 You know, and we're here, you know, we're learning lawyers. We're learning lawyers. We're learning lawyers. Okay. So this session is, I would say, is less meaty. There aren't going to be any statutes put up on the board. But no less meaty. Right. But no less meaty. We're going to talk about, you know, law is theater and theater is law, and it's something, you know, going through the early years of my career and the later years of my career, at home with a playwright, I get a lot of, you know, you say, ah, too much. Your hands are getting in your way. And so I've learned to live with that. And occasionally I get some good advice. And this panel is going to talk about the theater of the trial practice. And it's a great panel. We have Jerry Satin, who began her legal career as an associate at Stearns Weaver, and is now in the trial consulting business at Focus Litigation Consultants. Consultative? Consulting. Consulting. And she is helping put together mock juries and advising lawyers on how to look like lawyers and not offend judges and juries and everything that goes into that part of the practice. And I can tell you, as she began as an associate, she had no fear in telling me how I was doing, which is, you know, I was putting on a witness and asking the wrong question. I got hit in the ribs and it was explained to me what I should be doing properly, which I'm very coachable and I always appreciated that. Gail Garrison is one of the great directors in South Florida Theater. And a dear, dear friend and over the years has had a lot of, has had a big hand in a lot of years of summer shorts. And, you know, it's great having her here. And she's going to add to this discussion. And Professor Caisley is here. And Steve has seen him in action and he works as a trial consultant. And I hear you're fabulous and magnificent. No, he's lying. I've never done this before. And I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say. And you've got a great panel to work with and I'll let you go. Well, thank you. Thanks so much. And I just want to thank the planners. I said not too much, too. Well, that's all right. We'll let it go this time. We won't slap you too much. The organizers, I think, did a pretty good job of putting us together in the same panel here. We only have about an hour and a half. And normally when I do storytelling workshops with trial lawyers, I do like a six-hour CLE. It's kind of a boot camp, a litigation boot camp, I generally call it. And so I'm going to be, I'm not going to try to cram everything I do into six hours into 25 minutes. I'll try to provide some substantive information for you. But I'm not going to try to race through materials so I sound more like an auctioneer than presenting on advocacy skills. But we have some folks today who are going to talk about image, some folks today who are going to talk about body and voice awareness. And my focus is quite different from that. A little bit about who I am. I teach at the University of Idaho and I run the dramatic writing program. And my area of expertise is primarily in story theory. So those dusty, crusty Greeks, the Aristotelians, who first gave us the two arts of rhetoric and drama. And of course rhetoric would be something that you're quite familiar with. Dramatic techniques, perhaps not so familiar with. And I'd like to maybe shed a little light on that. How I got into this, about seven years ago, I had a play that I had directed that was invited to go to the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. And the university is always quick to create a little dog and pony show whenever they have professors who have something happening on the national level. They invited me to a fundraiser in Seattle. And unbeknownst to me, at that point I'd been working on the play for about a year and a half. I was actually sick of talking about this production. So instead of talking about the play, I decided instead to talk about the role of the artist within society and the more broader nature of storytelling and its social effect. What it can do to change the world. Afterwards, a little wine and cheese cubie thing. I was accosted, and the word is accosted. I was accosted by about 20 lawyers who had all come back from Jerry Spence's ranch in Wyoming and had formed a group called the TLC group. They were all part of the Washington State Triallors Association and they got together on a regular basis to drink wine, to drink wine, and drink wine and then also talk about their cases that they were working on. To kind of troubleshoot them, to workshop them. And they said, you know, one of the partners of this firm owns a cabin on Mount Rainier. We'd like to invite you to come out and spend the weekend with 25 lawyers. Well, you can imagine the prospect of this was harrowing, to say the least. But when I find out that the partners had a rather extensive wine collection and myself being a bit of a, well, what's the technical term? Lush, I think is the technical term. I decided that I would try this. And I said, look, I don't know anything about the law. I've never taken a law class. I don't know anything. I love law and order. I love Sam Waterston. But other than that, I don't feel like I have any credentials or credibility in these circles. But I tell you what I do do. What I do is I help my playwriting students and my directing students organize a collection of loose facts into a cohesive narrative that hopefully is interesting, clear, and emotionally compelling. And I teach these students, writers and directors, to be able to make an audience focus on certain parts of the story and not focus on other parts of the story and move things back and forth. And I also hope that the end of that experience for an audience, they will arrive at an emotional and intellectual conclusion about the facts that I've been presenting in the story that's the same conclusion that I arrived at as a storyteller. And they said, oh yeah, this is exactly what we do. And so I began, that's when I began to be an autodidact about the nature of litigation narrative and particularly about what happens in personal injury. Because I saw the world of personal injury as really being the same world as dramatic storytelling. Where one individual is wronged and slightly or hurt by another and must seek some kind of redress. And so I started taking Aristotle and I'll go ahead and sort of confess that everything that I will say to you today has been plagiarized by Aristotle, from Aristotle. Someone far smarter than I am once said that everything that's been written on the nature of dramatic storytelling and the art of drama is really just 2,500 years of footnotes to Aristotle. And it's true, you cannot pick up a playwriting book, a book about screenwriting, without seeing the long homage to the first and probably greatest treatise on dramatic storytelling which is Aristotle's Poetics. It's the companion piece to rhetoric. And it's very short and it's incomplete. It probably isn't even something that he intended to publish in any way, shape, and form. It's a fragment and it's more likely his lecture notes when he was walking around the Lyceum in Athens 2,500 years ago, lecturing in that classical peripatetic way walking with his students and telling them about the nature of storytelling. And he was also looking back 100 years on the Golden Age of Greece where drama was born in the western civilization and all of the formal conventions of storytelling were created. So everything