The 8 Second Rule That’s Costing You Verdicts [Ep 144]
In this episode, Elizabeth tackles the challenge of capturing and maintaining attention in legal settings, emphasizing the importance of the critical eight-second window to engage audiences like judges, mediators, opposing counsel, and juries. Discover methods to simplify complex legal jargon and prevent cognitive overload, ensuring clarity in your arguments.
Elizabeth dives into crafting compelling trial strategies, focusing on the power of visual comparisons and thematic development in opening statements to effectively counter defense narratives. Whether it’s contrasting visuals or structuring arguments to reinforce your points, these techniques will elevate your trial preparations.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Mastering attention in legal settings using the critical 8 second rule
- Simplifying complex legal jargon to avoid cognitive overload
- Utilizing visual comparisons and thematic development in trial strategies
- Integrating visuals with verbal communication for enhanced audience engagement
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Supporting Resources:
Do you have an upcoming trial and want help writing your opening statement? Book a free call with Elizabeth to see how she can help.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to the podcast Trial Lawyer Prep. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, trial lawyer turned consultant here to help lawyers clearly communicate their cases in order to win.
In today’s episode, we will directly speak to how we can hold people’s attention and not lose it. We have eight seconds to grab people’s attention. We already know as lawyers that attention spans are getting smaller and smaller. It really doesn’t matter who your audience is. It could be a judge, a mediator, opposing counsel, or a jury. Either way, we have eight seconds. If we lose that eight seconds, it is costing you verdicts, winning, possibly even settling cases quicker.
This episode, we want to talk about how we can work through that eight seconds to grab attention, but also to avoid cognitive overload, giving people too much at one time. I want to express all the things that we have found in doing focus group research, going to trials, and getting feedback to understand what worked. And of course, we know when it doesn’t.
So let’s talk about our eight seconds. There’s so much research that goes into our attention spans. Tons of marketing companies pour millions of dollars into figuring out what is the attention span. And right now, most current research I would say is eight seconds. What we really want to know is how to get that eight seconds down and keep their attention. We’ve seen this before. If you’ve watched any of the CLEs that talk about opening statements, if you’ve read any of the fabulous books that are out there about setting up and structuring opening statements, you will know that the instruction, the request is to start with a hook. Start with a simple attention-grabbing sentence. This case is about boom, boom, boom, starting with a statistic because we want to grab that attention, right? Get those brains going.
The other thing that we want to make sure that we do is then be able to keep that attention without overloading or overwhelming our brains. What happens is we unknowingly provide a bulk of information that overwhelms our brains and they end up being turned off. When you’re speaking, you’re giving folks a good rundown of the case, maybe you’re rundown the evidence, maybe the standard that applies. When you do that, if a juror or anyone in your audience hears a word that they don’t understand or maybe a phrase, or maybe it’s just how you’ve actually phrased the sentence, their whole brain will stop processing anything else and direct all the energy into figuring out that one word, that one phrase, or trying to restructure the sentence to figure out what you’re saying. Meanwhile, you’re still talking and delivering information and they’re not receiving any of what happens then? Well, maybe they keep trying to listen. Maybe they go to something else and think about other things. Maybe they think about what they’re going to have for lunch. Either way, they’re not listening to you. Either fill in the gap with what they think you said, taking a guess, or they just sit back and just resolve that they’re just not gonna understand. It makes no difference to them. And they’re just not gonna pay attention. I don’t want that for you. I want you to be able to grab people’s attention. I want you to work through cognitive overload.
And so we’ve got three plus a bonus that we’re gonna talk about here today that you can work through and these are simple things, there are three very simple things we can do with any presentation you’re about to give. So think about opening statement, think about mediation, think about an upcoming hearing that you have. All three of these things can be applied to any presentation you’re about to give so that you don’t lose someone’s attention or you don’t sit in their brain on a scavenger hunt trying to figure out a word or a phrase that you use. And again, these are time-tested results, done focus groups on these topics, read books on these topics, and again, taking these things to trial to test it out.
Number one is linguistics or language. We are really known for using some large legal terms, medical terms that really can stump jurors. I see this very often in focus groups and the easy thing to do is just pair. I know that we have to use certain languages in certain cases. We have to do it. The law requires us. I understand that. I’m not trying to fight against that, but what I want you to do is pair it. And you heard me already do that. When I said linguistic, I paired it with language. So I want to give you a couple other examples that have gone through focus groups. And we have heard directly, right, that these are things that need to be paired. So medical malpractice cases are great examples of this. And we once had a medical malpractice unfortunately the person developed some eschar. Well, that’s dead tissue. Now the lawyer used this word no less than 10 times.
And that was the first question we got when I asked for what do you think? What is your impression from this information? They were like, I don’t know what that word is. Even though, right, he may have explained it, because he kept using it, the brain kept getting stumped again and again and again. And so all we did was very simply reduce the amount of times you use the word, but also we just paired it together. We gave it a little sidecar, right? Like, eschar, dead tissue. It just goes right along together, so they pair together. Another example here recently was uncontrolled intersection. Now that stumped me because I don’t know really what that means.
So we paired it together with an intersection without any signal or sign with how to direct traffic. Now that’s a long pairing, it was a key element in the facts of the case. So I didn’t want to lose the people in the focus group early. And then I paired it with a I said uncontrolled intersection showed a picture and then I paired it. An intersection without signs or signals that direct traffic. Boom, simple, right? Super simple. Again, these are simple tips, but we tend to overlook them. So number one, think language when you’re walking through your presentation. How can I pair my language or change the language, remove it altogether to make it very simple?
