The Hard Truth about Persuasion and the Lawyer Brain [Ep 161]

elarrickbrand on April 2, 2026

We know we live in an attention-deficit age, where attention spans and concentration levels are lower than ever.

It’s not just about social media though. These trends carry forward into every day life, including in the court room. We simply can’t assume that just because the jurors are there and present, that they will necessarily be paying as close attention as we expect. It’s human nature to start to drift away and think about something else when you’re not otherwise captured by a subject, and there is fascinating brain science that demonstrates why!

So today we look at ways to maximize your impact, grab hold of the narrative, choose the most effective facts and frame your arguments in a way that keeps jurors engaged and wanting more.

Even the judge will notice this approach! And will appreciate how you started with the hook.

In fact, you could say that regardless of the impact of social media doom-scrolling, understanding these persuasion techniques has been a winning strategy in courtrooms, and beyond, for generations.

So, get to the point, cut the small talk, lean into the hook and the best facts, and remember who you’re talking to: tailor your presentation so that it resonates with a juror’s brain.

Set up a free consultation today: https://www.calendly.com/elizabethlarrick

In this episode, learn how:

  • Mediation focus groups help assess case value and strategy.
  • Running focus groups early can provide critical insights.
  • Each focus group builds on the previous one for better results.
  • Timing is key; don’t wait until the last minute.
  • Lawyers should commit to at least one focus group per case.

Links from this episode:

You can also watch today’s episode on my YouTube Channel:
The Hard Truth about Persuasion and the Lawyer Brain [Ep 161]

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Transcript

Elizabeth Larrick (00:00.398)
Have you forgiven a presentation and then saw people be completely confused by things that you said? Or maybe you gave a statement in a hearing and then the judge completely misread what you said? Well, it’s totally possible that you’re using persuasion the wrong way.

Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep, where you learn how to better connect with clients and juries. Gather strategies to help you with persuasion and learn how to use focus groups along the way. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and in this episode, we’re gonna give some hard truths about how persuasion can escape trial lawyers. All right, I deal with this subject nearly every day with my focus groups and helping my lawyers prepare to give the best possible presentations.

Well, what I have found is there are three very simple ways that lawyers can confuse and get persuasion kind of messed up. So I want to talk about those today. And I want to help you do a better job. And these are three very simple things that we can consciously look at and change going forward. Now

You will see they are very simple, but they are also things that we can do in our preparation to change and make our presentations more persuasive. And they are based on brain science. Okay, so it’s not this magic that we’re gonna slip in there that you’ve never heard of. Okay. These are things that work with our brains. They come from lots of different areas of brain science, but my experience comes from doing focus groups and mock jury’s for over 10 years.

And so these are things that I help lawyers with when we prepare for focus groups. So every month I do focus groups from one hour all the way to three hours, but we always work and prepare with our lawyers for their presentations to be as persuasive as possible or to avoid the pitfalls of confusion. And so that’s what we’re gonna talk about here today, are three very simple things that we do as lawyers that can confuse our audience.

Elizabeth Larrick (02:19.99)
Lead them down the wrong path or get them to completely turn off before we even get to the juicy stuff we need them to hear. So let’s get right on top of it. Our lawyer brains are not juror brains. We have been trained a very different way, and then we take that training and we work with it for years. And so we have patterns of thought that stick with us all the time and they work for us because.

That’s what we do all day is we try to take the facts and apply it to the law. And so our patterns of thought are very simple. And we sometimes assume that everyone around us has the same thought pattern. And that’s where it can get a little bit confusing or crossways. So our lawyer brain, what does that really actually mean? Well, that means most of the time our brains tell us I need to give all the facts to prove my case. I need to really explain.

All of these things that are going on for you to really understand what happened. And also, I assume you think like I do. Now I try to simplify all these things, which means number one, we love to fact it up. We just pile facts and facts and facts and facts. We investigate more to bring more facts and we just inundate our audiences with facts. Number two, we start off on the wrong foot.

I am not really sure where this actually begins, but pretty much every lawyer that I’ve dealt with has some training somewhere. And again, trust me, I was that person too, where we’re told how we start is that we talk about ourselves. All right. So we’re gonna talk about starting off on the wrong foot. And the last thing is we forget framework. People need framework. They need an outline. They need structure when we’re giving them presentations, a little something we typically forget.