I say to you, I've stolen from Aristotle and I'm just regurgitating it. And the other dirty little secret I'd like to share with you is that everything I know about storytelling is very, very simple. And you already know how to do it. But I bet you've forgotten how to do it. But I bet if any of you have children in this room they know it better than you do. They know they have more imagination than you do. They understand logic of linear storytelling better than you do. If I'm telling my story, I tell stories to my kids before they go to bed. And I make them up because I'm a playwright. So I make up the stories. But on Tuesday night I end the story and then on Wednesday I try to pick it up again and they say, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on a second. Well, when last we met, they correct me on my structure. They're very quick to point out deficiencies in my storytelling. And so kids are better storytellers than we are. And it's not rocket science. It's really, really simple. In fact, Aristotle basically had six rules of storytelling. And all of these rules of storytelling were about making something dramatic. Now, I wanted to spell what I mean by dramatic because it's got a negative connotation. When I say dramatic to a bunch of lawyers, you think emotional. I'm not advocating for you in front of a jury to get emotional. That's not going to work because you know what? It looks fake. It looks fake and in this era of tort reform you get picked out a mile away. But you can be a convincing and effective storyteller if you understand some of the basic rules of dramatic storytelling. So what I mean by dramatic is that the stories that you try to tell have what I call inevitable momentum. From the moment that you start the story it starts to build speed toward its inevitable conclusion. Playwrights are great at doing this and Shakespeare, one of the best of the best was brilliant at creating a play that at a certain point has to go inevitably towards a certain conclusion. So imagine like a roller coaster that when it reaches a certain part of that structure the energy of the thing carries it through the rest of the ride. And a good story does that. You've experienced it yourself either in the theater or watching a movie or even reading a great page turner that natural effect. So you should be able to adapt these things for the kinds of stories you may be trying to tell at trial or even when you're trying to write something that's the least bit persuasive. There are ways to create that inevitable momentum. Dramatic stories also have a specific shape to them. A specific shape. Some of them are linear and word for word, dollar for dollar the best way to tell a story is linearly. But you may be handling the case that it doesn't make sense to begin in a linear fashion. You may want to kind of chop up the narrative in a slightly different way. So Aristotle had these six elements. I won't be able to cover all of them in today's presentation but I'll cover what I think are the most important to you as lawyers. Of these six elements, Aristotle said the most important one is plot. Now what's your understanding of plot? Anyone? Just like a freshman English class. What is plot? What is plot? Wheeler? Wheeler? Wheeler? Story. Beginning, middle and end. What happens? The action? Good. All of these things are correct. Let me tell you, let me give you a little story. Something you'll all know. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. Jack fell down, broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after. That's a story, right? Is it a plot? Is that a plot? No. No? Yes? Lawyers arguing? I can't believe it. Unheard of! Well then, could I also tell it in this way? I can want to see one. A hospital room. Jack in bed with a broken crown. Tubes in every orifice. In comes Jill. Jack, about what happened last night on the hill. I want to explain, shut up Jill, you're dead to me. It's over. I don't want to talk about it. Blackout, flashback to the hill. The pail of water, etc. It's the same story, but I have just inverted the way I tell it. So it's important as you are constructing your story to figure out what's the best way to tell that story at trial. What's the best way to convey your client's story? Is it in linear fashion or not? And also where do you begin the story? Where you begin the story has to do with everything. Let's suppose you're working on the kinds of cases I've worked on in the past, just to give you a snapshot. It's been a variety. I've done a lot of medical malpractice. I've done a lot of wrongful death, product liability, slip and fall, maritime accidents, a lot of single-engine plane crashes for some particular reason, sexual abuse cases, and I hate to say it in a room full of lawyers, but I've also done an awful lot of legal malpractice as well, lawyers suing other lawyers for botching some aspect of their representation of another client. That's just a little... But let's suppose you're working on some kind of product liability case where you've got a plane crash incident, this is coming from a specific example, where there was a manufacturing flaw and a carburetor of a single-engine plane. Now, we may not want to begin the story on the day that the plane went down and all five family members were killed in that plane crash. We may want to start the story three and a half years ago when that carburetor was manufactured at that factory that we're now suing. So making aesthetic choices really dictates the kind of story you're going to tell. So think of it this way. The plot is not simply the events in a story. It is not simply the arrangement of those events, but it is also the orchestration of those events. And by orchestration, I mean the scaling of those events. So that each piece builds one upon the other. Another way to look at it, it's called dialectics for the Marxists in the room. Dialectics says that the collision of two ideas creates a third idea. This is the only way that you're able to sit at home and enjoy a movie. Perfect example. There's a shot of man looking out window. That's the shot. Man looking out window. Man looking out window smiling. Now what the human brain does, every few seconds, little electrons and synapses snapping, it basically says every few seconds what happens next. And that's a story teller. If you don't supply what happens next, the human brain will summarize. It will anticipate. The human brain will get ahead of you as the story teller. So the story teller has almost got to be a few steps ahead, not too far ahead, but a few steps ahead of the audience, of the jury. So, shot of man looking out window smiling. Cut to the next shot is children playing in the street. Now the brain then collides those two ideas. Man looking out window smiling, children playing in the street. And so we then put those ideas together and say oh, he's maybe the father of one of the children. He's smiling because he sees his son or daughter having a fun time in the street. Take that same shot. Man looking out window smiling. Actor hasn't done anything differently. It's the same piece of film. Man looking out window smiling. Cut to old woman being beaten in the street. An entirely different story has unfolded. Even though the first shot was exactly the same as the first example. So one of the things as a story teller you have to be aware of is not simply the pieces that you select to put in your story but how you connect them. The connective, kinetic