You are the arbiters of the facts here," Greenberg Traurig lawyer Roland Garcia said to the jury during opening statements of Texas's inaugural Business Court jury trial in February. Two weeks later, those twelve jurors returned a 10-2 verdict for Powers after less than five hours of deliberation.
The trial was Powers v. Berry, a $200 million dispute arising out of a billion-dollar crude oil delivery project. Created in 2024 to hear large, complex commercial cases, the Business Court has largely resolved matters through motions and bench trials. In this instance, the parties did not resolve the dispute pre-trial and one side requested a jury, placing twelve jurors with no former knowledge of crude oil logistics in the position of deciding what the evidence showed.
From the outside, Powers v. Berry looks like a familiar “he said, he said” dispute. One side says there was a deal for an ownership stake. The other says there was not. The record is large, the timeline is long, and the underlying business is technical. None of that is unusual.
No specialist to fill the gap
What was unusual was the forum. A high-dollar, fact-dense business dispute decided by a jury, without the buffer of a specialist judge who has seen hundreds of similar disputes. Inconsistencies that might be reconciled through experience or background knowledge are encountered directly. Jurors decide what they hear and what they see, in the order it is presented, without the experience to fill in gaps or supply context that is not in the record.
In a jury trial, understanding has to be delivered through evidence. Practices, expectations, and assumptions that may be familiar to lawyers or executives only carry weight if they are shown through documents, testimony, and conduct. Anything that relies on shared professional understanding risks being missed or misunderstood.
Chronologies, factual alignment, and consistency across witnesses always matter. But with Texas signalling that even its largest commercial disputes may now be resolved by juries, not just specialist judges, they matter more than ever. Small shifts in how events are described, or in what documents are said to establish, can take on disproportionate significance to a jury who have nothing but the facts to go on.
When the record expands
In large cases, maintaining that alignment is difficult. Teams expand, responsibility is distributed, and different lawyers engage with different parts of the record. Over time, slightly different versions of the same facts take hold in different places. Those differences often surface late, during witness preparation or testimony, when they are hardest to manage. At that point, they are no longer internal coordination issues, but part of the evidence the jury is weighing.
This is the problem we built Wexler to solve. It extracts factual assertions across the entire evidentiary record and orders them into a single, source-linked view of what happened and when. It listens to witness testimony and tests it against documents and prior statements already in the case. When accounts align, that alignment is visible. When they diverge, the divergence is explicit. When a claim lacks support, the gap is clear. In proceedings where court rules permit, Wexler Real-Time can check live testimony against the documentary record as it is given, flagging inconsistencies before the witness leaves the stand.
For a team preparing for a jury trial, that allows lawyers to see where the record holds and where it does not, early enough to make deliberate choices about how the case is framed. It reduces the risk that the first time a contradiction is discovered is when a juror hears it. And by structuring the factual record around events, decisions, and supporting evidence, Wexler helps teams ensure that business significance is visible in the facts themselves, rather than assumed.
The Texas Business Court is new, but the discipline required to try cases like this is not. When jurors are asked to decide what happened, the facts have to be able to stand on their own. The earlier they are assembled, ordered, and tested against the full record, the fewer surprises there are when 12 people are asked to arbitrate them.