jury trial and post-trial proceedings. The case produced a $28 million award together with further settlement and insurance recovery.
Hein, McDonald, and Sowards involved different legal theories and decision makers. Hein asked a jury to divide responsibility after a trucking collision; McDonald asked a judge to evaluate a medical-device design and an available alternative; Sowards asked jurors to examine the human network around a treatment decision. In each, McGinn made the chain of causation visible.
An Unsecured Gate in Arches National Park
In June 2020, Esther Nakajjigo — a 25-year-old Ugandan human-rights activist — was killed in Arches National Park when an unsecured gate swung open and struck the car in which she and her husband were traveling. McGinn, with Zoe Littlepage and Deborah Chang, represented the family in federal court, where the United States admitted liability and the case proceeded to a damages trial.
The court awarded $9.5 million to Nakajjigo's husband, Ludovic Michaud, $700,000 to her mother, and $350,000 to her father, for a total judgment of $10.55 million. It was the largest federal wrongful-death verdict in Utah history.
A Trial Practice Built on Seeing
Across McGinn's automotive, medical-device, civil-rights, and criminal matters, her evidentiary method begins with the physical mechanism, establishes a reliable chronology, and gives the factfinder a form in which the disputed event can be tested.
Her presentations have used animations, medical images, physical models, toy vehicles, and full-scale demonstratives tied to admitted testimony and physical evidence. A photograph establishes position; an engineer explains force and geometry; a physician addresses medical causation. The presentation connects those forms of proof without asking any witness to carry a conclusion outside that witness's expertise.
Those devices are not decoration. In a technical case, a demonstrative can expose a weak assumption as readily as it can clarify a strong one. A model of a roadway must correspond to the measurements. An animation must reflect the admissible reconstruction. A component display must permit the opposing expert to point to the same surfaces and offer a different explanation. Demonstratives make the dispute easier to test — which is exactly why McGinn, whose cases rest on what actually happened, keeps building them.
Her composure is its own instrument. She delivered the closing arguments in the Hein trial in Santa Fe days after learning that her husband, former New Mexico Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Daniels, had received a terminal diagnosis — steady to the last word for a family that needed her.
McGinn is the senior partner at McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers in Albuquerque, where her practice centers on catastrophic injury and wrongful death, with trucking, product, and medical cases at its core. She is a former governor of the American Association for Justice, a past president of the New Mexico Trial Lawyers Association, a former board member of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and a fellow of the International Academy of Trial Lawyers. Several of her cases begin with physical evidence that cannot speak for itself — a gap beneath a trailer, a corroded junction, a pacemaker already implanted, a gate that should have been latched. McGinn's work gives that evidence a sequence, a scale, and a place in the story a court must decide.