tissue between the individual frames if you will or scenes of your trial story. Does that sort of make sense? And that's what plot is in the Aristotelian sense of the word. So think of it like this. The idea is that plot of these individual pieces that you hang on a washing line. And the theme is that thing which kind of holds it all together. Without the theme you have buckets. You don't have a story. You don't have a story. You've got a bunch of random facts. Now I have read some of the crap that you people have to wade through on a regular basis. Just the sheer volume of information is daunting. It's daunting? I'm fairly dumb but I'm not that dumb because they gave me a full professorship recently at the University of Idaho. But some of that stuff is daunting. It's probably daunting for you. So you can bet your bottom dollar it's incredibly daunting and boring and tedious to your audience, to your jury. So you've got to be very clear about what you choose to put on that washing line. How you choose to arrange it. And I've met with many attorneys who, well first of all, the very first thing I say to the attorney who calls me up and says, hey Rob, we want you to consult on this case. Is they say, well, why don't you tell me about it? Well, about an hour later. And I say, no, no, no, no. Can you tell me that story in three sentences? That's what I do with my playwriting students. If they can't tell me what their play is about in three sentences, they don't know what the story is. They don't know what the story is. So we do these kind of little mini workshops where we take all of the fact panels in the case and we say, let's see if we can boil it down to three simple sentences and then a code up. One sentence would suggest who the antagonist is in the story. Now generally in a film or a movie or novel or a play, what I want to do as a storyteller is introduce my hero first, my protagonist. But I have to do exactly the opposite when I'm telling a trial story. Because the minute the audience hears about a certain person in a context where someone's got to assign blame, they assign it to the first person that they hear. So you want to bring up the harmful actions of the defendant before you ever talk about your lovely client. Because you tell the story of the harmful actions of the defendant. That's the first part of your story always. So this is the notion of creating plot. So you've outlined the harmful actions of the defendant. You've outlined in this premise, I call it a thumbnail sketch of the case, three sentences in the code up. Who's the defendant? What did they do? What was the effect of that? And then wrap it up and name the parties. So for example, I was working on this case where this position had prescribed and over-prescribed actually a series of medicines over the course of several months and years to a person who eventually became addicted to that particular cocktail, overdosed and died. And when I first heard about the case, it was probably 45 minutes of the lawyer explaining to me all of the medicines they took, when they took them, the dosages, all of the technical names of these things. And I said, okay, well let's boil it down. A doctor over-prescribes medicines for a patient. The patient becomes addicted and died. That doctor killed that patient. The doctor was ex. The patient was wine. Simple to understand. Now, we try to get very excited about this. And they started answering the phone and opposing counsel would call by saying, a doctor over-prescribed medicine to a patient. The patient got addicted and died. That doctor killed that patient. They would drive the other people nuts. He would type in un-memos. It had the effect of making opposing counsel feel that this is the story. And it created in the attorney this sense of confidence about what they had to present in very simple terms. How they needed to assign blame in a particular story. So think about a case that you might be taking to trial soon. And see if you can actually boil it down to three sentences and a coda. Just as a little exercise for yourself. So, oh, think of it like this. The plot of the story is the what happens. And the theme is always the why. One of the things that I do for attorneys, sometimes I'll do, I'll help them structure and write opening statements or closing arguments. Sometimes I'll do victim impact statements or again the live video, settlement videos. I'll do the scripts for the settlement videos. Scripts, by the way, what I mean by script is that not that I mean venting information. What I'm doing is the script for a settlement video, you write after you've got all the interviews of the family members in the can. And then you go through the transcript of what everyone said and you construct the most compelling story that articulates the damages. And it's particularly useful in creating a very compelling story of damages. Emotionally to jar the opposing counsel and to also bring about the largest amount of damages that you possibly can. And so anyway, with plot, plot is always the what of the story and theme is always the why. And the number one thing that firms that retain and wants to know is what's the case theme? I think this has become like a sexy theme maybe in the law. You've got to have a case theme. You've got to have a case theme. And so I provide them with, identify within the materials what I think is the most compelling theme. And the truth of the matter is, I can think probably of two themes that apply to every personal injury lawsuit. Now what I have done in order to not put myself out of business as a consultant is I've come up with a very long list of themes, case themes that you can adopt and apply to your particular story. And this is the same in playwriting and storytelling universally as in the law. For thousands of years, people have been trying to quantify universal stories. First is The Remissan by Carlo Gotzi. There was a very famous book called The 36 Dramatic Situations. You may have heard of this book. And most recently there's a terrific book called The Seven Basic Plots. It's a wonderful book and it basically boils all of western and much of eastern literature down to seven basic plots. So if I said to you, okay, oh my gosh, there's a small coastal village that's being terrorized by a watered beast of extraordinary size and a lone hero comes to the town to defeat this beast, thereby returning the town to a sense of safety, equilibrium. Some of you may think, oh, that's Jaws. And others may think, oh, that's Beowulf because it's exactly the same story. And the more and more I start studying trial stories, I see that many of them are exactly the same story. Why reinvent the wheel? Use the structures. These stories are the same because there are some things that always happen to human beings is betrayal. And that's what all person injury lawsuits are based on. And if you can get a jury to understand betrayal, you will get them angry. And my job when crafting a trial story is to generate a story that gets them angry because if they're angry, they're going to award money. That's the nature of what I do. So think about the universal and archetypal kinds of stories that there are. Another one that I always find coincides and goes hand in hand so that's about what? So we're talking about the wine. Well, it goes hand in hand with betrayal. Think about that. You may not have been fired for your job, you know, wrongfully terminated from your job. You may not have