Connecting in the Courtroom By Aaron Bundy & Shane Henry
We must make connections to be successful. We must connect with the judge and the jury when presenting our case. Without connection, trial is at best an academic exercise only good for curing insomnia. The decision maker will ultimately remember the message we convey, not the way we dress or the impressive words we use. To effectively persuade, the trial lawyer and the witnesses must connect with the decision maker. Connecting means being genuine. Trial is a social experience, albeit one with fixed rules and customs. When we are less than honest, the judge and the jury see right through us. Effective connection means being honest in that setting, especially when we are expected not to be honest. Gerry Spence says the first lie we tell the jury is that we want them to be fair, when what we really want is for them to be fair to us, or even unfairly decide in our favor. By recognizing those expected lies and discarding them, we can connect in a genuine way. Connecting also means focusing more on the “why” our client did what they did rather than only the “what” they actually did. Sometimes humans perform bad acts for justified reasons. For example, the client 18 Tulsa Lawyer
admits to killing another person then explains that it was in self-defense. In this case, the “why” your client did what they did explains the “what” of their behavior. This is often the case and something we should consider in case analysis. There are five basic stories in the human experience. The concepts of love, fear, anger, fairness and sadness have meaning for all of us. Everyone has experienced life events that give special meaning to those concepts. Everyone can relate to these feelings. They are the emotional component of the case. These emotional components can engage the decision maker and motivate a decision in favor of your client. When a client has been treated unfairly, the emotional connection will give the decision maker the motivation to right the wrong. When the client explains what happened and why they did what they did, it connects the client with the decision maker. Once the connection is established, the natural human tendency is to identify and help the person that has been wronged. Connection leads to understanding. Humans receive information and automatically begin trying to