So let’s talk about very specifically how does this show up? Well, our first topic facting it up. So I feel like when we have opening statements, we tend to just fill them with facts. And we bombard our brain. So what happens inside? We can only hold a few things in our short term memory, right? I believe it used to be five to seven. I think it’s more like three. And so we overwhelm the brain with facts.

Elizabeth Larrick (04:44.366)
And then jurors lose it. They can’t hold them all in our short-term memory, so they get lost. And they don’t actually know the priority either. So they don’t know which ones are very important, which ones are not. So they have to pick their own. And typically they’re not going to pick the same ones as you. And so we really want to do our job in limiting and prioritizing.

So that our audience doesn’t have to do it. They know what our priority is, and we’re not overwhelming them with a set of facts. I see this happen pretty often in focus groups where we try to do either an opening statement or we try to do just a neutral narrative of the case. And facts upon facts upon facts upon facts. And then sometimes they just get repeated again in the same fashion.

And again, that’s sometimes where we think we’re repeating is persuasive, but not if it’s just a bunch of facts. So that’s where one of the best things we can do to fix this habit is to look at our presentation. Let’s just take an opening. Look at our opening and count the number of facts that we have in there. And then realize do they need all these facts in opening? Now I’m not saying remove them and don’t let them bring them in the case. You obviously think they’re important.

You’re gonna have to prioritize those things, right? So you wanna limit your facts that obviously gives priority, but then you want to rank them and deliver them in a way that also prioritizes them, okay? For the attention span of our audience. Now, you could be doing a hearing, it’s the same thing. You want to look at what your facts are, limit them to the ones that are the most important because you know you’ve already written a brief, you’ve already put it all in there.

Now we’re trying to talk directly to our short term memory of our judge and what’s the most important thing they need to know right now in this moment. By doing that, right, we alleviate our brains. We get we we don’t we don’t cause confusion immediately. So let’s move to number two here, which would be starting on the wrong foot. So this plays into the concept of brain science of primacy, meaning the first thing we say is given priority. It’s it’s given

Elizabeth Larrick (07:01.132)
More memory space, it’s more likely to be remembered. And so what happens here is we start off introducing ourselves almost all the time, every time. Hi, thank you so much for being here. My name is Elizabeth Larrick. I represent the plaintiff, Bob Smith. Okay, great. But what have you done now with those first four, five, four seconds? Like you you lose them, right?

What we know so far about how our brains are right now, I would say, is we have eight seconds to grab the attention. And then you have a little, if you get it, then you get a little bit more time, a little more, like a little less than 40 seconds then to then get the engagement that you need to keep the attention. But if we’re using our the first seconds out of our mouths to talk about who I am, who my client is, you’re you’re gonna get to that. They’re already gonna know that. You don’t need to reintrodu introduce yourself, right? So that

Very quick eight seconds, we don’t want to start off on the wrong foot. We don’t want to lose our audience. We want to use that primacy for the best that we possibly can. So there’s a camp obviously out there that says start with the hook, an open statement. Start with the statistic. Start with the this is a simple case about boom boom boom, right? All of those are keying in on the

Persuasion that you gather with the first thing that you say. So primacy is so important. But we have to be very conscious about fixing this. Okay, so the fix it here on getting off on the wrong foot is because we are so ingrained, literally, we have to write it out, and either you need to read it or you need to memorize it so that you don’t slip back into that old habit of my name is Elizabeth, I represent the plane of Bob Smith.

Thank you so much for being here. My name is like though, but get to the point, okay? And so that’s where, you know, some people think, well, a little small talk is helpful. Think about a hearing, Elizabeth. That may I promise you, that judge is gonna really appreciate that the first thing that you said was the hook. The most important thing for them to hear. Right. So let’s not lose that beautiful gem of attention that we get in that first eight seconds and that concept of primacy, okay?

Elizabeth Larrick (09:28.086)
Let’s talk about setting up a virtual focus group for you. I run several every single month. And you can click the link in the show notes for a free consultation. Now, let’s move into our third one here. This is going to be a pretty nice and short episode for you, which is we forget framework. Again, this falls back into we have our lawyer brains, our patterns of thought, we do them every day. We take the intake, we put it to law, we apply it.