been hurt on the job and the insurance company fails to cover. You may not have died out of betrayal, but everybody's been cheated on. Everyone's been backstabbed. We understand as human beings and have a very gut reptilian reaction to betrayal. And I'm sure many of you have already read the book about the reptile brain, right? About the primeval reactions that we have to things. Okay? We have a primeval reaction to our families, to protect our families and, by extension, our communities. So if you've got a trial story which involves someone disrupting a community or a family, it appeals to the reptilian side of people's brains and the jury. Okay? So this is this notion of theme. Arthur Miller, great American player. We need to wrap up. Arthur Miller, this great American player. He said, he wrote a companion piece to Death of a Salesman in the New York Times. It was an essay called Tragedy in the Cotton Man. And he said in that landmark essay that we understand we're in the presence of tragedy when we're confronted with a character who will do anything, lay down their life if need be to achieve one thing to regain their sense of personal dignity. And so think about how that applies also to the notion of of personal injury losses. The person can't get back their job, they can't get back their legs, they can't get back their house, but what they want to get back and what the jury can award is their sense of personal dignity. Anyway, I'm out of time. I'm getting hooked off the stage. What's up? While you're switching off, I would say just as somebody who does a little personal injury and a lot of commercial stuff, everything you say is equally true to commercial litigation. It's a big Ponzi scheme or an architect that overbills his client and does a lot of work that he does too and creates a lot of problems and solve the same story. Same betrayal and at the end of the day you don't want to get their dignity back. A lot of times just good old money. Thank you. My name is Jerry Satin. I am the Rebel Externskeeper Associate decided to become a trial consultant. And a lot of what I do is focus on witness preparation tools. And a lot of times what happens is when you're working with a witness, the lawyer then says well, what about me? And so a lot of the tools that you can utilize when prepping witnesses for trials are also applicable to attorneys. So what I want to talk about today are some of the visual presentation tools that you as attorneys and budding attorneys as well as the witnesses that you're going to prep for, how you can speak volumes without saying a word. And Kelly, if you could just let me know one of the like 25 minutes or I don't think any of this time would be great. So one of the most basic things that I wanted to talk about, specifically for the budding attorneys, some of the seasoned attorneys in the room already know this, is what is appropriate to wear in court. You know, there are some Rebel attorneys out there that Johnny is the world who wear periwinkle suits into court and it serves them well. But for the most part think of what you can wear in court as what you would feel comfortable wearing to some sort of a religious ceremony. And what that means is you need to be extremely conservative. Some of the do's and don'ts include do's include for men wearing a long sleeved shirt, staying away from anything that as I like to say is relatively blingy. So for men in court room to a much more intricate level and right now I'm pursuing a Ph.D. in legal psychology so I'm spending quite a bit of time in the legal psychology lab so what I'm going to do today is try to back a lot of what I'm saying with empirical data. So you know that this is not just plus, this stuff actually matters there's research on it. So one of the things that I want to talk to you first about when it comes to your appearance and attire in the court room is color and how color can be utilized not only in what you reactions to colors we have emotional reactions and we have physiological reactions. So when we think of colors when we see a color for example we actually have a visceral warm color so we think of cool colors so when we think of warm colors we think of reds, oranges, yellows we think of the sun, we think of fire we think of warmth when we think of cool based colors for example blues and greens we think of the ocean we think of the sky we think of things that are tranquil a lot of times with demonstrative aids in court you're trying to relay information but you're also trying to get an emotional reaction from the attire of fact whether that's a judge, jury an arbitration panel or a mediator so oftentimes the colors that you use in your demonstrative aids for example evoke emotions that are calming you're going to want to use more blue based colors more cool colors than warm based colors another interesting aspect of color that most people don't know about is actually affects depth perception so for example when you're looking at colors that are warm based red based colors, orange, yellows the actual image that you're looking at looks closer to you than it actually is and the opposite is true of cool based colors so when you're looking at an image that's cool based it looks further away than it actually is so how from a practical standpoint could you utilize that in court well if you have a demonstrative aid for example that's from an eyewitness perspective and you as a lawyer trying to show that they were really way too far away to have been able to credibly see what's going on at the scene of the crime or whatever it is you can actually use a lens to have the picture appear more cool based it'll actually look further away from the jurors perspective and these are ways to actually make a reaction have an emotional reaction emotional perception from jurors without you having to say it which as Robert was explaining before is the most powerful way to do things if you're telling them things if they're coming up with this on their own then you've achieved your goal so that's one thing to keep in mind with color another aspect of color that's often overlooked but equally important in the courtroom are the colors you wear and I get this question a lot from people oh I have this this color on does it compliment me and you know I laugh and I say well it depends what you're trying to achieve so we all have different complexions different undertones to our skin some of us have yellow-based undertones some of us have blue-based undertones we also have different overtones to our skin, our hair, eyes, eyebrows et cetera so there are certain colors and we're all unique it's a different color palette for each of us that compliment us individually and there are colors that don't so the colors that compliment us for example they will reduce the sign of blemishes they'll reduce bags under eyes ripples they actually can lift your skin they can harmonize with your body they make you appear more dominant more powerful you have more of a presence in the room so that's what you're seeking to achieve in court those are the colors you should be wearing especially as close as possible to your face now what if on the other hand you're about to cross-examine a witness who's some evil corporate rep and what you think he's done is completely sickening cross-examining him there's no way a judge is going to let you say that so what do you do? you look sickened you look sickened by everything he's saying that's so much of saying that