I am delighted to announce the release of Persuadius's latest free litigation e-book, Trial Technicians, Hotseaters & Trial Technology 2024, designed for trial attorneys and their support staff. This e-book is a follow-up to the popular 2014 version that has been the industry standard for the past 10 years. We have added over 30 new articles on trial technicians, hotseaters, and trial technology, all included in this latest release. You can download this 153-page book without any obligations by clicking here. This book contains 60 articles carefully selected from Persuadius's extensive collection of posts related to litigation and technology. Each article is relevant to high-tech trials in some way, covering topics such as hiring a hot seater, establishing a good working relationship with them, and effectively utilizing trial technology. The book is filled with valuable tips that will benefit both novice litigators and experienced professionals.
I'm absolutely thrilled to announce the release of Persuadius's latest free litigation e-book, The Opening Statement Toolkit v2. Version 1 (2015) was our most popular ebook of all time, with many litigators telling me, "This is essential reading." You may now download this new book without strings attached by clicking here. In this 271-page book, you will find 80 articles curated from Persuadius's massive collection of posts related to litigation and persuasion. Each article relates to opening statements in some way. From organizing the opening to the use of storytelling techniques to persuade, the book contains an amazing array of tips that will prove valuable to the novice litigator and the veteran alike.
When presenting your case in court, demonstrative evidence (interchangeably referred to as litigation graphics or trial graphics) can be a powerful tool to help convey complex information to a judge or jury. Demonstrative evidence includes visual aids, physical objects, and multimedia presentations that help illustrate key points in a case. Here are 11 timely tips for effectively using demonstrative evidence in trial: 1. Keep it simple: Remember that less is often more when creating demonstrative evidence. Keep your visuals clear and concise, focusing on all key points of your case. Avoid cluttering your presentation with unnecessary details that could confuse or distract the audience. See Litigator & Litigation Consultant Value Added: A "Simple" Final Product 2. Use a variety of formats: Consider using a mix of visual aids, physical objects, and multimedia presentations to keep your audience engaged. Different formats can help reinforce your message and cater to various learning styles. See 5 Ways to Apply Active Teaching Methods for Better Persuasion 3. Call Persuadius: Many organizations and publications have voted us the best demonstrative evidence provider in the country. Contact us at 800.847.9330 or contact@persuadius.com. See also Why Work with Persuadius?
If you’ve been following our blog for a while, you may have let some amazing posts slip under your radar. With over 12 years of blog posts and an impressive 850 entries, it’s easy to miss a few hidden gems. That’s why we’ve compiled this curated list of captivating blog posts that deserve recognition.
I often talk about what not to do, but sometimes, I must remember to mention what you should do to achieve success at trial. In honor of leap year 2024, I have written this article offering 29 tips for successful trial preparation and execution. You can use this list as a checklist to compare yourself to your peers. I did not develop these ideas alone. Instead, they come from my experience working with the best of you over the past 30 years. 1. Conduct a mock trial. The very best litigators always conduct a mock trial when at least $10 million is at stake. Mock trials are a critical part of the Persuadius service offerings. If you want to discuss one, I invite you to email me (ken@persuadius.com) or call me (1-800-847-9330) or, ideally, fill out a client conflict check form by clicking the purple button in the upper right corner of this page. Only three people, including me, see those. 2. Conduct more than one mock trial. The ideal number is three, and that's precisely what I have observed the best trial lawyers do. It's not always affordable, but more than one mock is mandatory for cases with $25 million or more at stake. The only thing that varies is the investment in each mock trial. If $100 million or more is at stake, every mock should have every investment possible (i.e., a proper mock facility, a two-day or three-day mock, live witnesses, opening and closing statements, etc.). 3. Collaborate with litigation consultants who bring experience and insights to trial preparation. With a track record of handling hundreds of trials, we have witnessed exceptional and lackluster attorney performances. We aim to share valuable knowledge and advice, not lecture or boast about expertise. Drawing on the collective wisdom of countless cases, we strive to support you in crafting a solid and effective trial strategy. Litigation consultants can be exceptionally helpful when developing your opening statement. 4. Build a solid opening statement. In 30 years, I haven't seen anything to convince me that the opening statement is not the most essential part of the case. Some studies say that 80% of jurors make a decision about who will win after hearing opening statements. When done correctly, it should take months to develop an opening. It should be tested many times in whatever way your client can afford. We've written extensively about this. This topic is wonderfully covered in our opening statement toolkit ebook. See The Opening Statement Toolkit.
