Part 4 of the Persuasion Occasion podcast series with Perkins Coie (see parts 1, 2, 3, and the full podcast on Spotify) Trial consultants love stories. Unfortunately, facts occasionally insist on participating. One of my favorite persuasion lessons comes from an antitrust matter involving the proposed merger of two of the largest airlines at the time. The case never produced quite the courtroom drama we imagined. The matter settled a couple of weeks before trial, and like many high-stakes cases, the final resolution came before every argument could be fully tested in court. Yet one demonstrative from that matter taught me more about persuasion than many cases that actually went to verdict. The exhibit was almost embarrassingly simple. It wasn't a 3D animation. It wasn't a sophisticated economic model. It wasn't a dazzling piece of trial graphics. It was a slowly scrolling list of airline bankruptcies. Just a list. One name after another. Many of them familiar. Eastern. Pan Am. TWA. Braniff. People of a certain age recognize these names immediately. They were once household brands. Today, they're gone. And as the list continues to scroll, something interesting happens. You start to see the airline industry differently. Here's my explanation below:
We have previously discussed how valuable timelines used as legal graphics can be in the presentation of facts at trial. As we have noted, most cases involve the placing of events along some sort of time sequence, and timelines, if they are well designed, can give jurors a straightforward introduction to the facts of a case. In fact, we recently released an e-book describing best practices for the use of timelines and legal graphics at trial.
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