so color is a very very powerful tool often underutilized by attorneys that can have drastic impact on your visual presentation another aspect of tired appearance that's often underutilized but that's often equally as important when it comes to visual presentation is fit now most lawyers know I shouldn't wear a suit that's too baggy or too tight but sometimes you can make little tweaks in your attire that can affect the way you appear to a jury or the way your witness appears to a jury so let's say you have a witness and it's this big early guy and he's aggressive and he's overbearing and you have a likable witness to a jury if you place him in clothes that are just a touch too big for him you are shrinking him you are literally shrinking him and you in a way are neutralizing him as a witness obviously the opposite is true as well you can make someone who's a little bit of a meek witness or a meek attorney who's not used to getting up in front of a jury and giving an opening statement you can make them look more powerful shortening their sleeves a tiny bit changing the cuffs on their pants these are all tools that you can utilize again you're not saying a word you're making an impact on the judge or jury okay last but not least body language there's sort of two aspects of body language and Gil's going to get into this a little bit more but when it comes to body language it's important to understand the body language you're giving off but also to be able to read the body language of the trier effect which a lot of lawyers don't do as second chair many times not with Alan of course but with other attorneys I've seen the judge or jury jurors getting agitated, getting annoyed, getting bored and the lawyer will talk on and on and on and they've lost their audience they're done so it's not only important to understand your body language but to be able to read the body language of others so some of the sort of basic body language tips what can we say are like negative body language that we see in people arms crossed arms crossed anyone else shifting shifting eye rolling sleeping sleeping is a good one about this, this is one or what about the tight lip smile it's like I have something to say I'm not going to tell you and it's probably negative so what do you do what do you do first of all you have to be perceptive you have to be aware of these things and once you're aware of them you have to figure out a way to fix them so when it comes to a jury for example what's a great way to fix crossed arms hand them an exhibit there's academic research that shows that when people sit in a negative body language position for a long time they start feeling the emotional effects of it so even if someone crosses their hands because they're cold if they keep their hands crossed for a long enough time they're going to have a negative reaction to what you're saying and they're not going to be listening to anything you're saying after a little bit so hand them an exhibit a lot of juries are allowed to take notes now say something that you think will incentivize them to take notes see if there's a way to get the judge to take a break or seem like they're antsy judges are always willing to take breaks so the best way to fix negative body language is to spur a change in the body language so those are some of the basic body language tools I wanted to sort of finish up by presenting you guys with some recent, some old some recent stereotype courtroom stereotype behavior that you as attorneys and budding attorneys should know when you are in the courtroom so when it comes to dealing with a judge and jury a lot of times in jury selection a lot of the questions surround stereotypes and bias because what lawyers are trying to do is pick an impartial jury I was watching the George Zimmerman trial live streaming this morning and every single question was to vet out your bias, that's what you do in Baudier and and jurors the danger when it comes to bias is that we as humans have biases that we don't even know we have we have racial, we have gender we have age, we have facial appearance biases that a lot of times we can sit on jury and say I'll be impartial but you can't control your subliminal reaction to things so you may think you're being impartial but you may not actually be impartial so as attorneys it's important to understand some of these stereotypes as they apply in the courtroom context to be able to sort of sort of avoid falling victim to them if you will the first stereotype that I want to address is weight and gender stereotypes so there was a recent study done by the Yale Red Center for Food Tolesty and Obesity and what they did is they targeted almost 500 participants with a scenario, a mock trial scenario it was a ledge check fraud and what they did is they showed them pictures of one of the four defendants one was one a lean male a lean female an obese male and an obese female and what they found overwhelmingly was that men more severely punished women defendants who were obese women had the ability to impartially judge male and female defendants irrespectively but when it came to male jurors they more partially punished female defendants who were obese it's something that's awful but it's something that you need to know and something that you need to be aware of when you are representing clients in the courtroom because what does this mean let's say for example you have a client that you're representing who is a female who is overweight and let's say you are picking a jury there are a couple tools to combat this you can try to vet out bias in jury selection you can issue an instruction that people should not be biased to weight and gender but a lot of times those tools don't work another way to combat this is to try to make sure that women are in a jury so these are things you have to keep in mind another aspect of this is let's say you are representing a company and you are choosing your 30B6 witness who for the budding attorneys is the person with the most information on the case a lot of times in these corporate cases you have the ability to pick who the 30B6 witness is going to be so if you know it's a jury trial a lot of times if you are having a videotape deposition taken or something like that this is something you need to be aware of and perhaps pick your corporate rep another stereotype that has there's been a lot of research in the courtroom over is what they call the baby face stereotype so as a practical matter people with babyish faces so what's that like large eyes thin eyebrows, large head curved features considered more likable to jurors jurors respond well to them they think that they are more innocent they don't want them to be guilty whereas people with more angular harsh features that have a more mature look are more harshly punished by jurors and there's a string of research done in the 1970s on this there's sort of a corollary effect as well which is if a person who has a baby face admits liability they committed a crime they are more harshly punished because jurors feel like there's been some kind of breach and trust they wanted to find them innocent but now they've breached the trust so they're more harshly punished so how do you combat this from a practical standpoint if you have somebody who has a more mature look you reverse the effects of this you create more baby face features for them you can do that by combating it with the hair cut changing their hair cut to be more curved rather