Some trial graphics specialists are attorneys. Other trial graphics specialists are jury consultants. Some trial graphics people are trial technicians. But, there is a type of trial graphics specialist, like those at Persuadius, who work mostly in pairs. They prefer to either conceptualize or execute. Let's take a closer look at this pair of specialists. Understanding the role of trial graphics specialists Trial graphics specialists are professionals who specialize in creating visual aids and presentations for use in legal proceedings. While some may think their job is solely about making slides look visually appealing, their role goes far beyond that. Trial graphics specialists are responsible for translating complex legal concepts and information into clear and concise visuals that can be easily understood by judges, juries, and other participants in the courtroom. Sometimes that role is one person. More often than not, it is usually a pair of artists, one with legal training and one with more formal artistic training. Together, they form an amazing team.
Our blog has been thriving for nearly a decade, accumulating over a million visits during this remarkable period. As we approach the official 10-year blog anniversary next year, we also celebrate the impressive 28-year milestone of our entire company. To stay in tune with our readers' preferences, we meticulously monitor the traffic of each blog post, enabling us to identify the crème de la crème. Without further ado, here are the top 100 most engaging blog posts from the past ten extraordinary years. 5 Questions to Ask in Voir Dire The Top 14 Testimony Tips for Litigators and Expert Witnesses Ways to Identify the Jury Foreman: Insights on Leadership and Influence Lists of Analogies, Metaphors and Idioms for Lawyers 14 Tips for Delivering a Great Board Meeting Presentation 15 Tips for Great Customer Service from the Restaurant Industry
and Dan Regard, CEO/Founder, iDS As seasoned litigation consultants with law degrees, Dan (a testifying forensics expert and CEO) and Ken (a trial consultant, trial graphics expert, and CEO) have witnessed firsthand the striking distinctions between expert witness graphics and trial graphics. While these graphic types may appear similar, these types of graphics serve entirely different purposes in the legal realm. Let's delve into seven ways in which expert witness graphics and trial graphics diverge: 1. Inform vs. Persuade. Expert witness graphics are meticulously crafted to illustrate expert testimony, whereas trial graphics are strategically designed to present evidence before a jury. Expert witness graphics aim to inform the audience about complex scientific or technical concepts and provide visual clarity to the expert's testimony. These graphics are often created by experts who have in-depth knowledge and expertise in their respective fields. On the other hand, trial graphics are created by litigation artists working with litigation consultants, who focus on presenting the evidence in a persuasive and visually appealing manner to the jury. They simplify the information, ensuring it is easily comprehensible for laypeople, and aim to persuade the judge or jury of the client's position. They can (and do) take poetic license with the substance and may leverage analogies, caricatures, and even slight exaggerations to emphasize a point. 2. Experts create both. Typically, expert witness graphics are created by the very experts themselves, leveraging their knowledge and expertise in the subject matter. These experts have a deep understanding of their field's technical details and intricacies, allowing them to create graphics that effectively convey and simplify complex information. On the other hand, trial graphics are often entrusted to the expertise of graphic designers working in concert with litigation consultants. These professionals have a firm grasp of visual communication and design principles, enabling them to create visually compelling graphics that enhance the presentation of evidence in the courtroom. They collaborate closely with the legal team to ensure the graphics align with the trial strategy.