And it makes sense for us, but it does not make any sense for regular folks. So we have made it in our brains very easy to find connections with fact and law. But regular people do not. This is where you have to help them make the connections. This is where our framework is so important because brains love patterns. They love to find patterns.

They love to see patterns that makes it happy. this is easy. I understand this. And so that’s why when you see a lot of opening statement frameworks or even hearing, like having a hearing, you have there’s a framework for that argument. It is so important when we talk about jurors that we pick a framework they are familiar with. So there’s a great book by Cliff Atkinson about PowerPoints, and there’s also a great seminar.

put on by Mr. Mark Lanier, where he talks about these frameworks and he picks easy frameworks. It’s the A B C’s, it’s the seasons, fall, winter, spring, summer, right? wait, I that’s a pattern that I know. That wait, okay, good, right? Because when we are starting something, right? We’re starting our opening statement. Yes, we have our eight seconds and our primacy, but we also have curiosity.

We also have anticipation that comes with that. And when you begin, we want to give them a framework. I’m gonna understand this. I’m gonna, okay, great. But the other thing is they can see the connections that their brains need to be making with facts and law without you hitting, you know, it’s subtle, right? So let me just step back here and give you a good example.

Elizabeth Larrick (11:54.382)
So rules of the road, Rick Freeman, rules of the road, are great. But other things are not as easy to grasp as rules of the road. People know we drive, great, rules of the road. you’re speeding, that’s a violation. That’s simple, right? We can make that connection quickly. But other cases are a little more complicated. And so when you create these rules, safety rules, company rules, right? When you create rules that go with the case.

You need to help them make the connection with the violation. So that’s where you’ll have the rule and then the checklist for the rule that says, okay, trucking companies must hire qualified drivers. Okay, great. Oop, I like this rule, but now I I really am lost after that. Okay. Because again, they don’t know what all the the specific rules are. So then here’s the checklist. So how does a company hire what’s the checklist that they use?

Okay, well, number one would be: does the driver have a valid commercial driver’s license? Yes or no? whoa, that’s great. I got that. Check the box. So that’s where we’re making a simple framework, a checklist that helps them make the connections. So many times, what I see in focus groups, and what I see even in trial, is lawyers will bombard their audience.

with a lot of information and no framework. And when you can provide a very structured framework, here’s what you’re going to hear next. Here’s the checklist for this. Now, what does that allow you to do? You can then use the checklist with every witness. You can use it again in closing, right? So then we’re repeating our framework. Okay, it’s familiar to our brains. So it’s not unusual. We’re just now taking other facts and putting it and making those connections

Because we will assume as lawyers that they are making the connections and they’re not. If you’ve ever gone to trial and you lost, you know they didn’t make the connection. Okay. So we want to use frameworks. We want to work with the brain that loves these patterns and these familiar frameworks. So let’s back up and let’s talk again. We have talked about three things that we do as lawyers with our lawyers’ brains that can completely get

Elizabeth Larrick (14:14.41)
Our audience on the wrong track and that are just the opposite of persuasion. And number one is that we fact it up. We bombard with all the possible facts. All the facts to prove are one point, or all our facts to prove are three or four or five points, right? Limit it. Prioritize it. Keep it simple for them, right? You’re gonna give them the rest of it in trial. Don’t worry. Our second one is starting on the wrong foot, right? Where we lose our audiences with an

Eight seconds because we are talking about ourselves. We’re saying things that make no difference to the case, right? That’s why we start with a hook. That’s why we start with this is a simple case about blah blah blah. Or you start with a stat, right? That’s why primacy is so important when we are lawyers and we’re talking to a new audience, or even if you’re talking with a judge, right? Maybe a familiar audience. Don’t lose out on that very first thing. Start off on the right foot.

And lastly, we forget framework. We forget that regular people need help making the connections that we make so easily in our brains. And how do we do this overall? And again, it’s making the time right to prepare, go back and say, okay, where could I be losing people? Do I have a framework? How am I starting? Okay, let me not get off on the wrong foot. Let me write this out and read it verbatim. And then

Obviously, let me limit the facts here to the most important ones and then prioritize them for my audience because they won’t know. They won’t know how to prioritize it. I’ll help them out and do it for them. All right. I hope that this episode was helpful because listen, it’s the hard truth to know that sometimes our brains are working against us, but simple ways to fix it. Thank you so much for listening to Trial Lawyer Prep. Until next time, keep preparing to win.