than angular you can do it with eyeglasses you can do it with the shape that they're wearing you can do it with the colors of their outfit you can make them appear more baby faced and more likable and the last stereotype that I want to address is the stereotype called the glasses stereotype and it's also been coined the nerd stereotype and now everyone's starting to feel self-conscious in the room and so what the glasses stereotype is is there was some research done back in the 1970s on whether jurors responded well whether they what their reaction was to defendants who wore glasses and defendants who did not wear glasses and what they found was that defendants who wore glasses were found to be less attractive and more intelligent and the research showed that when defendants are found to be less attractive they're given harsher penalties more liability more damages higher sentencing when they're found to be more intelligent the opposite is true so what the research concluded was it's sort of like a mixed bag who knows but more recently with the onslaught of kind of like thick-drimmed cool glasses coming out they revisited the research and they saw what they did with it they took a look at different types of glasses so they analyzed they analyzed participants analyzed defendants who were not wearing glasses who were wearing rimless glasses and who were wearing thick-drimmed glasses sort of like the ones that I'm wearing right now and what they found was that potential jurors viewed people with thick-drimmed glasses as less attractive and more intelligent so again it was a mixed bag but what was really interesting about the research was they viewed people with rimless glasses as more intelligent and equally as attractive as people without glasses so in a sense what that tells us is that if you have a defendant who needs to wear glasses even if they're wearing the coolest glasses in the world super thick-drimmed dwayne-wayed glasses they shouldn't be wearing them in the courtroom but and we've seen that before we've seen a total rebranding done by Jodi Arias just recently she was wearing some pretty thick glasses not to say that that's the reason why things went awry for her she probably shouldn't have taken the witness down but all to say there are some of the visual presentation tools that can really affect how your courtroom presentation goes and are important to keep in mind and thank you so much if you have any other questions I'm going to have to stop while Gail's coming up when gerry told me that she sat next to me and she told me that she was leaving to go do this kind of work and then she was still with us for a couple of months and every day I walked in I was thinking I'm wondering how I'm looking I had a new suit on and she would never say anything I just got this tie for father's day I picked it out myself and I said what do you think my tie is she told me she might tell me during the presentation but I just found out that I'm going to the slammer any other face and thick glasses I'm just scared now six months ago I had the clear ones and I'm just baby face alright hi I'm Gail Garrison I'm a director I'm going to direct you now my big fat cool glasses and also have visual aids I want to go back to our wine scene I'm a director and I teach acting and directing at New World School of the Arts which is just down the street and I want to dub to you a little bit on what Jerry said around the stereotypes from my own experience on the juries and so I just want to talk a little bit about that because there is a bias not just for the people that you're defending but about you too when you're on the journey you probably know that but I love that we're talking about because all of such as human beings and you know this you know that you make a decision about people the moment that you see them you know that those people you all agree you do and you don't want to forget that somebody has an opinion about you and I know from when I was younger that I was a snob just by having my face the face that I had seven circles and I remember it was a big lesson and I want us all to learn this it was a big lesson because I really am a snob but there was a girl that said I really hated you for so long she had never spoken to me she made an assumption based on what I looked like and we do it all the time it was when I was still living in New York I really didn't like the lawyer I didn't like what he was wearing and I didn't like the way he sounded because he was a wise guy his speech wasn't good and okay that's part of my training my speech is important to me but because he was such a wise guy because he was such a harsh demeanor I automatically started making decisions and he was defending he was defending myself that wasn't good I was watching this and I was talking to myself and going just stop having that inner monologue but nonetheless it was affecting me and that's only what we need to remember all the time it does affect you so what you wear what your body language is not just you looking at what the jury's body language is you need to look at you and see how you're carrying yourself what vocal power you have the effect that you're having are you talking about that you're talking to the jury and the jury well you know they're listening to me now no they're not they've been sitting in a chair for several hours their arms probably are crossed and they're getting angry and wanting a drink okay I'm sorry that was me no they're getting a little irritated so your job it is show business you know it but you need to know it and not forget it on any given day it's what you do but it's also how you do it and the energy with which you do it you know so you don't want to ever forget that that's really really important because if you're one of the you know what are the things that we talk about in acting all the time is action action action it's always an action what are you doing on stage you have an action it's not what you want it's not what you are going to get I want to get an emotion emotion comes along for the ride you know what I do like that if I'm being truthful if I'm going for what I want the emotion will come along for the ride anyone want to do an air powder with me yes someone if I say to you why are you wearing that suit because why but you didn't answer the question what just happened can I ask a question you mean a lot she didn't have to do I didn't have to ask the question what happened locally what happened with me or with you oh my voice went up I have louder so she didn't have to I didn't have to do much to get her to do much so remember that the emotion comes along for the ride but it's up to you to evoke the emotion you're evoking the emotion in the jury you're evoking the emotion don't talk about the judge they're being really but you really it's in your power it's all in your power and I really want you to believe that and also to know that you have an instrument here's your instrument you have to know how to use it and I want you to think of that your body as your instrument you have lots of different levels I have a question I don't think you would have gotten the same reaction from every volunteer no alright who wants to be a volunteer I mean I wouldn't have reacted you would not have get up here hahahaha what's in the road between he's going to come back right now do you think a jurist who has you know you wouldn't be doing that to a jurist I would never I would never do that my point