Summary (TL;DR) Three years ago, A2L Consulting was #1 in all categories, but we were especially known for our trial graphics and jury consulting. We took a three-year break, and now the team is back under a new moniker, Persuadius. We are hard at work with clients as we speak. The backstory is long and eventful but compelling. Read it below, and I would love to hear from you at ken@persuadius.com, especially if you need persuasive litigation graphics or jury consulting. Persuadium is the new essential element of persuasion. So, what happened? March 5, 2020, 9 pm, pre-lockdown. I am alone at home. I was prepping for a morning meeting related to some enormous litigation. My personal life was, unfortunately, overflowing with drama. For me, however, it was just another typically stressful day. I was proud of an article I had published that morning, 5 Reasons to Be Terrified of the Coronavirus (and 5 Reasons Not to Be). In retrospect, it is quite prescient. I'm still proud of it, if you can't tell. To celebrate the end of my day, I poured myself a glass of red wine, which I had certainly earned. Then, out of nowhere, I couldn't understand the content of my phone screen. I assumed incorrectly that perhaps I just needed to lie down. Maybe I was overstressed. Wrong. I was having a cerebral hemorrhage.
A very close friend just asked me what we do at A2L Consulting. Last week, a 30-year colleague and client remarked that he didn’t realize that half of our business involved jury consulting. Last night, a high-profile trial lawyer kindly complimented our firm while speaking to a group -- but called the company by its former name of 10 years ago. It’s my job to explain to people who we are and what we do, and some of the people closest to me don’t understand what we do as litigation consultants at A2L Consulting. Clearly, I am doing something wrong. The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed overview of the work we do as litigation consultants. Still, it will also educate anyone involved in trying cases about best practices in specific areas of trial preparation and trial practice. The Big Picture Our firm was one of the first (if not the very first) to call itself a Litigation Consulting firm back in the mid-1990s. At a 30,000 foot level, litigation consultants like A2L are hired by top trial lawyers and large corporate legal departments to help increase the odds of winning a particular case. We help increase the odds of winning a particular case by: testing and refining cases during a mock trial and jury consulting process by soliciting and measuring feedback from mock jurors and mock judges; helping to refine the narrative and key arguments to be delivered at trial through our peer-to-peer litigation consulting process. This litigation consulting process often includes multiple rounds of practice, particularly of the opening statement; designing litigation graphics presentations rooted in persuasion psychology that help judges and jurors both understand our cases and help to persuade those same fact-finders to take our side in the case; and using highly trained hot-seat operators (trial technicians) to display electronic evidence on the fly and leave the trial attorney in a position to connect with judge and jury; I call these four areas, jury consulting, litigation consulting, litigation graphics consulting, and trial technology consulting. Collectively, I call them all litigation consulting. Within each category, there are MANY sub-services. Below is an overview with linked articles that explain each of these four areas in more detail and offer best practices. If you are in the business of trying cases, there is a lot of value here for you in the materials below.
