On this day sixty years ago, a 34-foot-tall Soviet rocket lifted off the Earth from a Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan. Its payload -- a shiny silver globe with four external antenna masts to broadcast a repeating radio chirp back to Earth. The Soviets called it Prosteyshiy Sputnik 1 -- “Simple Satellite 1.” The world’s first successful orbiting satellite was tiny, just 22 inches in diameter and weighing 184 pounds. But its “beep-beep -- beep-beep” signal was rebroadcast everywhere and easy to pick up directly by shortwave radio. Sputnik could also be seen in orbit by the naked eye, the sun glinting off its polished shell. In the moment a person first heard or saw Sputnik, they were catapulted into a new and different world. For 21 days Sputnik circled our planet, captured our imaginations, reshaped American national priorities, and changed the order of our lives. The Space Race began. NASA opened for business one year later. Within twelve years, Apollo 11 delivered two Americans to the Moon. Back to present-day Planet Earth. You are a lawyer on a jury trial. Opening statements begin tomorrow. How will you capture the attention of your audience of jurors? How will you get them to pay close attention, to focus on what matters most for your client? Even the best storyteller struggles with this. And to be honest, many trial presentations are, by their nature, not exactly heart-stopping. Plan for that. Find some element of the narrative that commands attention from the jurors, that challenges them to think deeply and to care genuinely about what is going on in that courtroom. Capture the jurors’ attention in that opening statement, and you can have it again later, coming back to that moment when the story struggles to engage the listener. Give jurors that moment they crave, that leaves them changed by something they just heard or saw. Make jurors feel that the trial will make a difference in someone’s life, even in their own lives. Mark the spot in the case that separates life “before” and life “after.” Ask yourself, what is going to be your trial’s “Sputnik” moment? Other free A2L articles A2L and free webinars related to opening statements, storytelling, and being memorable at trial include: 6 Ways to Use a Mock Trial to Develop Your Opening Statement Free Download: Storytelling for Litigators E-Book 3rd Ed. 14 Differences Between a Theme and a Story in Litigation 25 Things In-House Counsel Should Insist Outside Litigation Counsel Do 5 Things TED Talks Can Teach Us About Opening Statements 7 Ways to Draft a Better Opening Statement 5 Ways to Maximize Persuasion During Opening Statements - Part 1 Why a litigator is your best litigation graphics consultant 6 Reasons The Opening Statement is The Most Important Part of a Case How to Structure Your Next Speech, Opening Statement or Presentation The Effective Use of PowerPoint Presentation During Opening Statement 5 Things Every Jury Needs From You Is Hiring a Jury Consultant Really Worth It? Free A2L Consulting Webinar: 5 Ways to Maximize Persuasion During Opening Statements — Watch Anytime 12 Insider Tips for Choosing a Jury Consultant
During one college summer, I used to engage in aikido, a martial art. In retrospect, it was all a bit goofy, but I learned some good lessons from it. In particular, I learned about a technique common to many of the martial arts and to conflict in general. This is the idea that you can use someone's momentum against them. If they are running at you, you can move to the side and trip them -- and they will fall. This requires far less energy from you. Similarly, in the courtroom, while there is no physical contact (hopefully), there is certainly a direction and a momentum in the way factfinders arrive at conclusions. We've written about the idea of confirmation bias before in articles like I’m Right, Right? 5 Ways to Manage Juror Bias and Font Matters - A Trial Graphics Consultant's Trick to Overcome Bias. It's a concept that I believe all trial lawyers must understand at least somewhat. In the courtroom, using the momentum of a juror’s beliefs to help further those beliefs is a master trial lawyer technique. A new study reveals just how important it is for high-level trial lawyers to understand this concept of persuasion. The study, reported in the open-access journal Computational Biology, confirms something that is a little sad. It turns out that most humans will continue believing something that they previously believed, even when presented with clear evidence to the contrary and even when it hurts us to continue believing it. It's a bit more nuanced than that, but this is the essence of it. In the courtroom, we regularly work with banks accused of fraud, companies that have allegedly polluted the environment, and tech companies accused of theft of trade secrets. Trial lawyers always have the temptation to simply try to straightforwardly show judges and juries evidence that clearly contradicts the beliefs that those factfinders arrived with. That only makes sense, right? After all, if someone says you put the pollution there and you didn't, you just tell them you didn't do it, bring evidence, and you're off the hook, right? Unfortunately, my experience and this study do not support that idea. All humans arrive with certain biases when they show up to trial – such as these: Bankers are greedy. Oil companies don't care about the environment. Tech companies will do anything to win. All too often, trial counsel puts a lot of effort into trying to disprove these beliefs. Instead, consider the aikido move, step to the side, agree with the momentum, and use it to your advantage as follows: Bankers are greedy, so why would they ever do something that risked their money? XYZ oil company has been more reckless with the environment than you or I, but given what they went through before, do you really think they are dumb enough to do it again? Sure, tech companies will do anything to get ahead, but can you imagine anything more humiliating to someone as competitive as ABC company as looking as if you're not as smart as the other guy? Nothing is worth that when you are a competitive tech geek. In other words, find a way to accept that either your factfinders walked in with a certain bias or that your opponent will help them form a bias during opening statements – and then run with it. There’s no better way to test this approach than in a mock trial setting. That’s where you can learn to anticipate the biases and get ahead of them. Common sense, that new study, and several decades of litigation experience bear this out. Other free A2L articles and resources related to confirmation bias, the overwhelming power of the opening statement, and the power of effective storytelling in the courtroom include: When Smart Ain’t So Smart - Cognitive Bias, Experts and Jurors 7 Ways to Overcome Cognitive Bias and Persuade Still Think Persuasion is About Talking While Showing Bullet Points? 5 Essential Elements of Storytelling and Persuasion How Much Text on a PowerPoint Slide is Too Much? 5 Ways to Maximize Persuasion During Opening Statements - Part 4 Free A2L Consulting Webinar: Persuasive Storytelling for Litigation Good-Looking Graphic Design ≠ Good-Working Visual Persuasion I’m Right, Right? 5 Ways to Manage Juror Bias Persuasive Graphics: How Pictures Are Increasingly Influencing You 14 Places Your Colleagues are Using Persuasive Graphics That Maybe You're Not Font Matters - A Trial Graphics Consultant's Trick to Overcome Bias Why the President is Better than You at Creating Persuasive Graphics Law360 Interviews A2L Consulting's Founder/CEO Ken Lopez Are Jurors on Your “Team”? Using Group Membership to Influence Subscribe to this blog for free
Many of us find ourselves, from time to time, in the position of having to give advice to friends and acquaintances. In those circumstances, it’s simply human nature that the person who is seeking the advice is frequently more than a bit resistant to following it. So the person giving advice needs to figure out ways to overcome that resistance and to persuade the friend. I believe that the same principles that help us persuade our fellow human beings to follow our advice are also very helpful for trial lawyers who want to convince a jury of the rightness of their case. Here are some of them. To me, the essence of persuasion is trust. If that friend trusts you, she is much more likely to follow your advice. The same is true of a jury. Much of a trial team’s work can be seen as a concerted effort to build up trust with the jury. Trust has several components. Certainly, a key component is credibility. Do your background and experience indicate to the jury that you know what you’re talking about? Another component is comfort. Standing before the jury, do you appear comfortable and at ease with what you are advising the jurors? Yet another aspect is rapport. This is a matter of addressing the jury directly and being mindful and focused so as to develop a connection with the jurors. No distractions or multi-tasking can be appropriate. The jury is your only focus. Then of course there is empathy. This is very important in the context of advice-giving to friends, and even more so with a jury. If your client is, say, a large company accused of polluting a river, you need to empathize with the jurors’ possible bias against your client. You need to give them a narrative that will help them change their preconceptions. Then there is culture. That is hard to define, but it involves all of the life experiences that the jurors come to court with. You wouldn’t speak identically to a jury in a high-income New York suburb as you would to a jury in the West Texas plains or the Florida Keys. In addition to trust, a key element of persuasion is logical argument. You can have a great deal of credibility with a friend and share her cultural background, but if your advice doesn’t make sense, she won’t follow it. The same is true of a jury. Finally, one must not neglect the importance of time. Even your best friend wouldn’t want you to waste his time while giving advice in a drawn-out way, and juries too tend to tune out an argument that is too lengthy and complicated. As with the other components, a good deal of the art of persuasion amounts to common sense. Other free A2L articles related to persuasion techniques, connecting with jurors, and being likable in the courtroom include: Three Top Trial Lawyers Tell Us Why Storytelling Is So Important Like It or Not: Likability Counts for Credibility in the Courtroom Still Think Persuasion is About Talking While Showing Bullet Points? Free A2L Consulting Webinar: Persuasive Storytelling for Litigation SPICE Is the Key to Persuasion Free A2L Consulting Webinar: Winning Your Case BEFORE Trial Using Persuasive Litigation Graphics — Watch OnDemand Now Free A2L Consulting Webinar: 5 Ways to Maximize Persuasion During Opening Statements — Watch Anytime How Pictures Are Increasingly Influencing You 5 Ways to Apply Active Teaching Methods for Better Persuasion 12 Ways to SUCCESSFULLY Combine Oral and Visual Presentations 5 Chart Tricks and Cheats to Watch Out For 7 Ways to Avoid Making Your PowerPoint Slides Your Handout 14 Tips for Delivering a Great Board Meeting Presentation Presentation Graphics: Why The President Is Better Than You 12 Reasons Bullet Points Are Bad (in Trial Graphics or Anywhere) 8 Videos and 7 Articles About the Science of Persuasion Could Surprise Be One of Your Best Visual Persuasion Tools? How to Be a Great Expert Witness (Part 3)
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting Over the past three decades I've heard hundreds of lawyers say, “I won't need many graphics because my case is not very visual.” Usually, that's followed up with “It's really a case about documents” or “It’s a dispute over who said what,” or “It’s just about what someone's actions were.” Fortunately, there’s a clear and straightforward answer to these objections: What drives the need for visuals in a case is not the underlying subject matter. It’s your audience's need to see things as well as hear them. In effect, every case is a visual case today. So instead of wondering whether your case lends itself to litigation graphics, you should probably be asking yourself whether you are substituting your judgment about the need for visuals for your audience's core psychological needs. Remember, lawyers tend not to be visual learners themselves, while many or most jurors will be in that category. One trial lawyer said this particularly well in this short video about why litigation graphics are important.
by Tony Klapper (former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting Here in these pages, we often talk about storytelling as a fundamental principle of successful trial work. But what are the elements of a good story? A good story is one that will be retold – it’s one that begs to be retold. Just as our ancestors told and retold the fundamental stories of their nations by the fireside, a great story is one that people today will repeat at the watercooler, in the bar, in the line at the grocery, or anywhere that there’s time for a narrative. A compelling movie (think of the Pixar films or a Steven Spielberg production) or a great epic (as far back as the Iliad or the Odyssey) or even an account of business success (think Steve Jobs, Bill Gates or Thomas Edison) will have the essential elements of a story. And as trial lawyers, we want jurors to pick up the story that we tell, and retell it in the jury room during deliberations. Each of these great stories has a few things in common: a distinct source of conflict or tension, compelling character development, and a message that is conveyed, either directly or subtly, that conforms with the values of the people who are hearing the story.
by Tony Klapper Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting We have written many times about the fact that scientific studies have shown that nonlawyers (who are the vast majority of jurors) tend to be visual learners, and tend not to be auditory learners or kinesthetic learners –people who learn by experiencing. Lawyers (who are the ones who present facts and tell stories to jurors) tend not to be visual learners and are often drawn from the ranks of auditory or kinesthetic learners. Of course, this can present an intrinsic problem that we have discussed before. If most lawyers like to tell but not show, and our audience, the jury, prefers to be shown something and not to be told, we may completely fail to connect with our audience. It’s not just psychologists and other students of human behavior who say so; it’s also people who devote full time to understanding trial advocacy. The National Institute of Trial Advocacy (NITA) is a fantastic organization that represents the “gold standard” of trial advocacy. In addition to putting on outstanding CLE programs for newbie and experienced litigators, NITA also publishes many great books from scholars who have thought long and hard about advocacy.
by Tony Klapper (former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting In our last post, we discussed why expert witnesses should rely on visual aids and litigation graphics in preparing their testimony. Another key point for expert witnesses is that no matter how well credentialed a witness is, if the jury thinks he is a jackass or if he acts in a way that is inconsistent with jurors’ perception of how an expert should act, his testimony will be useless. In every trial, the jury and the judge evaluate the credibility of every witness who testifies. If you have done something as a witness to lessen your credibility quotient, what you say will either be filtered through that lens or not even considered. For example, some experts make the mistake of engaging opposing counsel in a pitched battle during cross-examination. While a feisty expert who resists answering “yes” or “no” questions might be seen by her attorney as a hero, the jury more likely sees an expert who is being difficult -- particularly when the “yes” and “no” questions are intuitively answerable. Similarly, an expert who regularly resorts to “I don’t recall” and “I don’t know” responses to questions that objectively seem knowable and recallable also undercuts her credibility. The same is true of an expert who fights over the meaning of words that have common meanings, or starts asking questions of the questioner.
by Katie Bagwill A2L Consulting Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to learn, just from hearing a witness utter a few phrases, that the witness is lying? Unfortunately, we can’t read minds, so we need to make do with second best: reading the tone of the witness’s voice and eye movements. The scientific community has been working hard to develop a way to gauge an individual’s truth telling based on the person’s behavioral, verbal, and physiological responses. In the meantime, you can use these ideas when questioning a witness, preparing your own witness to give testimony, and selecting potential jurors.
by Katie Bagwill A2L Consulting Watching a mock jury deliberate is a lot like watching Dr. Phil; there is a lot of arguing, and most of the “facts” end up skewed. Nevertheless, a mock jury’s conclusions and how they reach them are essential to any lawyer who wants to understand the weaknesses of his or her case. Here are some of my takeaways from observing this fascinating exercise recently. Be clear. If a point or idea you want to instill in the jury isn’t clarified enough, you will see it warped and interpreted wildly during the deliberations. During each mock presentation that I saw, the amount of attention paid and the volume of notes taken varied, but one constant seemed to be apparent: jurors want to feel as if they have all the information. Even if they don’t, once they have a firm opinion, they will use any of the “facts” they have to defend it. Naturally you want these facts to be in your favor, but for the sake of this exercise it is actually more beneficial to you for the stacks to be weighted against you. In order to improve, you need to know how you could lose. Be passionate but humble. It is important for the jury to feel empathetic toward your client, and for that to happen they need to connect with you. While presenting your case, you want to appear confident and informed without coming off as arrogant. Persuasion is all about presentation. One of the most important notes that our mock jurors made about one of our presenters was that he seemed “smug,” which made him seem sneaky, and it spiraled from there.
by Tony Klapper (former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting In my last post, I talked about the fact that an expert witness needs to express her expertise in a convincing way – but also in a way that the typical juror can understand and not in the language of a specialist. The next step in becoming a truly effective expert witness is to understand the power and the importance of visual learning. It’s a safe bet that your peer-reviewed articles contain tens of thousands of words. Your academic poster contains hundreds, maybe thousands, of words. Your PowerPoint presentations delivered to your peers contain bullet point after bullet point of words (and maybe a smattering of cartoons). Ask yourself: How many television commercials convey the importance of the advertised product through words? How many magazine advertisements do the same through words? How many movies convey their story through words? How many architects explain their designs through words? How many patents have no pictures and just words? And how many biology textbooks have no illustrations and just words? In all these instances, the visual is what matters.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting I go to a marketing conference in Boston every year, and every year I see a handful of outstanding presentations about storytelling. One stood out for me this year that will have immediate applicability for our field. The presenter, Amina Moreau, is a filmmaker and co-founder of Stillmotion. Her session, Scientific Secrets of Superpowerful Storytellers: Techniques to Spur Action, covered some topics that are particularly useful for trial lawyers looking to persuade audiences. We are constantly discussing storytelling among ourselves at A2L and with our litigation-focused client base. We've published books about storytelling, conducted webinars about storytelling (a new one is going to be announced soon), and routinely conduct storytelling CLEs at top law litigation departments. Our articles about storytelling at trial are read and shared regularly. See Dan Pink, Pixar, and Storytelling for the Courtroom, 5 Essential Elements of Storytelling and Persuasion, and Storytelling at Trial Proven to be Scientifically More Persuasive. Using neuroscience as a foundation, Ms. Moreau raised a question that we frequently wrestle with: Whom should we tell stories about to generate the most powerful call for action and to be as persuasive as possible? Should the story be about a team, should it be about the CEO, should it be about the victim's wife, should it be about the inventor? How do we make the story most meaningful to our audience? After all, if the story is not meaningful, we can't connect with the audience, and if we can't connect, we can't persuade using emotions and the framework that a well-told story provides.
by Tony Klapper (former) Managing Director, Litigation Consulting A2L Consulting You are a specialist in your field of study. You are about to take the stand as an expert witness in court. You have read hundreds, if not thousands, of articles in your field. You likely have an advanced degree that touches on the area about which you have been asked to testify. You may have taught classes on the subject at a university. You may have presented your thoughts and research at conferences attended by your peers. You are smart. You are well-credentialed. But are you prepared to testify in a court of law? Do you know what you have to do to be just as effective on the witness stand as you are at the podium? To help you answer these questions, here is a series of articles that chronicle the unique challenges that a testifying expert faces and lays out a road map for overcoming those challenges and becoming a truly effective expert witness.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting We at A2L are launching a new e-book this month. This time, we are publishing the book jointly with IMS ExpertServices, one of the nation’s premier providers of experts and consultants for top law firms and Fortune 500 corporations. The title of the new book is Expert Trial Testimony: Direct and Cross-Examination. The book answers every question you might have thought of in connection with expert testimony at trial in U.S. courts, and it does so in a clear, conversational manner. Plus, it’s a free download. As more and more money is at stake in civil trials, and as the subject matter grows more and more complex and difficult for many jurors to understand without assistance, the value and importance of expert witnesses has grown dramatically. The difference between an effective, well-prepared, convincing expert witness and one who does not come across well to a jury can often be the difference between winning and losing a trial where hundreds of millions, or billions, of dollars are at stake. The book is directed at experts themselves and gives dozens of do’s and don’ts that will make any expert’s testimony effective and convincing at a trial. It’s not only experts who will benefit from reading this book but also trial attorneys, trial technicians, in-house counsel, and anyone who wants to understand the best ways to put on expert testimony. The book addresses the typical expert witness as follows:
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