is that lawyers never ask questions without really answering no no no you're just talking about if you you're not going to do that to a jurist a person on the stand necessarily that was just the point of view that you know you don't have to work as hard as you think but you have to be clear on what you want whatever you want and whenever you want this works in life too people just be clear be alright hi you look good do you feel good you look a little tentative you good what's your name do you look down here so where do you live I love Keybus game do you like it I'm so sad I'm so sad I'm so sad do you want to move away yeah okay so what's your response to what I'm giving you you're trying to be aggressively friendly and get me to be friendly to you but my natural reaction to people like that is probably to back away and that was my point that's your natural reaction I didn't have to do anything to you but I'm saying is she is people have different reactions I don't like people to be overly friendly usually I would do that again the point is your response is your response and you're your lawyer I'm also like your response is your response but it's a truthful response so if you go for something and you go for it truthfully remember then the person who's going to have this kind you have to be really careful you do have to be careful you can't just you can't just decide that this is a theme you're going to want the reaction people are really different and I think I think juries are really different they're individuals but you will get a response is the point yes you will I'm not going to argue with a lawyer I have been with my family I never won you will get 12 but you will get a response so the point was you want to be careful the response that you get and you want to be choosing the right actions to get it and there are lots of different actions and sometimes when you are on little handouts for you all I understand that you're the young associates what do you want them first summer okay pass them all there's tongue twisters and their action words so when you're when you're standing in front of people if you use the same action over and over again what happens same maybe or they get bored so if you're not using some kind of choosing different actions the ones that you need the ones to get the response that you want also some vocal color to get what you want you may feel the action becomes almost too drone you know what I mean so all you start to hear is white noise and that's what the jury starts to hear so white noise rather than the color these are things that we hand out in acting I'd like to say that I prepared this just for you but that would not be true I actually prepared for my acting class but it's a good case in point the first couple pages are tongue twisters and the second you turn that over here to see a lot of action words and that was my point that there are lots of actions to get where you're going there's not just one so when you're assessing your jury and when you're taking the cues that Jerry was talking about the body language and when, because you've already chosen these people you've chosen these people for a reason then you have to remember that you've chosen them for a reason from the expectations for what you want from them and make sure that you get it you never know they are all different people and that's why understanding human nature becomes really important become human nature how many stories are there Bob? the seven stories? there are seven basic ones we're all different but there are things about us that are all similar so you want to start to think about that and really put it into practice the other thing is just using your voice is anybody shy about using your voice? anybody getting nervous speaking in front of people yet? anybody? no, you're all really great he wants to get in and speak in front of someone alright none of you alright go ahead and ask me if I had to drink all the wine to get these courses yes, I did and I did it for you take a cork a little exercise just be brave I boiled all these myself too take a cork and yes, I buy cheap wine I work in theater it's the most I can afford is a cheap wine sometimes I don't even use the screw top I buy the screw top maybe I'll try it I got the expensive one anybody not get one? anybody want one? sorry, I didn't have any of you did everybody get a little hand out? thank you okay this is a very simple yeah, you got it welcome okay, you can do this in your car it's on the way to work people will look at you strangely alright this is just to really loosen your face a little vocal exercise because a lot of us tend to be sloppy speakers or speakers it just really means that you're not using your articulators but you need to and you need to be able to do things with your voice so when you're making a point you want to come down you want to go up you can be that little big piece person you can do a lot but the first thing is to articulate this exercise I want you to just put this in your mouth and really take that first tongue twister a big black bug alright, put the pork in your mouth just like this be brave now you're not going to bite hardly down on it you're just going to enunciate around it go ahead you can do it okay that was pathetic can I just say that I've never done this in a CLE before this is my favorite CLE ever okay I want you to see how sloppy you were just then and really guys no we need to talk about this there's law schools in the nation and they can't get this right I don't understand this alright, now really go for the gusto here because you want to see how much energy it takes to really articulate your words because here's what I don't want to hear when you're in court I really want you to know who cares who cares own yourselves and your articulators and yes you can put that on your bulletin board I am my articulators ready? now really watch this the big black bug with the big black bear and the big black bear blood blood you need to understand every word with the cork in your mouth okay, okay everybody now follow me ready? the big black bug with the big black bear and the big black bear slacker at this table I'm sorry ladies and gentlemen we have to stop right here what are you doing? oh, oh you just know laid to the table here Missy okay that's use your example stand up save us, bring she back to when you were the fifth lady that's what she would be you're next step on up okay good I know, put the cork in okay I'm going to stick with the big black bug right now and then we're going to turn over to the one that's really hard this is how we haze our summer assistant okay a big black bug a big black bear and a big black bear because it's embarrassing I'm not very good at the English language either English language do not try to cop out also I might need to feel the change in your mouth when you take it out because you're going to feel that you have more air in there more space, go ahead a big black bug a big black bear and a big black bear very nice things that you can do for yourself to make a difference okay I know you want to try it too don't you it's not the first one, the second one what's your name? Kim, stand up Kim, be brave, be bold the deadly dagger and the dire dungeon dangled in the dank dark dungeon okay but you actually said the word incorrectly oh I did the deadly dagger and the dire dungeon dangled in the dank dark dungeon right, can everybody say that that's very good the deadly