This past weekend, I went to the Boeing factory in Seattle to see planes. I didn’t expect to come away with a lesson in persuasion.

The place is staggering—airplane sections the size of office buildings, precision assembly lines that look like they were choreographed by NASA, and enough rivets to hold together a continent. But what struck me most wasn’t the machines. It was a man named Christopher Summit.

Christopher Summit was our tour guide, and he is not easy to forget. He has a thick Irish accent, long white mutton chops, and a storyteller’s glint in his eye that makes you lean in. Throughout the tour, he didn’t just explain Boeing—he performed it. Every stop was layered with narrative, humor, and precise delivery. You couldn’t help but pay attention.

I didn’t have the chance to speak with him during the tour, but I happened to bump into him later in the cafeteria. We struck up a conversation over water, and within minutes, he was telling me one of the most elegant insights I’ve ever heard about audience attention.

He told me that when he's giving tours, he watches people’s eyes—not just their posture or their faces, but what they’re looking at. And when he sees them looking away from him and toward something else, he doesn’t ignore it. He takes it as a signal.

“They’re asking a silent question,” he told me. “So I answer it. I explain what they’re seeing. Then they come back to me.”

In that moment, he modeled something that most litigators don’t do when they present with litigation graphics.

This Is What Most Litigators Miss

Litigators often focus so much on what they’re saying that they forget to watch what the jury is seeing.

And when jurors stop looking at the speaker and start looking at something else—maybe a chart, a photo, a confusing timeline—that’s not a distraction. That’s a signal.

They’re asking a silent question.

And just like Christopher Summit does, it’s your job to answer it—fast—or risk losing their attention for good.

The Eyes Tell You Everything

I’ve worked with hundreds of trial teams over the last three decades, and the difference between good and great litigators often comes down to this:

The good ones rehearse with their slides. The great ones rehearse watching jurors react to their slides.

When a jury looks away from you, they’re not always tuning out. Sometimes they’re leaning in visually but mentally getting lost. A confusing or overly busy litigation graphic can do that. So can an unaddressed question you accidentally raise with a diagram or flowchart.

And when you fail to read that cue—or worse, push forward anyway—you don’t just lose a second of attention. You break the rhythm. You lose the story.

Christopher Summit didn’t let that happen.

Litigation Graphics Are About Clarity, Not Just Design

The best litigation graphics don’t just look good. They carry the narrative. They anticipate jurors’ questions. They resolve tension the moment it starts to build.

Just like that shiny fuselage at Boeing, some part of your demonstrative will catch attention. The question is: do you know when, and are you ready to explain it before curiosity becomes confusion?

That’s not a design problem. That’s a storytelling problem.

And the solution isn’t a better font or simpler arrows—it’s seeing what jurors are looking at, what they’re not understanding, and answering it in real time.

Bringing It Back to the Courtroom

As trial consultants, one of the most important things we do is watch the jury—especially during presentations that use litigation graphics. We watch where their eyes go. We notice the moment someone leans back or tilts their head or squints just slightly at the screen.

And when we debrief afterward, we often ask: “Did you see what happened when that timeline slide came up?”

The answer is almost always the same: “No. I was focused on what I was saying.”

Understandable. But costly.

Christopher Summit wasn’t in a courtroom. But he modeled something that every litigator should emulate:

The audience’s gaze is feedback. Ignore it, and you lose them. Respond to it, and you pull them back into your story.

Want litigation graphics that do more than look sharp? Want a trial team that helps you monitor attention as closely as message?

Book a 15-minute strategy call, and let’s talk about your next big case. Because attention isn’t given—it’s earned, moment by moment, graphic by graphic.