While we were in Costa Rica I had time to read some books. A couple of them had helpful information for trial lawyers. Here’s a passage from the book Born standing up: A comic’s Life by Steve Martin about the subject of anchoring. I’ve written about this important idea previously in this blog, but I hadn’t realized that comics use the technique to coax a laugh out of an audience.: “A skillful comedian could coax a laugh with tiny indicators…
Trial lawyers have to be risk takers if they are going to be great trial lawyers. It can sometimes be frightening and intimidating. How we react to our fears determines how well we represent our clients. In the book The Airmen and the Headhunters author Judith Heimann quotes a pilot of a bomber shot down in World War II as saying that during dangerous flying missions he had often been frightened. But he went on to say: "provided you don’t…
I had two friends lose their jury cases last week and another one win his. It caused me to think about why that might happen and how we approach our cases is so important to the outcome. Here are some rambling personal views about the subject. In one of the cases the trial tookfive weeks, but it only took thejurytwohours to bring in a defense verdict. That very likely means they never changed their minds from the start of the…