Today, we are celebrating you - our subscribers - because we have reached a new milestone - 10,000 subscribers to this blog! To celebrate, we are releasing the list below for the very first time - A2L Consulting's Top 100 Articles of All Time. We started this publication in 2011 against my best instincts, and I delight daily in how wrong I was. Now, almost 700 articles later, being named a top blog by the ABA, and after millions of visits to our site and The Litigation Consulting Report blog (free subscription here), I now understand that we filled a significant void. It turns out that those seeking to persuade, inside the courtroom or elsewhere, really did not have an excellent place to go and learn about persuasion science. They certainly don't teach storytelling for persuasion in law school, and the intricacies of demonstrative evidence/visual aids are too much for any one lawyer to master (while trying cases). So, I'm proud that so many have enjoyed these articles about storytelling, voir dire, jury consulting, litigation graphics, trial technology, persuasion, and much much more. These articles are ranked by the number of visits to the article. Some have been read hundreds of thousands of times. I hope you will keep reading our old and new articles, and feel free to share a free subscription with a friend. A2L Consulting's Top 100 Articles of All Time 5 Questions to Ask in Voir Dire . . . Always The Top 14 Testimony Tips for Litigators and Expert Witnesses 10 Ways to Spot Your Jury Foreman Lists of Analogies, Metaphors and Idioms for Lawyers 14 Tips for Delivering a Great Board Meeting Presentation 15 Tips for Great Customer Service from the Restaurant Industry The 50 Best Twitter Accounts to Follow for Lawyers and Litigators The Top 10 TED Talks for Lawyers, Litigators and Litigation Support The Top 5 Qualities of a Good Lawyer 10 Things Every Mock Jury Ever Has Said 12 Reasons Bullet Points Are Bad (in Trial Graphics or Anywhere) 15 Fascinating Legal and Litigation Infographics 4 Ways That Juries Award Damages in Civil Cases 16 PowerPoint Litigation Graphics You Won't Believe Are PowerPoint
My Facebook feed lit up this week after the passing of 67-year-old drummer Neil Peart of the band Rush. Suddenly, mild-mannered middle-aged friends were pouring their hearts out over the loss of a drummer who was at the height of his popularity some 35 years ago. For many of my friends and indeed for me (someone who likes playing drums but is not particularly liked by others when he plays), he was the best of the best - the G.O.A.T of the drumming world. Neil Peart forever changed the way other drummers performed and even thought about how to approach a drum set. Why should trial lawyers (who didn't happen to come of age in suburban America or Canada in the early 1980s) care at all? A quote in Peart's Rolling Stone obituary is what jumped out at me because it demonstrates a way of thinking that is useful for trial lawyers and drummers alike: “What is a master but a master student?” Peart told Rolling Stone in 2012. “There’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better.” Here, Peart was talking about why he started working with a drum coach/instructor relatively late in his career -- even after he was widely considered the best drummer in the world. To people who work with the world's best anything, whether that's athletes, actors, or trial lawyers, this kind of thinking is not surprising. In our field, rules of professional responsibility speak to this concept of continuous improvement, but I don't think that's why the very best push themselves to be better. The reasoning for why is circular, but I think it's true: the best are the best because they seek feedback about how to be the best, and this loop never ends. When the best trial lawyers in the world (and those who aspire to be) work with A2L (or someone like us), they benefit not just from jury consulting and litigation graphics services, but they also benefit from working with similarly accomplished trial lawyers called litigation consultants -- a term we first started using in the 1990s. We have written about this concept of trial lawyers supporting other trial lawyers in articles like: Your Coach Is Not Better Than You – in the Courtroom or Elsewhere 3 Ways to Force Yourself to Practice Your Trial Presentation Practice, Say Jury Consultants, is Why Movie Lawyers Perform So Well When Peart wrote the obituary for his coach, he paraphrased a foundational message from his coach, and that message rang very familiar to me. It sounds a lot like the message the trial lawyers on our team deliver to other trial lawyers who hire us. "You've been doing what you do for a long time, so it obviously works. Don't mess with that. Consider my suggestions as options." And there it is -- firms like ours and people like us present already successful trial lawyers with options. It's part of the reason those trial lawyers outperform their peers. Whether an athlete, musician, or litigator, if you seek to be the best, seek and listen to options. It's what the very best always do. Here is a good Neil Peart tribute piece that already has millions of views on YouTube: Other A2L articles and free resources about storytelling, coaching, and litigation consulting include: Great Trial Lawyers