Number two is structure. Number one, let’s just have it. A lot of times we put together arguments, we put together presentations, and we don’t really think through the structure. So this is where we’ve talked about rules of three. We’re going to say it again, rules of three, working memory in our brain can hold three to five things. So if we already say, I’m going to walk through three can handle three. That’s easy. But when you can structure it and a lot of times people say, well, but what if this particular case m is going to have six different questions in the verdict form. Or what if the law has five elements? Okay, so we’re getting into the nitty-gritty here. When we wanna structure things in a three, we wanna go to that 30,000 foot view and try to get broad and then group it together. This will also really help you cut the fluff. Right, so if we’re making our strongest argument, not everything can go in there. it’s either fit in or it’s not. It’s not gonna be important. But not every detail’s important when we give our first presentation, right? Thinking about you’ve written a motion. You’ve given pages of information over to the judge and now you’re going to stand up and give your argument. You don’t need to hit everything in that motion. You need to hit the strongest things. You’d have strong structure and hit the top thing. And the same thing happens with an opening statement, You can’t give them everything in the opening statement. It’s overwhelming. You will lose them. So you want to make sure you structure it down to those three different pieces, right? Rule of threes. and then everything else can be saved for gonna actually give it more emphasis by targeting it later in cross exam or direct exam, okay?
Alright, next one is cognitive space. So this just means that when we look at our sentence structure, we make it simple. We don’t have long, dense sentences with lots of information. We take those apart and we give simple sentences that are very short and sweet and to the point. Alright, so if you’re gonna talk about a car crash. m on July 6th, it was a stormy, rainy night when the car was going eastbound on 35 with slick rain on bald tires. That’s kind of a lot. You really wanna break that down. There are lots of pieces in there that are helpful to the story, so just take it back, And realize what’s really important here. Is July 6th important to what the jury needs to hear? Not likely. So what is it? It’s the weather, it’s the bald tires, maybe it’s you’re on a highway. How many lanes are on that you’re just gonna break that down and when you do that, you’re giving space for the brain to process. Instead of trying to cram six things in a one sentence, we’re spacing it out. also make it easier on your audience who is listening.
Alright. Last bonus point I will say, and we will do an entire episode on this because I know how important it is to have a visual presentation that matches what you’re saying. So I talked a little bit about this. earlier we talked about showing a picture of an uncontrolled intersection while pairing it with what it we in order to grab attention and keep attention, we want to use visuals that convey our message but not duplicate our message. So many times when we’re using PowerPoint, we’ll just put the words on the screen and then we’ll read them. This actually compounds the difficulty of working memory. Makes it difficult. So what you wanna do is you wanna be able to pair your message, right, visually with what you’re saying. You don’t want it to be a duplication. And when you do that, people will pay more attention. Just typically, people identify as visual learners, even though learning styles have been debunked, that’s okay. If we wanna speak to how each person learns in your audience. I mean, if you have a jury, you have probably many different styles or many different ways that people want to learn. So you’re gonna hit both of them. You’re gonna have the visual, you’re gonna have the verbal, and that’s gonna key in on keeping our eight seconds, keeping things moving. keeping people’s attention, but also allowing some space. Because as you put together your presentation, you’re gonna wanna follow the same rules. If you put a word on the screen, maybe you’re gonna verbally pair it with a simpler term. You’re gonna use simple structure on your PowerPoint slides, right? Not dense wording. And then of course, you also wanna make sure when you structure it, It follows with what you’re saying.
Wanna talk a little bit about an example here recently, and we just had. So I worked with a lawyer, we’d done three short virtual focus groups on the same case over a period of a year as they got ready to prepare for trial, to prepare for mediation. tested many different things. We parts of the story, pieces of the defense arguments, and then it was getting ready for trial. So we came together for what I would call a strategy session. We each did our own homework, looking at the past focus groups. We wanted to look at what is working, what is not working, and how do we need to structure this opening statement.
So thinking through our eight seconds, we want to know what had to go first, right? Primacy. would be the hook that we would need to do? And then we also looked at what was working for the defense. and what was being tapped into. And again, we’re obviously running these focus groups and playing the defense. The point of view that was being tapped into was significantly defense. And so they were tapping into the point of view of the juror as a homeowner. And this particular case involves an knew, oh okay, we need to get ahead of this. This may need to be the thing you do very first, the primacy. We have to set this out straight for them and in a very simple way.
And so that was what we worked on. The rules that a business must follow to keep their place safe and how it’s different than a homeowner. we needed to think about how to educate them very simply, but then also even pair that with questions and jury selection. in that hour that we spent together, we really just worked on what would be first had to grab their attention, but also set things straight in a very simple language, very simple structure, And then ultimately had to make it very have this eight seconds. And through that visual comparison. Even if our slide had a business building versus a home, that would still be able to bring up different things in their mind on top of what the lawyer would have been saying an opening statement. So we were able to get a lot of work done on our themes, on our structure, and how to get out in front of oh the point of view that the defense was using to win the case.
Alright, I hope that this episode was helpful to you. If you are preparing for trial and you want to review your opening statement, maybe look at injecting case themes, I can help with that. There’ll be a link in the show a free consultation call if you’re interested. Alright, thank you so much for tuning in to this episode and until next time, thank you.
