by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting Welcome back from summer (to most), and welcome to the busy fall/winter litigation season. This blog, The Litigation Consulting Report, is now just about 4 ½ years old. In that time, we have written nearly 500 posts on dozens of trial and presentation-related subjects, including everything from TED talks to Reptile trial techniques to voir dire best-practices. We've earned accolades, won awards, won countless trials, and we have steadily grown our number of subscribers year after year, and I'm especially thrilled to say that we've just signed up our 7,500th blog subscriber! Every subscription is free, and perhaps that is part of the reason it took us less than a year to grow our community from 5,000 subscribers in September 2014 to 7,500 subscribers in September 2015 — a 50% increase. To celebrate reaching 7,500 blog subscribers, today we’re publishing (as a free download) this collection of our very best articles to date called, A2L Consulting's Top 75 Articles of All Time. By "very best," I mean that our readers have, by choosing which articles they read most, told us which articles they think are the best. On the Web, your clicks are your votes. We’re thrilled to receive this feedback from you.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting It's been another great quarter of publishing blog articles on A2L's Litigation Consulting Report Blog. This quarter, there were more than 45,000 blog post views, and we are just about to cross the 7,000 subscriber mark. I find those metrics incredible. Since we post 2-3 articles every week, I've heard from our readers that it is sometimes hard to keep up with the latest articles. To help remedy that and organize the information better, roughly six times a year we publish a mini-retrospective at the end of the quarter, at the end of a year and/or to celebrate blogging milestones. This quarter, I'm listing the top nine articles from April, May and June of 2015 reverse sorted by the number of times each article was read. This way, this list serves as an excellent reader-curated guide to the very best articles we have published recently. Voir dire and jury selection-focused articles continue to be very popular with our readers. Also, articles about persuasion, opening statements and a discussion of the Reptile Trial Strategy are getting a lot of views and shares. For the first time in memory, there are four different A2L authors represented on a best-of list. Below is a list of the top nine articles from A2L's Litigation Consulting Report Blog as determined by your readership. Each article has both LinkedIn and Twitter share buttons that allow it to be shared with your network. Enjoy! 9. 5 Ways to Maximize Persuasion During Opening Statements - Part 2 8. One Voir Dire Must Do and One Voir Dire Must Never Do 7. 12 Reasons Litigation Graphics are More Complicated Than You Think
When it comes to jury selection, many lawyers are eager to win voir dire. After all, this is their chance to shape the jury pool and hopefully secure a favorable verdict for their client. However, there are several reasons why trying to "win" voir dire may not be the best strategy. Here are five reasons why you might want to reconsider your approach:
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting We publish a lot of articles on this blog here at A2L Consulting. Sometimes we publish so many that it’s not easy to decide which ones to read first. That's why once a quarter we do a mini-retrospective of the best articles based on what our readers choose to look at. Our theory is that the more people that read an article, the more compelling and the better it is. All these articles relate in some way to persuasion: Why expensive-looking litigation graphics are better than inexpensive-looking ones, why you are less persuasive when you are using clichés, how people obtain trial experience these days when most cases don’t go to trial. We think this also helps our readership sort through the very best of our content by relying on the votes of 6,600 fellow subscribers as indicated by their reading habits.
by Alex Brown Director, Operations A2L Consulting How do you determine value? This weekend, while my oldest child was in Boston at a gymnastics meet, we thought this would be the perfect time to “renovate” her room back home. My youngest daughter wanted to help but also wanted to negotiate her fee to do so. I came up with many reasons for her to find value in helping: the good of the family, experience, and enjoyment, but none of these provided the proper balance of cost and value to her. Finally I told her that she will be able to destroy something that belongs to her big sister, without any concern for retaliation. This brought her on board, and in the end she not only loved it but she also had the added benefit of being able to tell her sister how much fun it was to destroy her room and how destructive the work needed to be. As litigators, you have a similar job of having to persuade your client about, say, the importance of using expert witnesses or the need to bring on a litigation support team. This is always a delicate conversation because there are so many factors in play; emotions, money constraints, and inexperience, to name a few. For years, the use of expert witnesses has been an easy sell for the most part. But the importance of litigation support (i.e. theming, visual presentations, trial technology/hot seat operators, and mock trial exercises) is not universally accepted, so it can be more of an uphill struggle to convince clients of the need for these things and even harder to persuade them of the value. But why? It’s clearly not the cost, since that normally runs anywhere between .5 percent and 5 percent of the legal fees in a big case. So the sticking point is the need for these services.
As a CEO for nearly 30 years, I understand the importance of job satisfaction for employees. Throughout my career, I have witnessed firsthand the impact that a positive work environment can have on employee morale and productivity. Employees thrive in an atmosphere that fosters collaboration, respect, and open communication.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting It's been quite a week at A2L Consulting, and I want to share three pieces of good news and some valuable resources with you to round out the week. Unbelievably, we crossed the 6,000 (free) subscribers threshold this week at The Litigation Consulting Report blog. I say "unbelievably" because we only just crossed the 5,000 subscriber mark three months ago. Clearly, publishing valuable information for the litigation marketplace is both something we love doing, and the marketplace loves reading our articles, ebooks and watching our webinars. We remain grateful that the ABA honored us as one of the top 100 blogs in the legal industry. To celebrate this milestone, we are re-releasing our Top-50 Articles of All Time E-Book for free with no form to fill out. Just click here or on the graphic next to this article, and you'll be able to download the book instantly. These are 50 of our best articles out of 400 that we have published so far. It's a great resource for lawyers, litigators, in-house counsel and litigation support professional alike. I also had a chance this week to be interviewed by famed litigator Mitch Jackson as part of his Human.Social project. The interview largely focuses on why A2L produces this blog and how it simultaneously creates value for our readers and for us as a business. Here is the recorded interview below:
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting Seven of the top ten web searches that lead to a visit to our website in 2014 were related to voir dire or jury selection. These are topics that we write about frequently and assist clients with often at A2L Consulting. To respond to the obvious demand for information about voir dire, we are today releasing our latest free e-book, The Voir Dire Handbook. This 111 page book is comprised of 37 articles about jury selection, voir dire and related topics. Like our 20+ other litigation, persuasion, psychology and presentation-focused e-books, The Voir Dire Handbook is a free download with no strings attached.
by Ken Lopez Founder/CEO A2L Consulting If you can learn the secrets of how mock jurors commonly behave during mock trial deliberations, you will be better positioned to win at trial. These behavior patterns are understandably foreign since most people see mock juries deliberate infrequently. However, when you are a jury consultant, mock trials are routine, and repeat behavior patterns become clear over a long career. Surprisingly, it turns out that no matter where you go in the country, mock jurors tend to act in similar ways. Although there are venue-specific idiosyncrasies, mock jurors act quite similarly from locale to locale. If you understand the questions they almost always ask, the order of deliberations they usually follow and how mock juries address damages almost every time, you will be far ahead of almost all of your peers. We at A2L have put together a free 75-minute webinar, 12 Things Every Mock Juror Ever Has Said. It will be conducted live on December 9, 2014 at 1:30pm ET and is designed to share A2L's accumulated knowledge about mock jurors. Click here to register for it for free.
Group dynamics play a significant role in shaping our behaviors and attitudes towards others. This is evident in the phenomenon of in-group bias, where individuals tend to show favoritism towards others who share their identity. In the context of a legal case, understanding and leveraging this bias can be advantageous in swaying the jury's decision in favor of your client.
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