dagger and the dire dungeon dangled in the dank dark dungeon you actually have to move your mouth and yeah that isn't overstatement but once you get used to moving your mouth you actually are to really move it and I'm serious if I tell you take these home and practice them just like that, drink the wine first I mean if you want to it really does make a difference it makes a difference in your confidence it makes a difference in really just standing and doing your house also standing up in your house okay presuming presuming you have home what do you do I made a home as a little space when I lived in New York one of the reasons I moved to Florida I was in my apartment one day which was very very tiny and I was looking at my walls and I finally moved a little too far and I moved which is now my own home in Florida instead of living in a dungeon in New York okay so when I walk towards my students which I'm not going to do to you now but if you can accomplish this in your life as articulators give me the gift of a grip top sock good grip, ship shape, tip top sock that's the one I want you to work on now I'm not going to do the whole thing because it makes us sad it would but you can do this for yourself the other thing is just turn it to this last page where it shows you the action choices these words are really what we do when we're talking about acting you want something because you want something so you're always trying to make the right choice for what you're doing and I'd like you to just look at these for a moment because when you want to make a point you want to choose the right way to make the point and that is depending upon who you're talking to or what you want it really doesn't might not help you as the lawyer to rip somebody's guts out that might be the choice you want but it may not be the choice you want depending upon how you put your story together but it is the choice, if that is the choice then make that choice don't make a I'm kind of going to get him kind of sort of not words you want to use because we're sloppy thinkers now sloppy thinkers and sloppy talkers see I just said you don't need that word in your vocabulary you don't need like sort of you don't need to start so we're starting to speak text talk also you want to be very careful about that because why you can do that you're doing this if I'm on your jury and I know I'm a little older and it is a generation that I'm going wow you can't speak you don't speak well and you don't speak articulately and you don't speak in a fashion that uses you know I am a son about that I expect you to be educated you've all gone to law school so I expect you to have an education that goes with my opinion of what that means so you do need to be careful in the same way that we all need to be careful of what ever we do so there's the uh again so I want to also some of you young lawyers have you been in court yet okay there's a lot of nerves I think that go along with your job and a lot of tension right you're going from this to that to this to that you've got to think really fast so I'm going to give you two exercises that you might want to take away with you and it's a very breathe for five breathe for five and all it is is when you're when you go you have to go from one thing to another and you have to go very very quickly it literally is paying attention to your breath as you breathe in for five and breathe out for five and you do it five times just really really simple and you want to breathe into your belly none of this all up here my phone yeah um pockets you want to think this breath all the way deep into your belly uh so you're breathing and you don't close your eyes you're breathing in for five inhale for five and exhale for five so you're breathing in close your eyes two three four five and exhale one two three inhale and exhale deep into your belly and what's different than a minute ago anything just gone and it's the gift that you can give yourself so if you're about to make a presentation give yourself out can I do one more can you all stand up lots of times when you're in our business in the theater business you're running from an audition you're running back and forth all the time so ladies I'm sorry if you address this on me this is another really easy way to just find a language see? cute right um to create yourself you're going to come into your feet just parallel and you're just going to chart we call charging up a little bit just a little gentle that's it just that arms just to your sides your chin is parallel to the floor you're feeling your spine really good and you're going to drop your chin into your chest and you're going to drop down to the count of 25 and I'm going to count that for you so you're going to stop the charging and it's one three four dropping down five six seven eight nine ten your hands are going to hold on to the floor if you get that down that far your head will touch the floor no doubt especially not flexible not into the machine however don't do it if you can't and just hang there for a second just hang there and you're breathing into your back and your back is opening up your feeling it's a visualization drop your head really drop your head though lawyers want to hang on to their heads no you can drop it it won't fall off I promise expand into your back and now come up to the count of 25 the burger burger time one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty one two three four five okay what's different now wait but you don't do this at home obviously don't do this at home don't do this at home you feel taller really do do this at home by the count of fifteen okay I'm bored now okay I know you want to get where you're going young people but no you actually have to slow down you know slow down be present because if you're present in your life you're going to be present when you're in the court you can't skip the steps you don't be present because if you're present that's what I see I see a person also with a smile don't forget you can have a smile right now on that it won't kill you because that's what people also respond to that also means that it looks like you're very confident it's not a smormy smile that the word smarmy don't be smarmy but do look like a person that we want to know alright alright thank you very much we have three panelists and we have about five minutes for questions so if anybody has any questions for any of our three sorry you may have your quirk it's a present I drank that wine for you okay well I would just I would say that at Esther's here we actually have a yoga class and it's been great for the litigator it's been great for me and I just have a big argument Federal Court in the Southern District of New York Lower Manhattan it's like a big time court and the judge was running a few minutes late and we were just me and the other lawyers and waiting for the judge and I just used the time to breathe I mean it really has become important to me to get relaxed and centered and all that it's not just some new way to mumbo jumbo it's really good stuff it really will serve you just well and in life thank you thank you all so much for coming to the CLE we are done for the day please make sure to get your certificates of attendance from Melody or from Rachel right outside that has the course number so you can go to the Florida Board website and register your credits for being here all day thank you so much to all of our panelists and have a great night yep thank you