Behave Differently The First Version of Your Story Is NOT Your Best 3 Ways to Force Yourself to Practice Your Trial Presentation 9 Things In-House Counsel Say About Outside Litigation Counsel Dan Pink, Pixar, and Storytelling for the Courtroom Practice is a Crucial Piece of the Storytelling Puzzle Three Top Trial Lawyers Tell Us Why Storytelling Is So Important The 13 Biggest Reasons to Avoid Last-Minute Trial Preparation Your Coach Is Not Better Than You – in the Courtroom or Elsewhere What Steve Jobs Can Teach Trial Lawyers About Trial Preparation Develop Your Trial Story – Sooner, Not Later 21 Reasons a Litigator Is Your Best Litigation Graphics Consultant Practice, Say Jury Consultants, is Why Movie Lawyers Perform So Well 7 Things In-House Misses When Litigation Consultants are Underutilized FREE DOWNLOAD: Storytelling for Persuasion - 144-page complimentary book The Very Best Use of Coaches in Trial Preparation 3 Ways to Force Yourself to Practice Your Trial Presentation $300 Million of Litigation Consulting and Storytelling Validation RECORDING STORYTELLING WEBINAR Conflict check: Be the first to retain A2L
The opening statement is, in most trials, the most important part of the case. Here, biases are formed and overcome, attention levels will be at their highest, and up to 80% of jurors will make up their minds about who will win. Over three decades, A2L Consulting has supported the development of thousands of opening statements. It's where our trial-lawyer clients and we invest the most time and energy. Our work has typically included: the creation of persuasive PowerPoint presentations to accompany well-developed opening statements to; practicing and refining an opening statement 100+ times until it is perfectly delivered; testing versions of opening statements in a mock trial setting to help best plan the trial strategy. Our team is made up of trial lawyers, psychologists, litigation graphics artists, and hot-seaters. We see many of the world's best trial lawyers practice their craft on a regular basis. As I have always said and written about, Great Trial Lawyers Behave Differently. I often write about how their preparation is altogether different from an average litigator. When I do write about this topic, my goal is to cross-pollinate great techniques and ideas. This article is no different. I want to share some of what A2L has learned along the way both by watching great trial lawyers prepare for trial and by helping them do so. These best practices expressed in these top 10 articles/books/webinars about opening statements are unique. I hope you can put this information to use as you prepare for your next trial. How to Structure Your Next Speech, Opening Statement or Presentation 6 Reasons The Opening Statement is The Most Important Part of a Case 5 Things TED Talks Can Teach Us About Opening Statements
Working at A2L, I have the distinct pleasure of watching many of the world's best trial lawyers prepare for trial. Most start months or years in advance. Those lawyers engage A2L early to do theme testing with a focus group or to organize and run a mock trial. Each of these events requires the creation of litigation graphics and usually assistance in developing an opening statement. Having watched so many great trial lawyers prepare for 25 years, I have been able to observe patterns in how they prepare. Below I share ten chronologically ordered tips (plus accompanying resources) based on these observations. If you're less than one year from trial, I hope these tips are still helpful, and I hope you will get in touch with me. More than one year from trial: There is no better time to do theme testing then when discovery is still open. Read more in How Early-Stage Focus Groups Can Help Your Trial Preparation and as you start this journey, always remember that Great Trial Lawyers Behave Differently. One year before trial: Plan your first of two mock trials. There are dozens of good reasons to conduct a mock trial, but forcing yourself to prepare early may be the very best one. Read my one-year trial planning guide and read A2L's Opening Statement Toolkit. Also, it is a good time to read A2L's Jury Consulting and Mock Trial Handbook. Nine months before trial: Begin or continue development of your litigation graphics. If you conducted a mock trial, you already have a good start. Read How Long Before Trial Should I Begin Preparing My Trial Graphics?, 10 Reasons The Litigation Graphics You DO NOT Use Are Important and The 13 Biggest Reasons to Avoid Last-Minute Trial Preparation. Six months before trial: Refine your opening statement story and the visuals that will support it. Make sure your experts have their visuals being worked on by your litigation graphics team - not the in-house people at the expert's firm. Watch Persuasive Storytelling for Trial Lawyers and read Storytelling for Litigators. To help develop your experts, have them read this three-part series on How to Be a Great Expert Witness. Three months before trial: Conduct opening statement practice sessions with your trial team, litigation consultants, and your client. Read The First Version of Your Story Is NOT Your Best, 3 Ways to Force Yourself to Practice Your Trial Presentation, and Practice, Say Jury Consultants, is Why Movie Lawyers Perform So Well.
Share: