Author: elarrickbrand

Have you ever wondered how to set up a focus group system that not only saves you money but also provides invaluable feedback for your courtroom success? In this episode, I share my insights and experiences on creating your very own focus group that will help you improve your skills and case strategies. I cover the non-economic damages model, the confusion around it, and how it could create gaps in your case. Plus, I discuss how to eliminate a defense argument and even add facts to your case from the focus group feedback.

We dive deeper into strategies for ensuring reliable feedback from your focus groups, such as preventing repeats, providing clear instructions, and utilizing the right tools for communication, payment, hosting meetings, and advertising. By treating participants with respect and making it easy for them to participate, you can guarantee they’re engaged and providing honest feedback. Listen as I discuss how these strategies can help you get the practice and feedback needed for courtroom success.

Lastly, I touch on streamlining focus group logistics by suggesting the use of tools like PayPal, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Dropbox. To help you get started, I’m offering a free download of my questionnaire. So hit play and join me in this episode to learn how to optimize your focus group system and ultimately improve your abilities in the courtroom. Don’t forget to leave a review and follow the podcast to help others find it!

In this episode, you will hear:

• Learning from focus groups 
• The value of having a Gmail account
• Setting up and managing focus groups
• Ways to improve communication and directions
• How to select from a diverse focus group participants 

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Supporting Resources:

Please follow this link to download the Virtual Focus Group Checklist: https://fantastic-designer-3528.ck.page/635800b2c4

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Elizabeth Larrick and I’m your host for Trial Lawyer Prep, a podcast dedicated to folks getting ready for trial and preparing cases the better way.

I’m Last episode you met Rhonda, my focus group recruiter, and we talked pretty extensively [00:01:00] about the system that we use to recruit. And I wanted just to hit a pause and take this episode to dive just a little bit deeper into setting up your own focus group system. Because I know that there is still a lot of hesitation out there to running your own focus group.

And I think it’s something that we can totally do and totally handle. And one of the things I’ve heard over the weekend, ran focus group here in Austin with some great lawyers going to trial and I heard through the grapevine about another focus group that costs a set of lawyers 88, 000. Now that’s a lot of cheese.

So that’s why I want to take time and walk through this with you and setting up your own focus group system. Um, because It is so vital. It’s essential. It literally is not a step that you should [00:02:00] skip because we need the feedback and we need the practice. That’s all there is to it is these focus groups are an amazing place to get that feedback to get that practice where you wouldn’t get it somewhere otherwise.

And again, I’m going to go ahead and say again, focus groups, okay, because we’re not talking about. mock trials. We’re talking about doing things and efficient, getting things done in an hour, getting it done in two hours, maybe even getting it done in three hours, depending on what needs to get done, but making it really efficient for you so the cost is efficient as well.

So talking to my trial lawyers here, Which found the podcast. So you know that this is for you and wanting to give basically what I have learned in my eight years with the focus group system that I have set up for me. And remember when I started doing this, I was basically a sole lawyer and I didn’t even have any staff when I first started out [00:03:00] doing focus groups by myself.

So this is a system that has been evolved, but it still evolves, but basically it’s set, it’s easy, we follow it every time. I’ve had many, multiple people, multiple staff follow the system without a problem. And then of course Rhonda has picked up that system and we’ve carried it forward. So focus groups.

Just to touch on that, why would we do focus groups? And let me tell you, every focus group, no matter what, the number one thing I hear from lawyers after we finish a focus group is, I learned something new. And that’s what we need, is that outside perspective and the testing. And these are lawyers who, with years of experience, 30 plus trials, right, they’re telling me, hey, wow, I wasn’t expecting that reaction.

Or, I’m glad I learned to see how people see that fact, because I thought it was different. Or, wow, we’ve got a hole in the case right there that we need to fill up with some facts and information. Let me give [00:04:00] you a concrete example. Doing a testing in a focus group of a damages model. Right, so what the lawyer believes will be a way to calculate the damages in the case.

Generally, when we talk about a damages model, we are talking about that. non economic part of things, right? Economics are easy. We can add up numbers. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the non economic stuff, right? So in some places, it’s mental anguish. In some places, it’s pain and suffering.

Okay. So that’s really kind of what we’re talking about. We want to test it out. Okay. Which is, I think, a great way. We, sometimes we come in with what we want to test it for, what the number is, but really it was the model, how we’re calculating came in with us. Seems super clear, but in the feedback from the focus group, Was just confusion and the way that had been calculated people thought that he was referring to lost wages And so people got on tangents about [00:05:00] lost wages and some people just Because of the level of kind of confusion just turned him off altogether now That’s a pretty valuable piece of feedback.

Now, how long did it take to do that? 30 minutes We’re talking very efficient use of time, and then again, turning and getting that feedback back from focus groups. Another example that I had where we were doing a focus group and testing both sides of a case and the lawyer learned that that one defense argument made a lot of ground with these people.

And that was one thing we kept hearing over and over again in discussion. It was like, okay, we need to eliminate. that argument and give these facts. We have these facts in the case. Always going to learn something new, and again, sometimes it feels really subtle, what you’re learning, but it has a giant impact on the case overall.

And we talked a little bit about this at the beginning of this episode, that [00:06:00] what’s the holdout? What are the problem areas for us? Generally, I hear, well, it’s too expensive. Or it’s too time consuming, or I’ve never done it before. I’ve never even done a focus group at all. So I wouldn’t even know where to start.

So let’s tackle our first top two things, which is it’s expensive and it’s time consuming. This is what this podcast is about. And that’s what a lot of the feedback is on in the blogs and on my website. And even in the handout that I had today is, you set up your own system so that you can control that cost.

And you set up that system to eliminate the time consuming part of things so somebody else can do this for you. Now, of course, you can offload all of these things, but that can increase the cost. And that’s what we’re trying to be really cost conscious for trial lawyers who are out there who are solos.

Maybe you’ve got a mid sized firm. And time consuming because maybe you’ve got a lot of cases on your plate. And being efficient with your time is really something that you need to do. And, of course I’ve never done it [00:07:00] before. Well, that’s, we’re here to talk about, there’s lots of, again, episodes that I’ve done and even blog posts about never done it.

Try this first. And maybe that will be another one that we refresh and bring back to never done before. Let’s talk about it. And I do know that in the month of June, this month, I’m going to have conversation with a lawyer who had never done focus groups before and picked it up and has run with it. And so we’re going to talk about, Hey, feedback on that part of things.

But let’s talk a little bit about a solution which would be never done before. How can we set up the system to make it efficient time wise and expense wise? When I started out in 2015, I had a rough idea how to set up a focus group. I’d had some prior experience with my prior job where we’d run a few focus groups, but we had some staff that was helping us.

So, when I went out on my own, without any staff, I kind of had a few holds to figure out. And, the two main things that I did right from the start, one of them was, um, uh, I[00:08:00] 

And that would be collecting, recording, and storing all the past participants and having it in a program. I use Excel, nothing super fancy, to be able to collect data points like emails and no shows along with the date they attended, the time they were Of course, once we turn virtual, then we add that virtual column in there, virtual person, but collecting all that data from the start is fantastic because that then allows me to search to see who has ever attended before to prevent repeat attendance.

Now, I know that repeats can be used. I do, but what I want to see is I want to see time pass before these folks come back. Six, eight months, sometimes two years. And of course, some people are not ever invited back, but what’s really important is we don’t want focus [00:09:00] group people who do this for a living to join into our focus group because most of the time they’re just parrots.

They just mimic, right? They don’t actually tell us real feedback. They get either really upset or they try to take the opposite view, be a contrarian inside the focus group. You never really can nail down what the actual feedback is or the truth is from the feedback. So that’s why I always try to prevent repeats, especially back to back repeats.

So I track that as well. And then again, of course, I don’t invite people back who don’t show up. Now, there are people who reschedule, or there are people who need to cancel. That’s different than just a complete no show, so we always track that as well. And that just, again, prevents a lot of frustration on recruiting and getting people in there.

And I really harp away about this prevent repeats because of course it’s super easy to invite the same people back, even though it’s a different case, Elizabeth, it’s no, they’ve seen you before, they know what the song and dance [00:10:00] is. You’re not going to get solid feedback, that’s reliable, right? We want to make sure we can rely on what we’re getting, otherwise focus groups are a wash.

It’s garbage in, garbage out, right? So if you put whoever signs up first out the gate, not vetting at all, and then you have focus groups. And you think, wow, that went really well. Who’d you have sitting in the seat? How do we test our reliability? Who was sitting in the seats and then what’d you present?

Because a lot of times we can do a really great job of putting a great set of people in there. And then we get a presentation that argues with people. That’s extremely biased. And we tried to set up things to make sure that we’re being neutral and people, the cover’s blown sometimes people say to me, and it’s just, okay, so can we really rely on it?

But anyhow, the second thing that I did from the start and I took time was that I always wanted to treat all our participants with respect. I wanted to make sure they knew where to go, when to be there, when they would get [00:11:00] paid. I want to make sure that when we were in person we had as many creature comforts as possible.

Sometimes it’s not totally possible to do that when you’re in a limited space or got limited funds. But here’s the thing, I knew from the very jump, running focus groups, I wasn’t going to pay top dollar. Okay, I get a lot of complaints still to this day. I went to this other focus group, they paid me 150.

I went to this other one and I’m like, okay, I hear you, but here’s the thing. The questions that we have to ask you are not personal. We’re not coming in to make people give us. A lot of personal private information. What we’re here to do is get your Feedback on the presentation. And also I know that there’s a budget that we have to accommodate.

Now again, that doesn’t mean I still pay the same amount of money that I did eight years ago. We’ve had to go up, we’ve had to pay more. But again, I still get complaints for that. But also I want to treat people with respect because I run a referral program. Which is basically asking people who’ve attended, had a good time, or a good experience to refer [00:12:00] somebody else.

And in that referral program, I have been able to gain people who are engaged, who show up, and make great participants. So I want to make sure we do that. Also, I’ve noticed, again, when people can’t find the place, or they get the time wrong, and they get super flustered, it’s really hard to get them to calm back down.

To then be able to focus on what you’re saying and get feedback. So I want to make sure to eliminate all those things so we can go over the top when it comes to giving instructions, to giving reminders. If we have a location, we give them, we link it with a Google app, right? Just to make sure we’re going the extra mile so that they know exactly where they’re going to go.

The two things we did right from the start, but I did right from the start to make sure. So let’s jump into really quickly. The focus group system and right up the gate, when you’re setting up your system, the first thing you need to sit down is you need to pick your tools. Some people [00:13:00] fancily call this your tech stack, but I’m just gonna call it your tools.

Cause I’m not a toll tech person. And I’m definitely not with all the up and all how much to talk about things. So it’s your tools. Okay. So for me, it’s Gmail, it’s PayPal, it’s zoom, it’s Adobe, it’s Craigslist. So what did I just list? How do I communicate with people? I use Gmail. How do I pay people? PayPal.

With virtual, what platform am I going to use to host the meeting? Zoom. For my confidentiality, I’m going to use Adobe. And for advertising, I’m going to use Craigslist. And I also use Facebook. So, in all of these things, always be thinking about what is the easiest for participants. You want it to be easy on you as well, because you’re learning this.

But most of these tools We’ve already been using as trial lawyers. I use Adobe for eSignature because it’s a program I already pay for. I use Zoom. It’s a program I already pay for. I also, when I started out, that seemed to be [00:14:00] the easiest platform. And so, I’ve taken it and used it over the years. They definitely improved it by and far.

There are new things you can do and fancy things you can do. PayPal, I chose that one. Just kind of, that’s what I chose. And, um, I see, here’s a couple pitfalls that I see with some of the technology people pick. One is you pick a lot of stuff. Meaning, I know some lawyers who they’ll use whatever payment platform people want.

Some people want Cash Appet, some people want Venmo, some people want PayPal, some people want Zelle. Like, that now becomes a logistical nightmare for your staff who’s going to be paying. So we, from the very start, PayPal, that’s it. If you don’t have it, sorry, you can’t be a part of it. And that makes it really easy when you’re going to go make payment to people that you have one program they log into and make the payment and it’s done.

Is it the best payment platform out there? I don’t know. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. PayPal and Venmo are the same people. But I [00:15:00] still get arguments both ways or either way from people who want to join but don’t have PayPal. I just say, sorry, that’s just the way we use it. I also see as far as picking your tools, I love Gmail because there are So many things inside that 6 account.

Always do the paid account. Please do not skip on this because you do not want any of that information. You don’t, it’s, again, you don’t have any privacy. Let’s just put it that way. You have zero privacy if you don’t pay for it. So pay the 6. It’s totally worth it because you want to make sure that none of this, all this stuff doesn’t get leaked, especially if you are using Gmail as a way to transfer videos.

Okay. To people, to co counsel, or you’re putting materials up in the Gmail for document storage. So pay the 6. It’s totally worth it to have that paid account. Now Gmail of course gives you document storage, like I talked about, or just general online store storage, but it gives you access to questionnaires that you can make.[00:16:00] 

And of course the Google calendar. And we use those for every single focus group and it makes it super easy. It’s all in one place instead of having it in different places. Now again, this is the tool that we use to communicate with people, so we’re using that email and we’re using that Google Calendar to communicate with our folks.

And we are doing a questionnaire form, we call it a questionnaire, to get people to respond to our advertising. Some folks ask people in the Craigslist ad, hey, email me a response to these 30 questions. What are the chances you’re going to get somebody to answer all 30 questions? It’s possible. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I am saying you may not get very many choices, right?

Because people want it easy. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to apply. And you also want to make sure they’re paying attention, right? So we use our questionnaire form to gather [00:17:00] information about people, but also to kind of run a little bit of a test to make sure are actually reading the ad.

The questionnaire or the makes it super easy for us to manage and seal information in one place, but also learning from Zoe chance and her book influences your superpower, which we did a review with Jason here recently. What’s the easiest, how do you make it easy and having a quick, easy questionnaire, we used to have a ton of questions on there.

I’ve narrowed that down again, out of ice for Rhonda, who talked about that, where people seem to have a hundred questions. questionnaire they have to fill out and then they’re mad when they don’t get picked or they just give up on it. So we want to make it an easy tool to use. Those questionnaires are super easy.

Of course, then it turns into a sheet so you can see everything everywhere. And also, again, it creates a little bit of a. tool to help people. If somebody fills out the form, okay, they’re eligible. If they send an email in response to Craigslist, they’re [00:18:00] automatically not considered because they’re not following directions.

And you got to have people follow directions, even if they’re doing in person, they got to follow directions to get there. Or if it’s Zoom, you got to follow the directions to get into the Zoom meeting. So you definitely want the people who get at least at a bare minimum do that because you want people who are going to actually show up at jury selection.

So part of the system, pick your tools. If you need to vet some tools, that’s good. But basically, like we talked about, you need to have a way to communicate with them. And I will say, having a separate Gmail account is key, right? Because if you’re emailing them from your lawyer account, they’re automatically going to be conjuring up things in their mind about lawyers and what the folks group’s about.

So having that separate Gmail to communicate and have all the other tools with it, calendar, all that good stuff. Pick a way to pay people. That’s helpful. Even today, when we’re doing in person, I still use that PayPal to pay people. I think it’s super easy, creates a receipt for every [00:19:00] person, and I don’t have to fumble with going to get cash.

Pick a platform for doing your virtual, I suggest Zoom. Pick a way to do electronic confidentiality. There’s tons of options out there, Dropbox now offers eSignature, HelloSign, DocuSign, whatever it is. Just Pick one and go for it. And then of course, pick how you’re going to advertise. I use Craigslist and I use Facebook.

To do that, there’s Nextdoor. There’s all kinds of ways you can advertise. Just consider what your budget is. Okay. And. other free ways that you can do that, which would be like one of the ways I use the referral program. All right. So picture tools, and now you need to look at, okay, so what can we automate or even semi automate in my system?

Emails. This is something we’re going to send the same email out for every single FocusScript, we’re just going to change dates, times, maybe the amount of the incentive, right? So emails, that’s great. Gmail will host [00:20:00] templates, right? I know Outlook will do that now too. Easy way to make those templates, get them set up and then just boom, you don’t have to retype those emails.

And again, first email, second email, reminder emails, day of emails, all of that can be put into a template and make it very easy. I will say I’ve tried group emailing and individual emailing. Hands down, do the individual. Because what I have found is people will respond more to the individual one. So I’ll get more people that say, Yep, confirmed.

I will totally be there. Versus if we do a group one. So I know it may save time to do one email with everybody on it. Even blindsees see it. Yeah, okay. Here’s the thing. We use the draft. So we basically draft. All the reminder emails, we draft all our zoom emails so that when it comes time to get it done, it’s just open it, put the email in and go or open it and hit send, you know, it’s [00:21:00] semi automated, right?

So you could use a tool that makes it very automated. That’s going to be more expensive versus having somebody do it semi automated questionnaires. Again, we just copy, create. I used to do a single questionnaire for every single focus group. Of course, that creates a lot of questionnaires. And now we just do one, pretty much one per year.

Or if there are some specific for focus groups, then we’ll create one specific for them. And of course the check in process. You can write that out and have that good to go for in person or in virtual. And it, again, was super easy where you want to check people’s photo IDs. We want to make sure they sign confidentiality and is the technology work, right?

Super simple things here, but again, write it out, have it done. And then you can always have it go back to refer to it. Or if somebody new comes in to step into that role, It can do it very easily. And finally, which would be fine tuning. Part one of your system is pick your tools. Part two is what can be automated or semi [00:22:00] automated, and then go ahead and do that.

So that makes it very easy to reproduce those things every time. And then last one is fine tuning. And that is just. It’s going to happen. There’s going to be something that you forget about that you, Oh, I need to add that. And this happened, of course, constantly. So when we first started doing virtual, we had people show up on cell phone.

That’s not going to work. So we found a way to put that very clearly multiple times. Then when someone showed up on a cell phone, we had a way of saying, Oh, I can’t have a cell phone. We had people who were getting in that didn’t have a PayPal because we weren’t reconfirming the PayPal. And one of the things, too, that we found were just the days that it took us to recruit.

And that used to be a week out. Sometimes we now start at 10 days out. And then just small things that were happening that we were realizing, like, Oh, okay, we need to figure out a way to vet for people who are trying to get in from out of the U. S. It’s not folks that we [00:23:00] want. Most of the time, If you tell people up front what you need, and what is not good, or what you’re not looking for, they generally will not apply.

However, sometimes they do as well. And again, that’s just a matter of, okay, how do we tell people politely, Hey, this is for people who live in the U. S., or this is a study for people who live in California. And then we put that in the questionnaire as well, right? So we want to make sure people Who may breeze past that or read it and breeze past the question.

We have a way to look at that and make sure. And again, that’s all just fine tuning for problems. Another thing that we ran into is, of course, people from outside the U. S. have PayPal outside the U. S., which then has a fee. Who has to pay the fee? We don’t have that in our system. Guess what? Now it’s in our emails.

Just to let people know, if you have, it’s connected to a foreign bank, you’re going to pay the fee, not us. And we haven’t had any complaints for that. Alright, so it’s a lot about the system. [00:24:00] And I know there’s a lot of information, so I wanted to let you know I do have a free download. It’ll be in the show notes, the link to it.

That gives you the questionnaire I used, the tools I used, the confidentiality form that I used. So if you’re curious about that or want to start beyond Scratch, please use that. Get started. And basically what the system puts out for me, it creates a table of folks for me to choose from. In the table, I can quickly eliminate people I don’t want to use, leaving us with people who are eligible.

And I will tell you a big misconception about, oh, okay, I get to this point, I’ll just I’m good to go. There’s still part where you need to pay attention and pick people. And I will say just from having used different staff to do this, one of the biggest things is most people come in and they think, Oh, I’ll just pick the first 10 people and send them an email and we’re done.

Wrong. We don’t want to do that. First of all, you got to vet for repeats, right? You still need to look at the information that’s given [00:25:00] and you got to pick a variety of people. I try to always have a variety of ages, a variety of education, a variety of jobs. Kids know kids, right? And if you pick the first ten people, you might end up having a panel of all single males.

And that might not reflect what the jury poll looks like. So you can’t just automatically pick the first ten, Oh, don’t pick the next ten, right? You’ve got to fine tune at that point and take a little bit of time to stop and look and pick folks. taking that time. Cause you’ve saved so much time on your system and getting people there or getting people to your table, uh, being able to select people is going to help.

So that’s one of the biggest jobs that I do is I go in there to actually select people than put into that email system. And of course, Rhonda helps with that. She vets out people are She’ll say, hey, we’re having a hard time with this person who’s responding or I’ll just say, okay, and we’ve learned I’ve learned if you’re difficult on the [00:26:00] outset, you’re going to be extremely difficult on the inside of the focus group.

So it’s generally a pretty red flag, but get a look and what some of those red flags are when you’re doing it. Okay. I hope that. this podcast episode was helpful. Let’s just stop and recap really quickly. Let’s get you into doing focus groups. Start small. Maybe you do an hour, maybe you do two hours. Set up a system to make it easy on you and your staff to find people to pick.

When you set it up, it’ll be outside your law firm, right? So it won’t be necessarily clued into people that this is a law firm that’s running make it easy on staff. If it’s easy, you’ll do it more. Because once you’re in there and you’re getting that feedback and you’re learning all that good stuff and you’re testing things out, you’re going to see, oh my gosh, this is immensely valuable beyond the expense of 1, 000, 1, 500, or maybe [00:27:00] even 2, 000, right?

Because the value you get out of that is 10x or more because you’re going to learn so many things that you just couldn’t see. We get blinders on, we get into our cases. I really want to stress like getting into this focus group, creating a system for yourself and your staff to start running focus groups.

So I hope that you found this episode helpful and my episode with Rhonda, who is our recruiter to walk through some of those things. If you have questions about focus groups, setting a system, please do not hesitate to call or to email me. And again, we’re going to have that free download of my questionnaire I use.

The tools I use and also confidentiality format free for everybody. It’s going to be in the show notes, but it will take you to another place. Just put your email in and you’ll get an email to you. And again, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review.

That’s a great way for other folks to find me. Also. If you want [00:28:00] to do the plus sign or follow on your favorite podcast platform, that also helps other people be able to find it. And it means a new episode will automatically go into your platform when it is available. All right. And until next time, thank you.

Discover the secrets to successfully recruiting focus group participants in my conversation with Rhonda, a seasoned virtual assistant based in Charleston, South Carolina. Learn how our innovative recruitment system, utilizing platforms like Craigslist and Facebook, has proven effective in drawing in participants from various locations across the US. Rhonda’s own experience as a focus group participant drives her passion for helping others find the perfect candidates for their groups.

In this episode, you will learn:

• The importance of advertising and maintaining an active Facebook page for focus group recruitment.
• How to utilize Google Forms and questionnaires to vet potential participants.
• The benefits of using a step-by-step email sequence to confirm attendance and manage expectations.
• The necessity of maintaining a master list and a no list to ensure proper eligibility and successful participation.
• How to handle payments through platforms like PayPal and Venmo, and streamline communication using email templates.

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Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particular challenge with focus groups, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their businesses and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. I am your host Elizabeth and so glad that you are here.

And we have a very exciting episode I’m going to get to introduce. My focus group recruiter to my audience. And I’m really excited to have Rhonda here with us. She’s going to talk a little bit about [00:01:00] what she does and how our system works and how we try to do our best to have focus groups that are full of folks that are going to talk with us, that give meaningful feedback and that are from the correct kind of location.

So anyhow, before we jump in, let me just go ahead and say, Rhonda, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. It’s good to be here. Fantastic. Rhonda and I normally communicate on zoom. That’s pretty much what we always meet and greet on zoom. And so that’s because Rhonda, you’re not here in Austin, Texas. Where are you located?

Rhonda: I’m in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. And is that where you’re originally from? 

Rhonda: No. So I’m originally from Atlanta, Georgia. I’m a native Atlantan and I moved here about 15 years ago and I love it here. I wanted to be near the beach and it’s a great city to live in. 

Elizabeth Larrick: We worked together remotely. How long you’ve been, was it a pandemic choice or was it, you’ve been working remotely for a while?

Rhonda: Oh yeah. I’ve worked off and on remotely in different jobs, but I decided [00:02:00] about two years ago. To take a turn and I wanted to be a virtual assistant because I wanted to set my own hours and I wanted to be able to travel and I wanted to be able to just take my laptop and be able to go wherever I wanted to go.

And it’s worked out really well. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I know that you help me, but you help a lot of other kinds of people in businesses as well. Right. That’s right. So tell me, did you decide, Hey, I’m going to be a virtual assistant and just put it out to the world? Or cause here’s the thing. I get a lot of questions about how do you find a virtual assistant?

Like, where’s it go? And I know how we met up, but maybe help everybody who’s listening to find out how can they find a virtual assistant if they want one through your path. 

Rhonda: Yeah, so I just decided I was going to do it started researching doing a lot of research on what direction I wanted to go in and what kind of services I wanted to offer and I started putting it out there, I advertised a little bit on LinkedIn, [00:03:00] I went through some Facebook groups that I was a member of.

And I just would go out and network and talk to people. So that’s really the best way to do it. And if you’re looking for a virtual assistant, I think networking and referrals are the best way to go because, Oh, so and so worked with this person and they did a great job. That to me is the best way. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah.

And that’s how we found each other was through a locator, a recruiter, pretty much. Cause I had a really specific kind of virtual assistant that I wanted, cause I’ve been trying to find somebody to help me really specifically with focus groups. And Rhonda has been helping me for over a year now, and it’s been awesome to help get into the system and even fine tune it, but help it run smoothly because sometimes it can go haywire.

So you love it. You’re in Charleston. I’m in Austin. So where are some of your other clients located? 

Rhonda: Oh, wow. So I actually had a client in St. Louis, Missouri. I have one in Chicago, one that [00:04:00] is actually located in Charleston, but I don’t ever see her. I’ve met her one time, and I’ve also worked with someone in Champaign, Illinois.

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, so 

Rhonda: all over. Yes. Awesome. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Obviously, I had a recruiter that kind of put a lot of feelers out to find somebody. So what made you interested in doing focus groups or being in a focus group role? 

Rhonda: I’ve participated in some focus groups over the years, and I always found them fascinating because you never know what you’re going to talk about.

They don’t tell you beforehand, usually, and you’re usually there with a very diverse group of people, right? So you never know what you’re going to hear and who’s going to be there. It’s just interesting. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. 

Rhonda: And 

Elizabeth Larrick: before you started, I said, Hey, will you sit in and be on a focus group? So you got a little taste.

Awesome. Like I said, you’ve been here with me for over a year now. Let’s talk a little bit about the system that we use to recruit. So talk a little bit about folks who are listening, kind of [00:05:00] our system and how we put together. Participants in a focus group. 

Rhonda: Yeah. For us, the first thing we do is once we have a focus group booked, we advertise, advertise on Craigslist.

This is what works best for us. So we advertise on Craigslist. We put it on Facebook, on your Facebook group. And the third place too, is referrals from past focus group participants. Those are the three main places that we pull from. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, and one of the things too that you handle, which is, which I think is a big part of recruiting, which is keeping a really active Facebook page.

So we, moons and moons ago, I set up a Facebook page specifically for Advantage Focus Groups, which is the name of my focus group company and just started feeding it. Holiday stuff. And we do some survey stuff just to get followers. And I think that’s really helped when now, and again, you keep up the Facebook page and occasionally [00:06:00] I’ll get on there too, to hide some unnecessary comments that we get on our Facebook page.

But yeah, so I stopped you there just to talk a little about that Facebook page and how helpful it is. And one thing too, is once we put something out there, we do occasionally we’ll boost. a post, but most of the time we’ll get in there and share to individual groups. So one of the things that we always try to do is if we’re going to have a focus group in Danville, Illinois, then we go and I try to find a group or a page that has Danville jobs and then we apply to get in and then we’re in and then basically once we post on Advantage Focus Group’s Facebook page, then you can share it to any other page you’re a member of.

That’s another way, just kind of, it feels a little time consuming, but it’s free. And that’s where people go to look for jobs. Keep going down our road here. Our advertising. What else is part of the system? 

Rhonda: Yeah. So after we advertise, we ask them to fill out a short questionnaire and it’s a Google form [00:07:00] that they fill out and then we can get their responses and then start pulling people from there.

The thing that I really like about our questionnaire is that it’s not long and complicated. So sometimes if you want to be a focus group of participants, they ask you to fill out a questionnaire and it could be a hundred or more questions. It’s long. And if you answer a question wrong, it won’t stop you.

It’ll make you go through all the questions. And then when to the end, it’ll say, sorry, you’re not a candidate for this focus group. But. Okay. Our questionnaire is very short, and then once they fill it out, we don’t tell them yes or no one way or the other. We’re able to siphon through and sift through and start picking people out that we want to invite to come.

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, that questionnaire has been molded and manipulated over the years to weed people out on very easy questions. People who, before the pandemic hit, everything we did was in person, so it was pretty easy to weed people out. They had to be in the area. Now, when it’s [00:08:00] virtual, they There’s been a lot more challenge of finding people who truthfully answer where they’re located and how to sift through those people that don’t.

So sometimes we’ll tweak a questionnaire to see who people are or there’s been feedback on the Facebook page about do you accept people outside the U. S.? We don’t because obviously our studies are for people here in the U. S. Right. We added that into the top of the questionnaire. Don’t apply if you are not a resident of the U.

S. Some people still do, but I think that questionnaire definitely helps us do a vetting job for us. That makes it super easy for us to say, Oh, that person’s gone. And then one of the things about the questionnaire that, Rhonda and I go round and round about, and I think it’s because we’re both like super OCD is the way we communicate with each other.

Like who’s eligible. Who’s not is we’ll do a highlight green or yellow, and I will black out people. And Rhonda’s like, why are you doing? I’m like, that’s because I don’t want my eye to look at that person. I’m scrolling down to eliminate people. And I [00:09:00] know, Hey, that person participated before, or maybe they’re not from the U S.

Rhonda’s like so busy. You’re like, I know. I would invite people and be like, Oh yeah. And sometimes I’ll invite somebody. It will, we generally run it as the heavy lifts on the recruiting. I’ll pick up a little bit of slack on the weekends. And Rhonda will say, I don’t know if this is a real person, but I’m like, Oh, you’re probably from the group.

Yes. All right. So we use our questionnaire. What happens next in the recruiting? 

Rhonda: So we use our questionnaire and start sifting three people and then we’ll start sending emails. The email system is really good because it really weeds people out that are not serious. Or that maybe they thought they wanted to, but then when they read the first email, they’re like, no, I can’t do that.

But the good thing about virtual focus groups to me is that we pay them accordingly, but they don’t have to get in the car and come [00:10:00] somewhere. They can just, if they can turn on their computer, they’re there. And it saves them a lot of time. We send a first email that lays out what the focus group. Is when it is, what time, what day, all of that, and what the requirements are that you have to be on a tablet or a computer.

You cannot be on your cell phone because we show slides that need to be able to see them all. And you have to be able to be on audio and video the whole time. We have to be able to see you and hear you the whole time and you have to have the ability to answer some things in chat. We send that first email out and we give them basically 24 hours to respond if they want to join.

And the other thing they have to have is a PayPal account. Because that’s how we pay people and we pay them the minute the focus group is over, we send them their money so there is no waiting for a check in the mail or anything like that. It’s super simple and I think people [00:11:00] really appreciate that.

They’re going to get paid that day. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Oh, absolutely. And we used to get a little gruff about PayPal, but What I figured and I’ve seen other lawyers do it differently. Well, we’ll use Zelle. I’m like, why? Just one, just pick one of these things and then just ride that pony on, because it makes so much more complication for us to issue that payment or jump around on platforms.

And 

Rhonda: yeah. And if they want to participate. That’s the deal, right? You have to have a PayPal account. And we even have some people that are like, Oh, I don’t have a PayPal, but my friend does. Can you send it to my friend? Sure. That’s what you want. And as long as you’re the one that gives us the information, sure, we can do that.

So we just ask them to confirm all of that kind of information as well. And once they’ve done that, then we can confirm them. And so then after the first email, if they answer us and say, yes, I can confirm and they give us all the information, we send a follow up email, like a second [00:12:00] email that says, Hey, great, we have you, you’re good, you’re scheduled.

And we give them next step. So every time we send an email, we give them next steps, hook them a little bit more. And so we will send a calendar invite. We highlight them green that yes, on our sheet that yes, they’re coming and we follow them through. So, once they’re confirmed, and we’ve sent them the email that says, hey, you’re confirmed and we tell them, we’re going to send you a reminder email the day before.

And then about an hour and a half on the day of the focus group, we’re going to send you a confidentiality agreement and they have to sign that and send it back. And only once they do that, will we send them the zoom link to get into the focus group via zoom. So it’s a laid out process. It’s pretty systematic.

And along the way that will weed out people that aren’t really serious, usually. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, usually, and I think also it helps us because I [00:13:00] know some people who do the system where it’s like they get everything done all at once, and that makes it really easy for you, but it’s been really hard to predict who will be there because we get people who.

We send the reminder email day before and they say, Oh, thanks. And you’re like, okay, cool. Now I feel like I can rely on you. And then with the confidentiality forms being an hour and a half, like if they don’t send it back, we already know we’re going to be missing those people. 

Rhonda: That’s right. And so it works and they know what is soon.

I have it already. And once they send back the confidentiality agreement, I immediately send them the zoom link. So they’re in, we ask for people to show up 10 to 15 minutes. Before it starts so that we can make sure that their audio and video are working and that everything’s good to go. And also because it makes us really nervous.

If we’re five minutes out and we only have three people there. That’s when we panic. 

Elizabeth Larrick: It’s only happened a couple of times, but it doesn’t happen very often. Yeah. And luckily, like the nice thing about is [00:14:00] I was doing it a certain way and then Rhonda came in and kept with the system and then it was like, Hey, can we try this a little bit or can we give it them an hour and a half to fill it out?

It’s the nice thing about it is we’ve been able to tweak it so that it works a lot easier. And one of the things it is a stair step process, but the nice thing is. Rhonda’s got email templates for everything. So we’re not retyping these emails. We create the drafts. So it really makes it really easy on the day of to get whatever you need done.

And sitting out the reminder ones, those are all drafted and ready to go to make it super quick. But what’s our last thing that we do to make sure that they’re eligible? What do we do in our, inside the zoom itself? 

Rhonda: Oh, yeah. So once they come into the focus group, they have to show a picture ID. Now they don’t have to show us their address per se, but we just have to see that the person that they say they are is, and they have a valid U.

S. I. D. [00:15:00] And sometimes that will, once we get in there, we have had some people drop off because they knew they didn’t have it and, and we lost them that way, which is okay. But we, we tell them at every step of the way, remember to have your I. D. ready. Yeah. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And I think that, again, It can be any photo ID. We’ll take your Costco card or YMCA card or whatever.

As long as you’ve got a photo ID that matches your name, like we’re totally fine. But even that requiring that level of, okay. And again, we tell them we’re not, we don’t need a state ID, cover up whatever you don’t want to show us. We just want to make sure that you are who you say you are. That’s right. So we talked a little bit about weeding people out.

We talked about the referral, how do we do the referral program? 

Rhonda: Yeah, so we’re always trying to get feedback to see how we can make it better for the participants and for the people that we’re running the focus group for. So after we [00:16:00] send them their money, we send a thank you email. And then the thank you email, it gives them a little survey, how’d you feel about this and this?

And we ask them about the focus group, which is good feedback from people. And we also tell them, Hey, we love referrals. So if you. give us a referral and it’s someone we use, then you get a gift card and it’s a small incentive, but it works. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And they’re generally good referrals. They show up. That’s what I love about the referral system is like, these are people who 90 percent of the time are going to show up versus we don’t really have that same percentage, but just people who are responding to your eggs list or the Facebook and filling out the questionnaire.

That’s right. Fantastic. Okay. Okay. So we talked about email sequence and the templates, the questionnaires on Google Forms, which I think is really helpful. The only thing was with the referrals. The way that we also stair step this is someone will give me their name, they’ll refer somebody, and then [00:17:00] there’s an email sequence for that.

And then once they make it through that sequence, then we send them to a specific questionnaire. That way we can track it because I have a lot of times people will say, I was referred by so and so and I’m like, I don’t have that down. I’m like, I’m not sending you or randomly a gift card when I don’t track it.

Yeah. Awesome. Let me see. Is there anything else that we haven’t covered about the recruiting system or some of the things that you do in your role? 

Rhonda: Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Yeah. I think for us, Being able to have the system down and having worked through it so many times to know this is what works.

And the other thing too is like internally we are obviously creating some documents. One of the things that we always make sure is we have a demographic table for every focus group that gets, Circulated. Rhonda creates it, circulates it over to me so I can circulate it on to lawyers. And then we create other internal documents.

And one of the things too that is what I think is really helpful is, and somewhat [00:18:00] tedious, is Rhonda maintains our master list. So I have a list in Excel. I guess it’s Excel, but now it’s in Google. Of every participant who’s ever been in one of my focus groups. And so with more data in there, we didn’t always, so RANA is very good about maintaining that so that we can ensure Because we’ve had people recently who slightly changed their name and showed up again at a focus group.

And sometimes I’ll go back and try to re recruit from that list, but I think that really helps us be able to track who’s coming, but also who needs to not attend for a couple weeks or maybe a year or be on the no list. So, what’s the no list? 

Rhonda: The no list is someone that was either. Inappropriate in the middle of a focus group and they said inappropriate things, or they didn’t participate at all because that’s the whole purpose of a focus group.

We need for people to participate and give us their opinion. And if you won’t do that, we don’t [00:19:00] need you in a focus group. That’ll get you on the no list as well. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And sometimes I don’t mean to. But there are people who will just badger, continue to badger us over the email. I’m just like, okay, you’re not attending.

It’s okay. And then so generally we’re on a red flag going over here. Let’s figure this out. Nobody has a perfect memory. So that’s what we keep our master list. And also our no list so that we can read through that. If somebody pops back up to know I’m not coming back. 

Rhonda: That’s right. And it sounds. Super simple.

It’s not. There are a lot of steps behind the scenes, but because we have been doing it so long, it is a smooth process. Now we got it down. There are a lot of steps involved. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And also, even if I’m here in Austin doing an in person, like you’re still handling all the recruiting and you’re doing the PayPal.

We just, some of the things become paper and I just sent it to you virtually so that you can get started processing everything. That’s right. Any other fun stories or things to share [00:20:00] with our audience about the focus group recruiting? 

Rhonda: I don’t think so. Yeah, it’s just interesting. You can tell the people that really want to attend because they’ll fill out the questionnaire like 10 times.

Please see me, please. I really want to come. That’s always fun. When you, especially if you pick them, they’re so happy. They’re so appreciative. They’re like, Oh, thank you. I really wanted to do this focus group. So it works. It was fun. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, it is. And most people do want to be there and there that don’t have any problems, but people who, again, we generally keep our eye out for people who are complaining, you know, saying negative on the Facebook page, but that’s one of the things too, that RUN has been so helpful because again, I have my perspective about the focus groups that I run, but I haven’t gotten to attend any.

I don’t think anyone would ever invite a lawyer on their focus group, but it’s been helpful because there are times where I just say, Do we need to pay people more? What’s happening? And Rhonda’s like, no, no, like here’s what people are telling me. And here’s what I’m hearing is we’re not asking people personal [00:21:00] questions about what laundry detergent they use or how much money they make.

Or so we started telling people like, Hey, we are priced. at a level for you just to be able to watch a presentation and get feedback. We’re not here to ask personal questions about you. Now, I don’t know if that’s made any difference. And that’s kind of one of those things to run as some people have to fill out like, yeah, you may make 150, but you’ve got to fill out.

100 page questionnaire. 

Rhonda: It’s true. I think generally the feedback is really positive. And I think people feel like it’s fair compensation for what they do, especially once they’ve gone through it. They may be like, that’s a little low, but once they’ve done the focus group, they’re like, okay, get it. I understand.

Elizabeth Larrick: You don’t, yeah, there’s not a lot of heavy lifting on their side of things. Oh, then we do ask them to pay attention. And that’s one thing, one of the reasons, and this is just kind of trial and error. When I first was doing zoom focus groups was the instructions and like [00:22:00] setting their expectations clear.

From the very front and then in every email after that, so that they know when they show up on the cell phone, it’s not difficult for me to say, Hey, looks like you’re on a cell phone, gosh, we really need you to, and that’s one thing too, we’ve worked through like. How do you handle somebody like that? And how do you do it in a polite way?

Because everyone’s watching you interact with this person soon. And Rhonda does an excellent job. Customer service and being polite. And that’s, I feel like sometimes half the battle too is, cause I have done a focus group once where we all just were like staring at each other, the moderator wasn’t talking and we didn’t know what instructions we needed.

Having you on there. And that’s, Again, starting the zoom and doing all that, really being proactive with people when they’re on there. I think that really helps them immediately. 

Rhonda: Yeah, I think so. Awesome. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Rhonda, thank you so much for joining the podcast to talk about recruiting. You’re [00:23:00] welcome. I love it.

Okay, good. I hope so because I don’t want you to stick around for a long time. We need more focus groups. So Rhonda is the recruiter here with me in my office. Virtually, of course, and so if you want to learn more about Rhonda, we’re going to have a blog post. She’ll be on the website, but of course, if you have any recruiting questions, let us know.

I’ll put her contact information in the show notes. But if you have any other questions, let me know. Otherwise, thank you all for listening. Appreciate it. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, please, or follow it on your favorite podcast platform so that other people can find it. All right, until next time.

Thank you.

Christopher Russo, a seasoned lawyer with 32 years of experience, will be joining us to share his insights on this aspect of client preparation and role play. Roleplaying is a versatile technique that can be employed to prepare for challenging scenarios, including cross-examinations and depositions. As trial lawyers, it is an effective tool that can improve our preparedness to handle complex legal situations. 

Today’s discussion will focus on roleplay’s application in getting clients ready for testimony, whether it is for a deposition or trial. 

During our session, we will delve into the common stumbling blocks that can arise during a deposition and explore techniques to avoid them. We will also discuss how gauging the personalities of our clients can aid in choosing the most effective roleplaying techniques. 

Our conversation centers on the value of roleplaying with clients, the importance of taking breaks during the process, and the benefits of roleplaying the deposition. By examining these topics, we hope to establish a more comprehensive understanding of how roleplaying can be utilized to enhance client confidence and performance in the courtroom.

In this episode, you will hear:

• The common stumbling blocks in the deposition
• Gauging the personalities of your patients
• The value of roleplaying with a client
• Roleplaying the deposition
• The importance of taking breaks

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Supporting Resources:

If you have a question or a case in Rhode Island, please reach out to Christopher crusso@kirshenbaumri.com 

Christopher L. Russo | Managing Partner

Kirshenbaum & Kirshenbaum

Attorneys at Law, Inc.

117 Metro Center Blvd. Suite 1003

Warwick, RI 02886

Office: 401.946.3200 |  Fax: 401.943.8097

Christopher concentrates his practice in representing personal injury plaintiffs. He handles all matters assisting people injured in car collisions, slip and fall, bicycle and motorcycle accidents. He has handled many cases involving tractor trailer collisions. These cases require an attorney with knowledge of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations and an intimate understanding of the dangers these vehicles pose to the unsuspecting victims.

Christopher also handles a variety of criminal defense matters. He has handles District Court misdemeanor offenses, Superior Court felony matters as well as Federal District Court matters.

www.kirshenbaumri.com

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hi there, it’s Elizabeth. I wanted to step in very briefly before we begin our conversation with Christopher Russo to give a little bit of background on Christopher and how we met.

Christopher is a personal injury lawyer in Rhode Island, and we actually met several years back while I was [00:01:00] teaching a witness prep course. After that, we kept in touch. Christopher and I like to trade ideas about. Witness prep, and especially if we get stuck, I’ll get a call from Christopher or I’ll reach out to him and say, Hey, do you have any ideas on how to handle this?

Or Hey, what’s a new question you’ve been asking clients when they get stuck on this particular thing? And we also role play. So Christopher and I have a really good conversation about witness prep and role play. And I want to share that with you guys in the podcast. So let’s get to it. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast.

I am always excited to have a guest, but today I have a good friend of mine. Christopher Russo is joining us. Hello and welcome to the podcast, Christopher. 

Christopher Russo: Hello. Thank you for inviting me. 

Elizabeth Larrick: We are going to tackle a topic role play in a client witness prep. Now I brought Christopher on because he is on my short list.

When I need somebody to grill a client and they need a fresh face, I say, Hey, Christopher, we jump on the [00:02:00] zoom and grill this person for me. So that’s why I thought he would be a wonderful guest to come. Talk about preparing clients and this role play aspect of everything. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

Now I will say on this podcast specifically, you’ve also talked about using role play as a way to get ready for a cross exam. It’s a way to get ready for taking a difficult position. Role play can be used in many different areas. I think it’s a great tool. for getting us ready as lawyers. And so we’re talking about today in the frame of getting the client ready for testimony, either as deposition or even for trial.

So that’s kind of where our frame is here today, but let me throw it to you first, Christopher, let’s talk a little bit, just generally, what do you do for client witness prep? 

Christopher Russo: Actually, I think in answering that, I always like to share how I was first taught because I’ve been practicing now for 32 years and God rest their souls, my former partners and mentors, they really taught me more like you’re supposed to tell your client what to answer.

[00:03:00] And as the Jewish phrase used to be, come up with the mitzah, you have to come up with a story for them. And I’m like, Oh, okay. That didn’t really work. And so I have really embraced this concept through you as you were my teacher, the three step process and meeting with them over several occasions and not jamming it in all one session.

Because just like anything else we learn. If you just drink from the fire hose in an hour and expect them to show up the next day, or God forbid, lawyers who prepare them the morning of, and you expect them to digest everything and show up in an hour and perform, that’s amazing. Amazingly stupid, I would say.

So yeah, definitely over several sessions. I even have sent them some questions by email. A lot of clients like to do email, like to start the thought process going and let’s show up with your answers and go [00:04:00] over it. One of my favorites is really trying to find the guilt and their truths. Because getting, I realize I’m short circuiting this, but that whole process of getting to their truths, it’s so much more powerful.

When you pull it out of them and they hear it is their own words, as opposed to you just feeding it to them. It really ingrains it so much better. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Absolutely. And thinking about old way, right? And this way that we’re talking about, sometimes people want to call these truths, the case themes. Would you agree with that or disagree?

Christopher Russo: I think depending on what the truth is, it very well can be a case theme, but I don’t go by the one shoe fits all. No, not every single truth is going to be a case theme. Some of them can be powerful and I do like to use them. I don’t ever like to say that to the client. I don’t know why I don’t want it because I feel like some of the lawyer trial process we can keep to [00:05:00] ourselves, the better.

Okay, I’ll tell one story that is not from me, and I’ll even tell you who it was if you want to know in the end. Because it’s been a powerful idea of a lawyer not sharing something with a client. It’s a very famous lawyer in Rhode Island who is trying this very large, I believe it was a medical malpractice case.

And the concept is this, it was a young boy who was left paralyzed. Picture an 18 year old boy paralyzed from the waist down. And just thinking in my mind’s eye, how many lawyers would have the foresight to not share some of the stuff I’m about to tell you and how it all played out. So fast forward trial, the plaintiff was not in the courtroom at all times.

Plaintiff expert on the stand. Mr. Expert, what’s a plaintiff’s condition? He’s paralyzed. And what’s his future? His future is paralyzed. There is no hope. There’s no changing, no nothing. Okay. Next witness was the plaintiff. [00:06:00] Puts a plaintiff on the stand. And I still get goosebumps when I tell this. Plaintiff on the stand, he asked him at one point, Hey Johnny, what do you see your future?

Oh, I’m going to walk again. I’m going to run. And as the story was told, there wasn’t a dry eye in the jury because he had the foresight to leave that child’s hope. intact. And I’ve often thought of that story thinking many lawyers that I’ve met in the past would have said to the client, No, you can’t say that you’re going to contradict our expert and would have totally presented a completely different witness, probably more a depressed witness, which some Oh my God, I’m You could, you can imagine the boy, right?

He would have been depressed. He would have come across that way. He would have came across like Eeyore, but this lawyer had the foresight to say, no, I want this excited child so that they can see what they took from him. [00:07:00] And I will say it was God rest his soul, brilliant lawyer, Lenny Decoff from Decoff and Decoff, who had that brilliant foresight to think like that.

And I think of that story a lot of times when I think of my trial prep with my client to what they might be saying, and in line with what you said, why, hey, maybe I would like to, maybe I might not call it a theme, but I think of that story when you asked me that question, and I might not share with them that I want to do this.

Because I don’t want them knowing what the prize at the end, so to speak, is. And sometimes, let’s face it, when people anticipate something, I think it affects how they’ll say it the next time. Make sense? 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. And I think from a perspective of What is more powerful? Truth is always going to be more powerful and themes.

That’s just strategy when you hear it. And I hear that’s just fluff. That’s strategy. The truth is what they need, right? That’s what’s going to, and the [00:08:00] truth for them may be a hundred, you know, maybe exactly what they need to be talking about. And the case theme could be completely different. My example would be.

Christopher and I are edge reptile followers and the teachings that the theme is always going to be putting the defendant’s conduct and putting the defendant first and things. So thinking about trial strategy, but also I always feel like strategy is that is well above being beyond the world that our clients have any idea about.

And they’re just trying to get through this deposition at this time. And I’ve talked about in this podcast before preparation is. Just this very serious time for this one thing, focusing as much as you can, as the lawyer and helping the client do the same. And if we bring in other things, Oh, this is the theme.

And Oh, this is the, now your client may need information to help them understand who will testify on this and who, you know, that way they don’t feel like that they have to do that. But most of them like, Hey, when we’re prepping [00:09:00] nose down to the grindstone, we’re doing our prep work just with you. We’re not talking about focus groups.

Of course, we’re talking about. Hey, here’s how folks could folks could perceive you. But let me ask you, since I’m the one interviewing you here, what do you find are common stumbling blocks for clients and depositions and think also about with the dynamic now. Post COVID most of client depositions are still zoom wise.

They are here for us here in Texas, and I assume that’s probably the same for you. So keeping that in mind, what are some common stumbling blocks you’re seeing? 

Christopher Russo: Sure. Some of the common stumbling blocks I find is, I’ll give you one example that I had, Where this was, uh, was still pre COVID, but they get too stuck on a particular way, a question must be asked.

And the example I give, which I was stunned when this happened, it was a trip and fall case. And I’m sure we’ve all had triple [00:10:00] fall cases, but you know, they’re going to ask you to put on this drawing where you fell or on a picture or something, and so I prepped with her and I pulled out some of the pictures that I had.

And I said, you’re going to have to do it. Let’s practice it. And she did. So fast forward to deposition. And there was a picture that I used that had to be sent to the city to put them on notice of the claim. And the attorney pulled that out. And I’ll admit it wasn’t a great copy, but it was a black and white copy.

And the attorney asked the client, can you show me on this picture where you fell? No, I cannot. And I’m, I’ve never, I’m not a good poker player, but I got a good poker face. So I just sat there silent and we took a break and I called her out. And I’m like, what the hell happened? Oh, that was a bad picture. I couldn’t see it.

That’s didn’t say that. Don’t you say I can’t show you. [00:11:00] You can clearly see where you fell. And that’s one example where they get too pigeonholed. So I try to be more general on the topics so that they don’t get stuck with this particular phraseology of a question. One of the other examples was I do try and prep some of the clients on the lawyers personalities.

This one client I’m thinking of that if I could say this attorney has a reputation for, I’m not going to use foul language, but if I could I would. All right. We’ve all had those. And so I tried to prep her for that and not give too many nasty examples but and I. Second guess myself now because I didn’t meet with this person three times I met with this person like five or six times because she needed that extra time and we did some role play, and we’ll get into that later that I did it where I think in hindsight I shouldn’t have been the one 10 minutes into the [00:12:00] deposition.

She’s going sideways, and I’m not. Not understanding why and 

Elizabeth Larrick: going 

Christopher Russo: sideways, meaning he’s answering, he’s giving her, in my opinion, softball questions and she’s just answering poorly. So I asked for a break and I take her into the room and I’m like calling an audible here. What’s going on? He’s being an a hole.

He is one, but he’s not today. I feel like being kind of nice to you today because you’re being nasty to him for no reason. I think you’re gonna be careful with that too going forward. Maybe not so much get into the personalities and just stick to the plan, if that makes sense. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I think sometimes people, one of the summer blocks that I see pretty often is people are just, they’re heated.

Like they’re already very upset about the situation’s taking too long. And there are things they’ve had to do that are inconvenient and [00:13:00] frustrating and this should all be done. So they come in very, already upset and geared up to break them off a piece. And, and so sometimes that’s the blackboard’s like, Hey, yeah, we may have some tough questions.

You may get questions that have certain tone, or this person is known for this style of question. But at the end of the day, what’s going on here? Like how do we figure out and move through some of this like anger? Because if you go in there, like you said, and you just start ripping it up from right from the start, it’s like the lawyer, the person on their side is going to be like, I’m going to give it right back to you.

Or they’re saying, this is great for me. I’m still in. Let 

Christopher Russo: me, let me throw one out to you in your podcast. Let’s see if you guys have an answer for me. And I’m also going to give you some good Italian legalese. So what do you do for a client like this? And the Italian slang is the term of art we use is What a cat get on is is somebody who can’t shut up another phrase.

We use diarrhea of the mouth. That’s [00:14:00] cat get on. So what do you do for the client that happened recently? We’re prepped them. Look, answer the question. He had it in his head. They need to know something. And come hella high water, I’m thinking the question wasn’t being asked, wasn’t all of a sudden the attorney asked a question about A.

He just stuck a square peg in a round hole Z. It was that thing that in his mind they had to hear. And afterwards we broke, I’m like, What are you doing? They needed to hear that. No, no, no. You needed to say it. They didn’t need to hear it. What are you doing? A client like that? I don’t know. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Sometimes I gauge personalities and I always ask them, even if I have a really in gregarious person, or if I have a very quiet person, I always say, Hey, this is that time, right?

This is that one place where they’re going to ask you questions and you can [00:15:00] explain. And so what is it you want them to know? And on the flip side, we always ask it, what is it that you do not want them to know? So we always, whether it goes both ways. And the other thing is I always say like, Hey, listen, if there’s something that’s super important to you and you really want to talk about it and they don’t ask you, I’ll ask you.

Okay. So just hang out with me. I have a chance to ask questions and I know it’s important to you. Will you trust me that I will ask you that question so that, you know, that way they feel like, oh, okay, here’s the safety net. And that way. Now I get to solve the question. 

Christopher Russo: And I assume in your answer that whatever was important to them, you also agree is appropriately to be spoken up.

Elizabeth Larrick: That’s right. Yes. Yeah. Cause we, half the battle is like, most of the time there’ll be something that we need to talk to them about. Right. Let’s say there’s a nasty email that came in, or let’s say there’s some other thing that’s in a medical record that we need to talk to them about. And that’s to say, like, we look at it.

Hey. [00:16:00] What happened? Just tell me about it. You just want to stay curious just so you get it. Because sometimes what happens is we say, Hey, look at this. And just say, Hey, it’s okay, but we don’t dive into, tell me a little bit about it. Give me some background, help me just a little bit and staying a little curious with a broad open question.

You may find a whole other side reason, or you may find either way, taking that just little side road to figure out where that foundation is can sometimes really help. 

Christopher Russo: And see the way you just came across in asking those questions is, I think, a good And I think hope all you listeners will watch this.

Watch your demeanor. That’s why I think it’s important. One of your other points that you want to get to is, who does the hard cross? Because you just gave a demeanor that was very opening, trusting. I’m going to tell you all my little secrets. Can I then trust you if you’re also [00:17:00] crossing me? Now I know you won’t.

Did you just double cross me? Did you want to get all that stuff just so you can beat me up? So that’s why I do think it’s hard to play the Dr. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde there. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, and that’s exactly right. And that’s talking about like role play. One of the biggest, I think, differences in the way that I was definitely taught how to role play.

It’s definitely part of the mantra. If you take the Keenan Trial Institute witness prep classes, you do not role play. You don’t hard cross role play your client because the way we set things up and you’re a listener and you’re really diving into, you’re getting a lot more information in these prep sessions and then turning around and like you said, you’re going to erode that trust because you are never going to use the stuff you just learned to ask those questions and, you know, using somebody else, your office, or that’s one of the nicest things about zoom is, yeah.

That’s how I do it a hundred percent. Now, as I say, okay, we’re going to do a lot of work and then we’re going to practice that way you can see it all come together [00:18:00] and we’re going to use a complete stranger, because again, that helps because they’ve never met very rarely, but occasionally someone will have met the defense lawyer with at a hearing or maybe something else, but most of the time you don’t first time.

So it’s a stranger and it’s like, okay, here we go. You’re going to meet this person and answer these questions. 

Christopher Russo: And I dare say the one that we did, there was also the added bonus. I feel like I’ve seen some attorneys from the South. The Southerner approach is a little softer intro approach. Whereas I hate to admit us attorneys.

I’m from Rhode Island. The Northeast is much a little harder edged right to the point. There’s no fluff intro into the question. So you get to see a little, probably very different approach than he did in reality. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And that was one of the things too, is whenever I asked someone to come in and role play, I’m like, Hey, here are the weaknesses and here’s the style that you need to put them through, because that’s what they’re going to, that’s, what’s going to mirror.

And most of [00:19:00] the time we try really to find the questions to be able to match up with what they’re going to hear. And occasionally we just come up with some good ones that like, they don’t get, but they’re still really good. We’re just like, oh, wow. You, how do you answer that question? 

Christopher Russo: I know as you’re talking, I do have a memory of this one other time.

There was where again, before I met you, I was role playing with this client where this attorney had this really sarcastic way of asking questions. And I did my best acting job. Of how he would ask a question. He would just be like, you mean to tell me, you know, that type of guy. So we’re in the deposition and I felt bad because it was a nice lady and we’re like five minutes into the depo and he’s going full blown and I’m thinking, wow, I’m pretty good, I was just like him.

And I look over, she’s a bundle of tears. She was crying. [00:20:00] And that’s when I realized. You know what? As much as sometimes for these clients, you got to help them realize no matter how much we do it, nothing beats the reality. She still was feeling, I didn’t know then how to work with the guilt as much.

Whereas that poor woman, he had a way of making you hate yourself. And I felt so bad that I, although I thought I was doing a good job, I probably did not prep her enough, poor thing. 

Elizabeth Larrick: We don’t know. We don’t know. It’s always about trying to learn. So let’s talk about just skipping role play altogether or sometimes putting role play in the wrong sequence of events.

What happens then? 

Christopher Russo: Oh, see, I think that there’s a client I’m thinking of that I was actually thinking of skipping the role play with her, but no, it would have been devastating because I have other clients that I never had this opportunity because I didn’t really know about it years ago. And I just don’t feel like the deposition went nearly as well.

[00:21:00] Clients didn’t feel prepared. And weren’t able to really open up and tell their truths. Whereas I spent a lot of time with this client who, she had a bad car crash, but she had a lot of problems with her shoulders before. A car crash. And one of the issues was also there was many years of treatment and what worked really well with her.

So picture, the point I’m trying to make is between treatment and accident and actually a hearing on the case was probably close to four years. So what worked really well with her was taking those couch times to get her to go backwards in time. And she didn’t really grasp initially why, but it worked well because when she started to do it, she started to cry.

And I’m like, why are you crying? And she said, Because you bastard she [00:22:00] goes, you’re making me think about things that I buried. Um, and I said, I don’t want you to bury him. I said, I want you to, unfortunately, you may hate me, but I want those emotions because that’s what you’re trying to relate to them. If you cover it all up, but that’s not something you could just do in an hour session.

And so I just think that taking the time and obviously having clients who are willing to spend the time with you. I don’t know if you’ve come across that, but I have clients like, I don’t want to come in. Oh, okay. Sure case. So I think the pitfalls. And not doing it is you are never going to get the true value of your case because they’re never going to truly open up and talk about their case and what the truth is because they’re too wound up and worried about what’s going to happen, that those things are all just going to stay buried deep just like that client was honest with me.

They were buried and buried because also trying to [00:23:00] live because she had gone through. Two surgeries on both shoulders, the recovery, the therapy, and trying to raise a family and work. And that’s miserable. If that answers your question. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, no, it does. And I think the other thing is we get to see how people will actually perform because one thing they sit down with us and they talk and they say, Oh, I’m not going to tell them that.

And it’s okay. Then in your mind, you’re thinking, okay, wait, what are we really going to tell them? So I feel like the role play then really does give you a glimpse of. How are they going to do with a complete stranger? Yep. Tough questions. Yep. And what’s going to come out? And that also, once they have that experience, you’re like, Oh, whoa.

Now I know why we’re pairing, because I have no idea how to answer these questions. 

Christopher Russo: And what you said earlier made me think of another client where see when I hear that’s not what I’m going to tell him. I don’t buy that because I don’t give anyone that kind of credit. You’re going to be [00:24:00] able to control your brain with this attorney who’s been doing a hell of a lot more than you.

This is probably your first time in a deposition. You’re going to remember, Oh, that’s someone I wasn’t supposed. And that’s the one you’re going to say, absolutely. And I’ve also, I’ve done this on a rare occasion, but I think it worked well for this client. The, one of the things that’s uncomfortable for me is having that conversation where you don’t really like the way you’re coming across.

And so for this particular client, in fact, I think I, you and I chatted about this, this was a confidential settlement. It was an anesthesia awareness case. where a client was undergoing surgery and actually awoke a little bit where she was experiencing and feeling but couldn’t move and couldn’t speak during the surgery.

Imagine everyone would think that’s horrifying. So I actually did a short direct with her and I recorded it and I played that for a focus group [00:25:00] and then I let her watch some of their comments. Where they were like definitely thought it was over the top. They thought that they’d got it They were appreciative of the horror of it, but when I then played her video, they just thought it was way over the top.

And that was immensely helpful for me to then bring her down from the stratospheres for a proper, meaningful, and ultimately settling mediation. So I think that process of it is also very useful and important. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And I think if you have somebody and you have the case that warrants it, and sometimes it’s a matter of you have a client, but the case expense doesn’t necessarily warrant it, then there are other ways.

And again, having that role play with another lawyer. Sometimes that’s what I tell them is listen, here’s the weakness that we’re struggling with and then I’m going to ask you to give some feedback, right? And I’m going to ask you to [00:26:00] give some hard feedback that maybe I can’t give, but because you’ve just had role play with them.

You have a fresh example and you can actually as a lawyer say, Hey, Let me give you some feedback. You did this well, but here’s what you did. And as a defense lawyer or someone that I’m, I love that answer. And let me tell you why, because it does ABC because half the battle, when we tell somebody, don’t say that, don’t do that, the brain just goes, okay.

And then it goes out the window unless this is why here’s where, like you do this one thing today, that’s like a domino effect. And here’s what it ends up happening ultimately at the end of the case. And that’s why I think having an extra personist, a stranger, and you have that fresh example, because if I give you an example where.

Oh, I had a client and they talked too much and they said all this stuff about their case and it ended up reducing their case settlement. Inevitably, [00:27:00] every single person always says, well, that’s not what I’m going to do. So that’s why having that real time, fresh example from somebody else. Okay. So you said, You took your dog for a walk for eight miles.

You have all, so this is what as a defense lawyer with my defense hat on, let me tell you what that does. And then that translates into, you don’t have any diminished value or diminished life quality of life. 

Christopher Russo: Yes. And I do think it’s important, as you were saying earlier, you can’t just say, don’t say that because they’re not going to be able to take it out of their memory or put it in their memory.

Because, and I also think it’s unfair. When we do that, because again, I think that was old school. Okay. So my former partners, they were practicing in the sixties and seventies where lawyers would just, this is what you do, this is what you say. And they would listen to you. Whereas it’s, I just don’t think that’s a fair way to ask somebody to remember and be, they’re not going to properly feel prepared because they’re like, okay, you just told me not to say it, but I don’t [00:28:00] understand why.

Elizabeth Larrick: And I don’t know what else to say. So that is, then that’s my default. And the way that we practice law before is very different than the way we practice now. And that’s a result of a lot of things that are out of our control. How lawyers are viewed, how cases are viewed, how going to the courthouse is now a pain.

And it was always a pain, but Paul, it’s just a different way of practicing law. And. It’s unfortunate. And one of the common assembly blocks that I just heard from a mediator actually last week was, we’re still not getting people prepared to be present on zoom. Clients are working or they’re in their car and he’s just, they give such a terrible adjusters look at that.

And they say, they’re not serious about the file. So why would I be serious about this file? So I 

Christopher Russo: don’t know. I hate to admit it. We had one, it wasn’t my client, but this man is still our firm, where a person was on, and they, so many miles, surreptitious, took a picture to send it to me. Oh my [00:29:00] god, I forgot to tell him, there he is on the Zoom smoking a cigarette.

Really? Did I have to tell you not to wear your baseball hat and smoke a cigarette during a deposition? Okay, but yeah, you’re right. That’s part of the prep that people aren’t forgetting that are, they are forgetting, I’m still trying to get people to attorneys agree to do it in person, but it’s so comfortable and lazy that they don’t want to, and it’s really hard because I actually had to fight that one about a year or so ago.

where they were trying to force my client to come to their office where, but that was, she, Zoom was made for her because she was an elderly client who they had to transport her by wheelchair in a truck. And it’s like, come on. And he actually made me file a motion to prevent it. He was not giving up. I’m like, okay, I do think that is part of it.

I still ask for him personally. I think that’s better. I don’t know yet whether or not the clients, you know, And all [00:30:00] the good feel for this. Maybe you have a comment on it. Does a zoom give them a level of Protection. It’s not as real as if in person, do they feel more intimidated in person versus zoom? I don’t know.

Elizabeth Larrick: I think it’s more, it’s that plus the formalities, right? You’re going to a foreign place. You’re going so that it’s not just, I’m sitting across, it’s also the whole formality of every, and that’s why one of the reasons why judges want all of us to come back in person, a personal hearings because they’re like, this is it.

We’re over you guys. Not showing up on time, like being super casual about this. And you guys are the lawyers. We’re going back in person hearing so that next time somebody asks and it’s no, we’re not going to make, we’ll make an exception for clients or a witness to be on zoom, but there is zero exception for a lawyer unless it’s like extreme circumstances.

Christopher Russo: Because the formality 

Elizabeth Larrick: coming out of the courthouse 

Christopher Russo: and lawyers are getting out of the habit of it. Let’s [00:31:00] face it. There’s courtroom etiquette that a lot of lawyers have to dust off their, the dust there to get back into the formality of it. Look, I couldn’t even speak out the word. See? 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Well, and that’s why I think like having the role player, people come into your office for the prep, or even if.

You’re going to do zoom and have them come into your office still to create like just a little bit of formality for them, but also there’s not going to be a zoom hiccup that’s going to make an extra panic for them, especially if they don’t, they’re not used to it. And I have some clients that are totally fine.

They’ve been using zoom for work for. Months and months and they, it’s not a big deal for them. I’m talking about just some people, it’s just easier for them. And like you said, the formality and come in for the preparation just to make sure. But I, hands down, I think having zoom to role play with different lawyers is just.

Christopher Russo: Yeah, it’s so 

Elizabeth Larrick: easy now, 

Christopher Russo: right? No, think about think about it. You and I are able to work together. [00:32:00] You’re in texas I’m in rhode island without zoom that ain’t happening. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, and that’s why I was like, okay I need someone to who’s gonna Like role play with the client who is a tough nugget. And I need a, I need another tough nugget.

Who’s going to maybe have a little spin Northern spin for me. So then I called Christopher. I was like, okay, I it’s a different kind of case. It’s a business situation, but I still need somebody who’s going to come in and be a fresh face for him. Because again, him role playing with me was. He was going to face a male attorney.

So there’s, there was role playing. 

Christopher Russo: Oh, let me ask you, I’m curious about that case. Obviously I enjoyed helping you. Would you say the actual deposition was easier or about the same level or harder? 

Elizabeth Larrick: Something happened that was I would say unusual is a different person than it was anticipated. Took the deposition being a female.

So there was, yeah. So there was a little bit of different, like, Oh, cause that [00:33:00] then created a very different tone. Yeah. Overall, I think it went really well. I just think sometimes there’s things that are hard to prepare for when it’s going to be, it’s a six hour. Depot for personal injury. That’s really unusual to have one of those.

So to prepare somebody physically and mentally for basically a six hour interrogation is hard. And he had done a lot of prep just. Sitting in the chair, just going through all the stuff. So I think it went really well. And I think that I had done something a little different. You had done some role play with them.

And one of the things that I’m doing now more because we have zoomed up. Oh, so easy. I take old depositions from the lawyers and I take them and I cut them up so that we can practice with the actual questions, with the actual voice of the, and we just basically play a video. And they don’t listen to anybody else.

They have to answer it themselves, not listen to the other person. [00:34:00] So they had a lot of ways that we were all played, but also just kind of made like, okay, we have the actual voice. And we have really similar questions. Let’s give you the real version. 

Christopher Russo: Yeah. Hey, can I share another thought? It was a random thought as you were talking.

Something else I’ve learned through our trials and errors, right? Like we all learn, it’s deposition breaks. I used to always rely on the client. And I’m thinking of this case. They had, she was a sweet lady. It was a trip and fall case. And so there were two lawyers cross examining her and she kept going.

And I’m like, she’s not asking for a break and she’s going in. She’s not asking her break. She’s going and she’s going. And all of a sudden, after about an hour and a half, going two hours into it, again, I’ll ask her for breaks. Now she’s wearing down, not answering, not answering good. Oh, she’s losing it.

She’s losing it. And. I ended up salvaging the case, but I walked away from that saying I am no longer [00:35:00] relying on my client to take a break. Every case, whether it be a half hour, 45 minutes, I want a break. I don’t care if you think I got a tiny, teeny little bladder. I don’t care what it is. I need a break.

I want to like a boxer, bring them back into the corner, throw some water at him, how you feel, take a break. I think that’s super, super important because I think the clients forget, even though I try and empower them, they forget that they can ask for a break and they don’t, they can’t appreciate that they’re losing it.

So I think that’s something that I remember. And another war story that I wanted to share with you that I so important, I didn’t know this back then the whole, the promise and the promises that you tell the client, look, for those who haven’t heard of it, you empower them that I don’t care if you wake up the morning of, if you are not ready for this deposition, let me know, I will cancel it.

And yes, and I’ve learned this cause I’m a real follower and I always used to be afraid of. Oh [00:36:00] my God, I don’t want a court order against me. And then I realized, who gives a shit? If the client deposition gets canceled four or five times, and what if a judge gives me a conditional order of default unless I dismiss it, unless I show up?

The jury’s never going to hear any of that. Because I remember years ago, I had this case and a guy was injured in construction and it was whether or not he ended up getting electrocuted and fell off the ladder. And we go to the deposition, and he was an old Italian guy, could have been my godfather, and his wife shows up, and she’s behind him, and he’s starting to answer questions, and she’s in behind him going, oh, oh, and the answers were horrible.

In fact, it was so bad that when the deposition was over, the defense attorney looked at me and said, I offered you too much money. You better get approval to accept it. So we go back to the And I am animatedly recreating the scene and saying how I wanted to kill [00:37:00] him. Somebody pointed to me, he was standing behind me and he sees me, walks out.

So partner says, get out there and talk to him. So I did, I said, I’m so sorry. You had to see me do that, but Oh my God, what happened? And he shook his head and said, my daughter told me she’s getting a divorce last night. It threw me for a loop. I wasn’t myself. And I’m like, Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me?

So when I first heard the promise, that person immediately came to my mind. I’m like, I should have known about the promise back then, but that requires them to, to be vulnerable and be willing to do that, whereas maybe there’s somebody like me, a rule follower, and so definitely afraid, but it’s our job to make them not afraid because all those little things like he didn’t know.

You know, that his daughter is telling him she’s going to get a divorce. Who’s going to throw him for a loop. And he was going to admit to killing Harry Carey and everyone else. Yeah. 

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:38:00] You mentioned breaks and what the way that I explained to people about breaks, and this is all supported by research is like that room becomes encapsulated with the heavy energy of.

The deposition and you have to mentally take a break. Even if you think physically, I feel fine. I don’t need to use the restroom mentally. You have to take that mental break and you have to physically get up and get out of the room because you’ve got to start circulating blood. You’ve got to start breathing some regular, because again, when we get.

Little bit stress. We, we start breathing just a little bit less, just a little less. And so that’s why it’s okay. When I take a break, this is what we mean. You’ve got to physically get out of the room, even if you don’t just walk to my office and just stand up and take a cup and go back in. We’re not going to have pow wow.

It’s not, it’s just, you’ve got to mentally refresh that brain and keep going. Cause we [00:39:00] need you to be a hundred percent. here physically. Yeah. If you’ve got neck or back problems, you need to stand up. That’s another thing. And that’s what I tell people too, is we’re claiming that you have a back problem, like you don’t need to sit here until you were absolutely positively.

So miserable. You need to do what you would regularly because they think. Oh, it’s formal. We’re doing this. And that’s why Zoom kind of helps because then they’re like, Oh, okay. When I take a break, I’ll go into the kitchen. I’m like, that’s right. Get up, go to the kitchen, come back and, or go outside and pet the dog.

Christopher Russo: That is a great example. I’m glad you brought that up because I’ve had that happen before where a defense attorney will say, okay, can the record please reflect? We have been here for an hour and 45 minutes and the plaintiff has not gotten out of the seat once. Would you agree? What are you going to do?

Yeah, that’s true. 

Elizabeth Larrick: But 

Christopher Russo: then they could try and backtrack. I’ve been in pain for the last 45 minutes, but I haven’t said anything, but 

Elizabeth Larrick: yeah. 

Christopher Russo: It gets out of the bag. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And that’s, and the thing about being prepared and being ready is there’s [00:40:00] a goal for deposition prep, hard stop. And. Everybody needs to know what the start point is and what the end point is and what our goal is.

And like, sometimes people just, Hey, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to talk for 30 minutes and, or 40 minutes. And I’m going to tell you what to expect. And then we’re good to go. But if you talk the whole time, you have no idea what’s in their brain, which is going to come all out of the deposition.

So having that, are you ready? I think you’re ready. Okay. You’re ready. Let’s do this. And it’s, and some people think it has to be, Oh, they look at the witness prep. Oh, I don’t, I can’t have all that time or I can’t do all those things. And again, I just look at having studied this for so many years and looked at all the brain science and all that kind of in the psychology, all of it is you can make so much.

Improvement in teaching and learning with people. If you just understand how the human brain works and just having a 30 minute planting some seeds, like quick zoom. And before you [00:41:00] have the heavy duty content, it’s going to do so much. Cause your brain will just keep working on the questions and all the things that you’ve planted.

And maybe they’ll go talk to somebody and be like, Oh, I can call up that person. Are you going to ask my spouse what they remember? And then it’s, that’s what I’m, that’s what I’m talking about. 

Christopher Russo: And I, in one of the, obviously I’m still learning, I’m enjoying, but still learning that one of the hardest things I think for most lawyers is shutting their mouths.

It really is hard because they in, because I also look at it as practice for us, because of that powerful tool of silence. That people will fill in the air. Would you like to use that ourselves or in depositions? Is it people think, well, he’s not talking, so I got to keep talking and talking. So I use that one because we do want to hear, get our clients to talk more, but I also want to see how does this person respond to the silence?

So they’re going to be that cat get, Oh, let me fill in with all this extra stuff. Let me just keep dumping. But I do think that’s hard, hard thing for them to do. 

Elizabeth Larrick: It is. And having that tie it all back together, having that role play [00:42:00] and having them experience somebody else do that to them. I’m just like, ask that question and look down and just give some silence to see.

And some of those people don’t even know they do it. And again, that’s that role play where it’s, I don’t think you even realize, but you got this thing you’re doing or you are talking when there’s silence. It’s just, so it’s, it’s just. They have to learn the rules of the game, but then practicing the level of understanding just exponentially increases.

Our learning curve goes up exponentially when we have the experience of something just beyond hearing about it. Christopher, you have been a wonderful guest. Is there anything else you want to share with the audience about witness prep or role play? 

Christopher Russo: Hey! Anything else, hire Elizabeth, if you need to do 

Elizabeth Larrick: it.

Or just call me. Christopher and I, we roundtable cases all the time where it’s like, Hey, I’ve got this. Maybe she’s difficult. Maybe she’s not. Or like, I remember that sweet little [00:43:00] old lady that you were like, I’m going to make a video. Let’s we watch it and see where we’re at. Yeah. I love all that stuff because then it gives us a chance to roundtable and say, Hey, Have Think about asking it this way, or you know what, Christopher, she’s fine.

She’s great for a 90 year old lady. Right. Yes. So awesome. Thank you again so much for coming on. It was a pleasure. Awesome. Thank you everybody for listening here today. If you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on your favorite podcast app. If you follow on Apple podcasts, just hit that big plus button at the top.

So we will follow and download automatically onto your phone. All right. Thank you so much until next time.

In this episode, we’re joined by Jason Erlich, an employment lawyer out in California, and we talk about a book we both read called “Influence is Your Superpower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen.” The author, Zoe Chance, put a lot of her research into this book about influence and the psychology of influence. As trial lawyers, this is a useful and thoughtful book on motivation and persuasion. Many of the concepts transition easily into courtroom and the running of a law practice.

Most people feel very uncomfortable trying to influence others. Zoe Chance provides examples and research that influence comes down to brain science and how we are wired as humans. Her book gives us an understanding of how our brains work and how we can apply some of her ideas, as trial lawyers, in talking to jurors, opposing counsel, mediators, or whoever else. It’s also interesting how this could be applied in your personal life.

It’s always coming from a frame of good influence. She talks a lot about her class and what she has her class do, including a couple of experiments that they do. So it’s a very fun, light read where you will also find some interesting and applicable concepts.

In this episode, you will hear:

• The gator brain vs the judge brain
• How to deal with a juror who disagrees with you
• How to deal with a juror who is bad for you
• The importance of focus groups in detecting a liar
• How to deal with disagreement in focus groups
• How we say things and ask people

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Supporting Resources:

Learn more about the author Zoe Chance: www.ZoeChance.com 

Purchase the book Influence is Your SuperPower: The Science of Winning Hearts, Sparking Change, and Making Good Things Happen

Big Thanks to Guest Jason Erlich!

If you would like to learn more about Jason and his practice please visit his website: https://erlich.lawyer/attorneys/jason-erlich/

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hi there, Elizabeth here. I wanted to pop in real fast before our episode starts to introduce our guest who you’ve heard me speak with before, Jason Erlich, who is an employment lawyer out in California. If you have any questions for Jason or if you have an employment matter in [00:01:00] California, his contact will be in the show notes as it was before.

He was on in February to talk about direct exam for clients. So we’re going to use this episode to talk about a book we both read about influences your superpower. Hope you enjoy. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m excited to have Jason join us again from California. Hello, Jason. 

Jason Erlich: Hi, Elizabeth.

Thanks for having me back. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. We wanted to bring Jason back because I want to do a book review today. So the book we’re going to review today is influence is your superpower by Zoe chance. I was turned on to this book by one of my business coaches, Ernie Svensson, Ernie, the attorney. I talked about him quite a bit, but.

He was turned on to it by a review by Robert Cialdini, who wrote Influence. And Zoe Chance has just built a little more on that concept. She teaches at the Yale School of Business. She’s got a doctorate in marketing. She’s worked at Mattel. She’s worked for Google, lots of big companies. And she’s basically [00:02:00] kind of put a lot of her research into this book.

About influence and psychology of influence. And I think it’s going to be really helpful for everybody out there listening because we’re all trial lawyers. We’ve got to deal with jurors. We’ve got clients. We’ve influence adjusters. This was a great book for me. But before I get into it, Jason, I’m going to ask you, what were your thoughts about the book?

Jason Erlich: What I found most engaging with the book was This idea that first when I read it, she was coming from a marketing perspective. And I thought I’m a little wary of marketing and that kind of world. But then as I started to dive into it, she really says, look, nobody likes to be influenced and nobody likes to feel manipulated or taken advantage of.

And so we have this sort of automatic bias against being influenced and also that. We feel very uncomfortable or most people feel very uncomfortable trying to influence others. [00:03:00] And so when I really started to then, of course, kept reading it and was intrigued by her approach and her ideas is that she’s saying, look, this is brain science.

This isn’t anything. That is new. People have been studying this type of how our brains work for the last 30 and 40 years. And once you started to quote from books that I’ve read, mostly the thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman, which was a fantastic book over 10 years ago now, I started to give her a chance and I said, okay, I think she has some interesting things to say.

And a lot of what came out of my reading of the book was. This makes sense. This is how our brains work. And this is how we can apply some of her thoughts to both work as a trial lawyer in talking to jurors, talking to opposing counsel, even talking to mediators or whoever else were coming and even our clients as well as okay.

Interesting. How this could be applied in your personal life. That’s my first. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And she’s got, [00:04:00] what I always appreciate is she’s got some pretty broad concepts, but she’s got all kinds of other research that’s packed in there. And it always is coming from a frame of good influence. And she talks a little about the dark arts and like the ways that people have used in the past that have then created our weariness.

Like you said, like you immediately thought it was a marketing book and like, Wait a second. I’m not hold on here. I’m not going to be influenced by you. I love to a couple of the frames because she talks a lot about her class and what she has her class do and a couple of experiments that they do. So it’s a very fun, light read.

It’s not super heady, which I mean, respectfully thinking fast and slow can be a little bit, can be a little bit thick and a little bit heady. This is very light. And I thought she was a great teacher of a lot of concepts she had in there. 

Jason Erlich: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, you’re right. She does have that example of how do you trade up so that she gives her students a project and I don’t [00:05:00] remember exactly what they start with, but they start with some trinket, and then they trade up and then ultimately somebody ends up with a car or some sort of Cadillac or something like that so yeah it’s an interesting thought experiment that she gives her students of like how can you go from a small trinket Up to a car or a large item.

Elizabeth Larrick: And I think everybody starts in the class with something like you said, like a paperclip or a pen. And then their job is to go out and then literally take that object and trade it up with somebody else. And it’s like, how do you get somebody to do that? Just perceive value exchange. And she talks about in one particular class, they had some very ambitious individuals who.

Wentz got this long line of dry cleaner to this, to painting, to ultimately getting a car, which they then donated to a woman who didn’t have a car. And so it was just like this amazing experiment, but she was like, that’s. How our brains [00:06:00] work like that. And it’s just a simple game. It was just really, she’s got some cool examples like that for sure.

Jason Erlich: Absolutely. Yes. 

Elizabeth Larrick: But what I really wanted us to focus on today is she has a great conversation in the beginning of her book, talking about kind of the two sides of the brain or the gator brain and the judge brain. And Jason and I are disciples of the edge trial strategy. Was before reptile. So I was going to get your kind of feedback on her thoughts and how she approached that gator brain judge brain.

Jason Erlich: Yeah, I think what she’s trying to make it simple and she’s building on a long history of science and experiments led by behavioral economists and psychologists. And so she really simplifies it as the gator brain is the lower conscious. And it’s always monitoring our environment for threats and opportunities.

And it’s part of our brain that really is based in emotion [00:07:00] and based in quick judgments, pattern recognition, because it kept us safe. And so she uses the idea and she gives this example of a gator, literally an alligator, if you thought tossed a piece of meat. Or to the alligator that’s outside of his or her bite zone.

It just ignores it. It like doesn’t have the energy. It doesn’t care. It won’t go for the meat and that that sort of brain is evolved with us over the millennia today. And then on the other side is this sort of judge brain that is sort of the conscious and rational brain that requires concentration. We don’t want to use it because.

We have limited resources, limited mental resources. So we take our, we don’t want to use that part of our brain and that’s calculating and strategizing and interpreting and making really hard decisions. So it’s a really simple explanation that she gives that for a kind of fairly complex part of our brains.

Elizabeth Larrick: And I like the way, one of the examples that she gives too is, [00:08:00] I’m going to make up the percentages here. 90 percent of the time we’re using our gator brain. These are fast, automatic, habit, done it before, automatic decisions. And the judge is about, gets to make about 10 percent of decisions. And she talks about going to the grocery store.

Like you don’t analyze every single purchase that you, or every single thing you put in your cart, you’d be there all day doing grocery. You’re using your gator to get, Oh, Hey, that’s on sale. That’s on sale. Oh, Hey, do that. And she said, that’s what we do most of the time. And when we go to actually use our conscious brain, use our judge.

Even then it’s information that’s filtered through the gator. So it’s very, still this very kind of emotional information. And a lot of it is confirmation bias. So it’s already based on a belief that we have, and even though we’re deliberating, trying to take both sides and be very logical about it, it’s still filtered through our gator emotional brains.

Jason Erlich: Yeah, it’s absolutely fascinating because if that’s the case, if 90 percent of our [00:09:00] decisions and actions and behaviors aren’t even at the conscious level, but we are so confident that it is at the conscious level that we are rational. Our will is taking, we are making conscious rational decisions and it’s our sense of our act of will.

And we’re very confident. That’s the judge part that sort of plays in that sort of overlays and makes us believe that this is a. Intentional act that I’m making a decision about when in reality, it’s not, it’s unconscious, it’s the gator brain that’s driving your decisions. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And 

Jason Erlich: it’s challenging as a person, because even if I know that, I don’t have a sense that I can control that.

So it’s a fascinating process of even as you’re going through your life, that you think you’re making conscious, rational decisions, but we’re not. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And I think that forming a habit, there’s all these books and not forming of habit takes 21 days, 30 days. And when I think about like, there’s no way trying to reprogram this brain to do [00:10:00] maybe a habit that you already had, and you’re trying to make a healthy habit.

And they have all kinds of tips and tricks to make it easy and stuff, but it’s truly just kind of like how many decisions. And then it goes back to who’s influencing my gator brain. And one of the things. I hear a lot about, and especially when it comes to our profession as lawyers, we have a lot of already built in emotions when it comes to what a lawyer is supposed to be and our mindsets and changing those things is difficult and hard.

And let me just give an example with witness prep. That concept of preparing a client for testimony Has come into a box and that’s what we all, Oh, that’s what we learned. We, and so changing that is a threat to people taking their time, everything else. And so introducing a new concept is definitely something where it’s like, okay, we know what we’re up against here.

And that’s half the battle is just knowing what’s in the Gator brain or space. And we were talking about getting ready or talking about this episode. What does this mean as a trial [00:11:00] lawyer? Jury selection is a great example of this because everybody walks in and they’re in full gator mode. Right? They do not want to be there.

We’re a threat. Everybody’s a threat. We’ve taken their time. We can make them stay longer. And I think there are people who just, they never get out of that. Then those are people you just don’t want on the jury. What are your thoughts on that? 

Jason Erlich: Yeah, no, I think she has some really interesting ideas that apply to jury selection in the process.

Absolutely. If everyone is coming in and they don’t want to be there, they’re going to feel under threat because it’s a room full of lawyers and a judge who are there to cross examine them, make them look silly or stupid, put words in their mouth. And so absolutely that they’re on high alert to. Be it the threat, like I’m looking around this room.

I don’t know these other people. These are strangers to me. And so how do I protect myself? I stay closed in. I don’t talk to anybody. I read my book, all of the things that we see when jurors first [00:12:00] come into a room for that day of jury selection. But one thing that did jump out to me is she talks a little bit about influence as Influence is not going to change people’s minds.

You’re not going to convince somebody who already has a view to change their mind. Instead, what I found most engaging was this idea of gathering enthusiastic allies to find, empower, and motivate them will get you much further along to overcome any sort of resistance. So that really resonated with me of like, when we’re doing jury selection, It’s finding those enthusiastic allies, which is who are those people that you can talk to who will be your allies and hopefully in the end of the day be that ally in the jury room when they’re making the decision.

Elizabeth Larrick: I think that is a an extremely strong point let’s emphasize it one more time. I see so many times when lawyers go into jury selection, and they’ll ask a question and they’ll [00:13:00] get the opposite answer they want, and instead of. Absorbing or thank you or tell me more like they dig in. What if you had this back?

What if you had this thing? And it’s, Hey, you’re not going to change their mind. You’ve got, like you said, go find those enthusiastic allies. 

Jason Erlich: Yeah. I don’t mean to jump on you, Elizabeth to cut you off, but because their gator brain is kicking in. The lawyer’s gator brain is kicking in, right? That person is a threat.

That person is going to turn and pour that case out. So I need to convince that person to change their mind because my case is at jeopardy. My, my win is at threat. And if this person is badger or who’s antagonistic to your case or your ideas is speaking out the unspoken, my gosh, we have to stop that person.

Let me shut them down. Let me ignore them, whatever it might be to make that threat go away. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Absolutely. And I would suggest one alternative. And I was talking to a lawyer [00:14:00] this week. She was practicing jury selection in a focus group. And I said, you get somebody that’s got an opposite view or somebody who you think you’d be able to get, excuse off the jury.

Here’s what you would practice, right? Oh, you came in with that belief. Oh, you calm down your gator and channel that into like securing them either to get off or getting any of the other people who may agree with them. And how do you calm your gator? So you can keep going confidently around the room and jury selection, because You don’t want to get thrown off or spend all your time trying to convince this one person, then how are you influencing everybody else on the panel?

At this point, they’re going to be like, hold on a second. Is that how I’m going to be treated? If I give my opinion and what if I don’t agree with you? 

Jason Erlich: That’s what that’s right. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And it really 

Jason Erlich: comes to the idea that we as lawyers are there to exaggerate manipulate lie perhaps on them [00:15:00] into something. And so, if we’ve already got that knowledge and that is how we are perceived.

By many, not all, but many, then how do we change that view, or at least present ourselves in a way that doesn’t cause that, and it’s not going to be the first person you talk to, it’s going to take some time, of course, but lay, laying out the facts, being a teacher, not exaggerating in the way that then, okay, this threat detection of this lawyer who’s going to try to, I know they’re up to something, is going to calm down and they’re going to be able to listen to the case and hear the evidence.

Elizabeth Larrick: Because otherwise, if you even lean just a little bit towards what they’re expecting of this greedy, Oh, confirmation bias right there. Oh, nope. Told you couldn’t be trusted. You know, it’s just like, ah, and you may not ever get back through to get them to open up and listen. So I appreciate the way she framed and talked about it and thinking about the trial [00:16:00] strategy and one of the things that I’ve learned.

I think keeps going through trial is if you had somebody who didn’t 100 percent agree with you and they end up on the panel, like, how can you keep continuing to try to, you know, when I say influence me, but you’ve got to keep talking to that person and keep talking to their. Particular brain to kind of, like you said, ease down and that way you have your allies in there who are going to come back in because again, you frame the case in a way that you know what your allies want to hear and what the evidence kind of supports in their brain.

Jason Erlich: Yeah, I think, yeah, and that’s, that is a challenge when talking about this book because that word influence almost seems like a four letter word that it’s a manipulative process. It’s a. On it’s a, and what you really throw home for me, the idea is that influence is what we do all the time. We have learned it because as babies, as small children, we needed to influence mom and dad to [00:17:00] protect us and to care for us.

Without some sort of influence, we would not have survived. We wouldn’t have made it to adulthood. So the idea that we’re influencing is like more in my idea that it’s just. I’m teaching. I’m not trying to manipulate you or I’m not trying to make you think something different or use the dark arts. It’s more, let’s teach.

And so to your question, or your example of like, how do you deal with a juror that might be bad for you and might be saying, expressing views that are, you’re concerned about, but you’re, you have to live with that person. Yeah. I think one of the best ways is to present the case facts that show that your case isn’t what they believe to be the case.

An employment law case where they have, let’s say a positive view of HR, or they think that the HR persons are there to help everyone. And when you start to then show that [00:18:00] in this case, the human resources, people didn’t help the client didn’t help the plaintiff and let that person twist in the wind and let them out to dry when they came for help, and then you start to show that.

Okay, yes, this juror has a positive view of human resources, but they can still keep that positive view. But in this case, and in this situation, HR failed the plaintiff’s employee. 

Elizabeth Larrick: I think that kind of also goes back a little bit with edge reptile teaching about when people have expectations. And it’s okay if they’re good or they’re bad, but nailing to know what it is, like you said, you got to aim for it to know which way to influence them.

So to speak, I do appreciate, like you said, he’s trying to ease down off of this persuasion, right? Into more of like influence. And she talks a lot about one of the things that we, Are really bad at as humans is spotting lies. She totally debunks that [00:19:00] there’ve been thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of studies on hundreds of thousands of people that say, basically, no, we can’t do it.

Like we’re 5 percent better than random chance, which is, that’s right. 

Jason Erlich: The worst part of, or not the worst incredibly challenging part is we think we’re really good at it. We are extremely confident in our assessment that somebody is a liar, yet, as you said, like, that it’s a no better than a flip of a coin.

I think she even said that even experts are only do 10 percent better than a random flip of a coin. So yeah. And if we’re really bad at spotting liars, yet we think we’re really good at it and everyone’s quite confident that they are, how do we address that in trial? I had some thoughts. I don’t know if you had some, but I was just thinking about this.

It was that. Oh, okay. If I am focus grouping my case and I’m talking to jurors and I show them clips of a witness and the testimony and they come at me and they say this person’s a [00:20:00] liar. Why? What did you see? Because going back to those snap judgments, those, she called, she even talked about this thing called thin slices, thin slices of body language, tone of voice, faces, thin slices of body language, tone of voice, faces, Thank you.

They conveyed valuable information. That’s the gator brain that then what’s if that’s true, which I think it is, then that that says this person is a liar because there’s a moment in time, a very thin slice that the body at language or tone of voice. So then, okay, how do we then either use it to our advantage to undermine credibility, see this person’s a liar or to flip it and say, no, this person can be believable and make those small changes that we need to with our witnesses.

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I think for me, when I was reading that was, and I get, when we do focus groups all the time, like quite a bit, people say, we’ve got this person and they’re a total liar. And I’m like, How good is it? Because you may think it’s really obvious and other people and focus groups are just like, they don’t get it.[00:21:00] 

We talk about, you have got to get it. It has got to be crystal stinking clear. It can’t be a hunch because someone’s hunch could go the opposite way. So it means like you got to have it documented and it’s confirmed and then reconfirmed. And practicing it with focus groups, I think significantly helps you gain that.

Okay. We’ve got, it’s clear enough. We’re not going on a hunch and, or the opposite where it’s just, let’s say it’s your client and the focus group hunch is like, they’re lying. Are they’re creating a scheme or whatever kind of conspiracy to do all this medical care or deceive their employer. And then it’s just kind of like, okay, if that’s the hunch, like we got to go the other way.

Again, same thing, like be sure and make sure that person with Evidence outside of just the witness to confirm it. And even when, if we have some people like that, especially when I work with clients that way, who there’s been focus groups and that’s a perception is that, Oh, they’re not [00:22:00] really truthful or they’re hiding something.

Then it’s okay. When we talk about things, you need to pair it with your, I said this, and I followed up with an email kind of conversational, but that, because that needs to be in part of the language that they’re talking about Testament. 

Jason Erlich: And because there’s, If they’re no good, the jurors are no good at detecting a liar, but they are very good at believing they know who a liar is.

And it’s okay, let’s find out why, what is it that you’re seeing? And if I think I used to think about this slightly differently, and I didn’t say, I’m no good at detecting a liar. Nobody else is. So I’m just going to let it slide because they’re not going to, nobody can really say who’s a liar and who’s not.

But once I started realizing that I tested things with focus groups and I got the feedback, then that people are not truthful, it’s why. And then you in trial, if you know that information, you can push those [00:23:00] themes, push those ideas that this person can’t be trusted. And here’s why. And that can be a valuable strategy, but you wouldn’t know that until you Tried it, tested it, and found out from a focus group what they think of this person.

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, and a lot of this book just really confirmed for me, like, you gotta figure out how things in your case are influencing people before you get there, so that you can be prepared for what you may hear in jury selection, and then be able to use your advantage. Or dispel and debunk along the way. But without doing focus groups, you’re really just guessing, you’re guessing at how people are going to talk to you or react in jury selection.

And you could have a great day at the courthouse with a great panel. And the next day you get stuck with the terrible stinky panel. It’s just not talking like, but you would have experienced that in focus group and also the disagreement. I think. We get so entrenched as lawyers and in our [00:24:00] cases. And that’s a good thing because that’s what makes us a zealous advocate for our clients.

But that can also make you super entrenched when somebody disagrees with you, like we talked about, like, you can’t let it go. You go after it versus if you practice and focus group, like letting that being okay with moving on to that next person, that is a skill. A hundred percent believe that is a skill of just being like.

All right. Cool. I’m going to go to this next person and keep talking to them and gather their information and staying very neutral facing. 

Jason Erlich: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I think it’s critical. And until I started doing it myself, I didn’t understand how important it was. I think I would in the past, I would have simply just, I heard a bad response.

From somebody and I just moved on. Like, I just wanted to avoid that problem. If I don’t talk to that person, I can just move on and that the problem is solved, but realizing that [00:25:00] there’s more, you can, there’s a lot more that you can gain and just having that ability to engage that person, even when they seem very hostile, because there’s going to be an outcome that is most likely good for you, which is one they’ll expose their bias, in which case they can get off for cause.

Or you can use that person as the counterpoint, point counterpoint, you know, that I, okay, who agrees with juror number three here on this issue. Oh, let’s see who else might be antagonistic to my case. And if you’re afraid of it, like I used to be, then you would just move on and not know that juror number 12 perfectly agrees with juror number three.

And they’re just going to form a little alliance in the back room there that is going to dump your case. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, and how you handle that as well. Because again, they’re slicing you, right? Like you said, they already have that inclination about you. They already made their Gatorade. You’re threatening them.

And when you just even slightly do something that then confirms it, boom, judges decided, you know what? [00:26:00] Jason’s no good. We’re not going to trust him. This is not good. This is all fake. No matter what else happens. And it’s just, it’s always just, okay, how can we keep that cool, calm. And I always tell people focus groups and getting up in front of a group of strangers is one of the best things I’ve ever done in order just to be a better communicator, to be more understanding, because I learned I don’t always speak as clearly as I do in my mind.

And that’s. One of the things she talks about too in the more applicable, some of the chapters is how we say things, how we ask people, and she talks about one of the things that they know, as far as measuring something that is going to be how successful you will be in getting clients or anything is how easy was it.

I mean, her example was there was a traffic court in New York city that they studied that basically said they did. I can’t remember one reminder of a court date. Yeah. And just [00:27:00] one reminder, like two days before got 40 more percent people to show up versus no reminder. And it was just like, Hey, that one little reminder can significant because it made it easy.

Oh yeah. Okay. That’s the other thing too, is don’t make it hard for jurors to go along with you. Like when you complicate it, you make it difficult. When it gets difficult, they’re more likely to be like, no, I don’t think so. So we want to make it easy. That means we got to make it clear you some of the things she was talking about.

Jason Erlich: Yeah, absolutely. No, I think that was what stood out to me. She had this statement that the people tend to take the path of least resistance. People take the path of least resistance. And if the simple case and the simple story is the path of least resistance, then they will follow it. And so if we make our cases simple, uncomplicated, then the gator is leading it and it’s going along and the judge is asleep, which the judge isn’t really even, the judge thinks that he or she is in charge, but it really it’s the gator [00:28:00] that’s driving it.

So I think that simplicity part really. That did drive home for me about how to truly explain our cases in a way that will activate people’s in a way that will lead them to our side 

Elizabeth Larrick: and make it pass an easy path right safety rules, a checklist, right, a visual aid that tells the whole thing so you don’t have to go in there and describe it.

That’s half the battle. I think sometimes with lawyers is we do want to complicate it and then just we just lose people. Any other closing thoughts or any other things from the book you want to talk about? 

Jason Erlich: Yeah, I think she makes this a very accessible book. As she said, like, you don’t have to read it page one to the last page.

You can jump into chapters. I thought you had some really good chapters on, again, the dark arts and why the dark arts and how people have used it and to try to manipulate cults and get with Ponzi schemes and get rich quick schemes and all those things and how people have, [00:29:00] have used this gator brain in this.

So it’s a nice reminder of why you can just quickly see the wrong way to take the. This idea of her books and she, then she has a book about women and women’s challenges in dealing with influence. As she says, negotiating while female, because she talks a lot about negotiation and negotiation strategy.

So I thought that was fantastic because there are biases and gender disadvantages that you have to, and not as women have to overcome. So there’s little bits of the book that can just appeal to different people, different points. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I also thought you started out saying it too. There’s stuff that this could help in my personal life.

And one of the things she talks about is she did this, it worked with Google trying to make their campus, this giant campus to make it have healthier alternatives and have their employees be a little bit healthier. And they just talked about really simple things. Like one of them was like, They just changed like how the M& M’s were dispensed, [00:30:00] something so simple where it was like, at first they gave you a cup and they, everybody always filled their cup up.

And what she did was like, then she translated that to what would that mean for, so she said, if you do that, you know, basically that translated to a pound of fat a year. And then they changed it into these little pre packaged packages that had half of what a cuff. And then it was just like, yeah, everybody ate less.

So it’s just, it’s little things like that. She talks about where it’s just, this is not dark arts. This is about. We’re working with the brain you’ve got on positioning things. And remember, we’re trying to make it easy on ourselves and it’s little bitty things like that, where it’s okay. It’s not impossible.

I can work with this crazy gator brain in my personal life, but also, you know, knowing when we’re facing, even when we’re trying to have somebody sign up. What it is that they, what they need in the path of least resistance. And it’s, that’s why sometimes people who all they have to do is pick up a phone and somebody shows up at their house, [00:31:00] that’s really easy versus, Oh, I need you to come down to my office.

Now we have zoom as an alternative, but it’s just, it’s. So many little examples, like we’ll start popping up as you read the book, but either way, I totally would recommend the book. She also has on, she has a website. We’ll put show notes. We’ll have the link to the book and her website. And she has a lot of really great videos on YouTube as well, talking about the stuff and re explaining it.

And it’s helpful just to keep replugging through it because It’s a good reminder of, Oh, that’s right. You got to keep doing that. Awesome. Jason, thank you so much for joining us again and coming in and reviewing the book. 

Jason Erlich: Thank you again, Elizabeth. It’s always a pleasure. Enjoy talking about these issues.

Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. All right. Thank you all for listening. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review on your favorite listening app. And until next time, thank [00:32:00] you.

In this episode, we explore how focus group clips can be used as tools in mediation. Specifically, I’m sharing five simple things that we can do as plaintiff’s lawyers to help our mediation, which I learned from a respected mediator on both sides of the aisle.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Virtual mediation v. in-person mediation
• Ways to prepare your client for the mediation
• Sending a demand before the mediation
• Negotiation styles (ex. positional bargaining and principled negotiation)
• The ranges of risk on a case
• How to use focus group clips for mediation

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Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their businesses and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I’m your host, Elizabeth, and I’m glad you’re joining us.

Today, we are going to spend this episode talking about mediation, specifically going to address a mediator’s point of view when it comes [00:01:00] to using focus group clips. in a mediation. We’ve talked very little about this on the podcast, and I was happy to get a mediator’s point of view. And I thought, let’s talk about it.

Let’s share it. And I love some of the things that he talked about. But before we get to that place, I want to talk a little about a few other things that this mediator talked about in his CLE presentation. He is a loved and respected mediator on both sides of the aisle. And he came and presented the five simple things that we can do as plaintiff’s lawyers to help our mediations.

And there were a couple things that he pointed out for just his point. of you that I thought were really helpful, and I just want to hit those high notes for you, because I think that they bear repeating. At times we can forget, or like I talk about, and you already know and experience, we can get really busy.

One of the things that he talked [00:02:00] about specifically was virtual mediations. And His statistics, basically going back from before the pandemic and after the pandemic, said that basically there was very little difference in resolution, whether they were in person or via zoom. So he of course told us his prediction was zoom is never going to go away for mediations.

So be prepared for that, but also to think about when it would be a good time to have in person mediations. His point of view was that if you have a great client or if you have a specific damage that is difficult to translate via zoom and The example was there was an injured person Broken their jaw and it had grown back in such a way that There was a clicking and movement of the jaw whenever she talked And he said, that’s a good thing to be in person because that’s really hard to translate over Zoom.

But that also led into one of the high [00:03:00] points, which was preparing your client and making sure, one, they are prepared for the content of the mediation, meaning that they know really what’s going to happen there, what people are going to say, and the purpose of a mediation. Also helpful to talk about money and expenses and those kinds of things.

He also made a very big point to talk about how When clients appear and it’s obvious they’re at work or they’re very distracted or even possibly driving it significantly decreases the ability of the case to get settled that day because the adjuster will see that and obviously discounts the situation significantly if your client is distracted and specifically if they’re driving as well.

Keeping that in mind when preparing your client and thinking about the content. Also, when you remove those kinds of surprises, you’re more likely to have your client. be more likely to move in a direction for settlement. Another high point that he talked about was sending a demand before the mediation and [00:04:00] specifically sending it with some time, 30 days out, so that you could actually follow up with a call to talk to opposing counsel to see if there’s anything, any holdouts.

And specifically the mediator went on to say, it’s not enough anymore to ask. Do you have everything? He said right now with many of the main carriers, insurance carriers, it’s very much about what each individual adjuster, and particularly sometimes a supervisor, would need to see, want, and have. Versus necessarily what, you know, hey, I’ve given, do you have everything?

They may have everything, they may not, but again, that’s going to be kind of a, hey, how do we read the situation? What can we do best to suit your adjuster or the supervisor in the case? The other thing that the mediator talked about, which I found really fascinating was the negotiation styles. He talked specifically about [00:05:00] positional bargaining and principled negotiation.

He talked in depth about positional bargaining is really a lot what plaintiff’s lawyers come in. We typically have, here is our number, and we’re not budging off it, right? So it’s, My Way or the Highway, opening with a demand and corresponding with a low offer, and really it’s a very low sum game because it becomes a test of will, who’s going to crack first, and it’s very much about perceiving concessions and signs of weaknesses.

Rather than the potential value creating moves that need to happen and a lot of times we come in that way and when we do That’s not at all how the counterpart on the other side is Looking at and evaluating they are very much on a principled Negotiation where basically it’s very much a risk taking It is a range of possibilities [00:06:00] and truly about limiting the risk, the least amount possible risk.

And he said, when you have a lot of times this positional bargaining take place, settlements are very unlikely to happen, especially if the ball keeps moving, Hey, we filed suit now it’s worth four times more. So that’s not really, it’s not a risk to them that you file a lawsuit. So that doesn’t change anything for them.

And he really gave a very good example, specifically laying out A range of risks on a case that they had recently had. an example where it had a defendant’s best day in court, which was zeros. And then it had a plaintiff’s best day in court, which had 1. 5 million. And what he was trying to explain was, you’re, dear Jester, you’re putting all of your weight in that this is going to be defendant’s best day.

When really. You’re overweighing that position. It’s more likely that something in the [00:07:00] middle is going to happen. So they had also done kind of the ranges in between there. What, best day, and then I think they had four or five different options. Basically weighing out different percentages of liability.

And not changing a lot of the medical bills and that kind of stuff, but changing some of the other values they had in there, and they had a couple different damage values in there that could be added in, of course, bills and futures and future medicals, and they changed all those numbers around. And when they were able to present that overall view of the range of the risks, It got the case settled because then that really opened the eye, just, oh, we actually, we have risk here because it’s not going to always be like what we think a plaintiff’s best day.

And it’s not likely to be a defendant’s best day. I mean, those are outside. It’s really going to be somewhere in the middle. So I thought he did an excellent job talking about that and really trying to get plaintiff’s attorneys, plaintiff’s lawyers to look at the other point of view [00:08:00] when we’re walking into.

Okay. A mediation and being open to that point of view, but also thinking about presenting things in that point of view to get further down the road when it comes to negotiating and settlement. He didn’t really have a position one way or the other about like how often things settle or don’t. The only other thing that he had to point out was in his observation that mediators proposals were basically becoming the norm, very much a regular, Turning into a little bit of a tool that the opposite side was using again as part of their risk analysis.

I thought it was super helpful all these good points to remember. But again, I found that last point that positional bargaining versus principal negotiation very helpful. Because I think we can get really one track minded about how things happen because that’s just the way it’s been done over time. And it can definitely just end in frustration.

I can speak [00:09:00] 100 percent from personal experience of taking that positional bargaining and that’s it. And then when I do, having zero chance of getting any settlement in the case without something else like very significantly happening. Because they then take the position, she’s not going to do it. And she’s basically so stuck in that one position.

Little food for thought. I appreciated the presentation by that mediator. But once it got to the question answer, somebody raised their hand and said, Hey, how helpful are focus group clips? And he said, they’re not that helpful because they get discounted severely. The reaction that I get is we weren’t there.

And. Basically, this is a biased set of people, these are just a room full of their friends or a room full of family members just saying things. It’s significantly discounted. And his, a little bit, I talked a little bit to him a [00:10:00] little bit more whenever I got a chance to one on one. He said, if people are going to use focus group clips, you either need to prepare the other side for that, meaning you need to say, Hey, we have this information.

Or if you want to wait, he said, you really have to provide a strong foundation and you need to be prepared in that foundation to show like where these people came from, even share some demographic information to be in order to be able to show this is not just a biased group of people presenting things that I basically wrote on a piece of paper and told them to say.

And the other thing I would add to that is you need to have a strong reason and purpose for showing a focus group clip. Typically, when we clip things out, even if we’re clipping out depositions, it’s just too long for a person’s attention span. attention span. So sometimes we make clips, they are generally 10 to 12 minutes [00:11:00] long.

It’s way too long. Sometimes we make it too short, just having one question, one answer, right? That’s not going to give them a full idea that this was an objective focus group. So you really need to think about, Hey, what am I showing this for? And a lot of times when I use focus groups for mediation clips, I’m taking the time.

defense position and running it through the focus group to get their reaction to it. I’m not trying to just get all the sweet spots for the stuff that I already know that they already know. I’m testing out their positions and then able to say hey, hear me answer the question or they show a clip of their witness and then it’s The focus group reacting to that or the focus group responding to that.

And again, that would just be to say, hey, you think this is a strong position for you, let me just tell you that’s not what jurors think and here’s why. Another thing I always encourage people to do is if you’re gonna use focus group clips, you gotta have more than one [00:12:00] focus group. You need to show two different sets of people, three different sets of people, four different sets of people, and if they’re all having the same reaction, Even better.

But again, you’ve got to be able to provide that foundation for all those to show, hey, this is not a whole group of my people and I’m not just reading them things to say from a monitor. And as always, the more objective, the better. The question that the focus group people are getting. It needs to be neutral.

It needs to be objective. There can’t be any banter, right? It has to be very open ended so that when it comes back out, it’s extremely objective and it’s easier for them, meaning the insurance company or opposing counsel, to listen to it and not discount it because they are automatically going to discount it.

And then, and if you’re going to use focus groups, you’ve got to overcome all of that, definitely. And again, I don’t think very many opposing counsel have any experience with focus groups. And they’re relying on [00:13:00] adjusters who, again, you may have adjusters who have no experience with focus groups, other than they’ve been trained to automatically discount, dismiss, and despise.

So always think about that when you’re going to go and either create clips or have that in mind. Hey, I’m going to use this focus group to try to test some things and maybe some clips will come out of it. But then also which way are you going to, are you going to go ahead and tell the opposing side, Hey, we’ve been running some focus groups and here’s what they’re saying.

If the, Automatic reaction is, we weren’t there. Maybe the automatic response should be, let me invite you to one. They never show up in any of my experience. Hey, you’re welcome to come down. We’re going to run folks through. It’s going to be biased. Blah, blah, blah. Okay, whatever. We’re going to do it whether you’re here or not.

So, just be thinking about those things when you are having that in your mind. And knowing what is the best way to use them. How am I going to establish a foundation [00:14:00] for it? And again, one other kind of red flag that raises in my mind that I always get as a concern from lawyers, which is, won’t I have to give them the entire.

Focus group if I disclose a clip. I don’t know. Let’s walk through this. Is it technically evidence in the case? No, of course not. You’re not gonna use it in the courtroom. Is it discoverable then? What claim does it have to go towards? None. It is absolutely positively for trial strategy and litigation purposes.

I’ve not had anybody challenge that. And sometimes actually in federal court, you have to a hundred percent disclose when you’re doing focus groups. Give the names, give the lists. All that is a hundred percent open and there’s no hide the ball or anything like that. And I don’t think people who do focus groups hide the ball.

I’m one of those people. I just think it’s a tool in our tool belt. It’s just to get ready for trial. That’s the purpose of it. So it’s not for anything else. It’s not like we’re out [00:15:00] videotaping the defendant like sometimes. The other side does of our clients, right? Surveillance. That’s not what it’s for.

It’s not gonna be shown to the jury. And I can’t imagine that a judge would say it is fully discoverable. So I hope that you found this episode helpful. I think there’s more nuggets that we can talk about, and there’s probably more ways that we can discuss when it comes to using focus group clips in a mediation And so I’m going to leave that open, we’ll probably have some folks maybe come in and maybe we’ll have a guest or two come in and talk about how they did it in a case, how it worked for them, and how to maybe read opposing counsel or read the decision makers to decide how to create that foundation for those clips.

All right. Thank you so much for joining us. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with somebody else. That would be great. Also leave a review or rate it on your favorite podcast app. If you are an Apple podcast [00:16:00] follower, then if you would just hit that plus button up in the top corner so that it automatically downloads onto your phone, that would be great as well.

All right. Until next time. Thank you.

When we’re preparing a client for testimony, whether for deposition or trial, there are basic concepts you need to keep in mind. As trial lawyers, we could be so engulfed in a lot of things that sometimes, we need to step back and look at things from a ground-level perspective. 

In this episode, I’m going to discuss these three basic concepts: teaching, communication, and timing. We’re going to touch on the power of visuals, the things that go into preparing for deposition, and how one-on-one meetings can help clients understand what they’re asking. We want to make sure that we nail down some of these concepts before we get into content.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Teaching: Use of visual aids, writing vs. reading
• The value in creating a timeline 
• Understanding people’s learning styles:  auditory, visual, or combined
• Using legal and medical terms
• Keeping clients from information overload or TMI
• Communication: Primacy and recency
• Timing: When to start and repetition

Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast, or I should say, so glad that you’re here to join us for your first episode.

This is going to be a pretty good episode. I personally think so because I have been doing a lot of work with focus groups lately. We’ve had a lot of guests in the podcast, which I always [00:01:00] love and appreciate all of our guests. This episode, I wanted to take a moment to go back and really think about preparation basics, very basic concepts of what we’re doing when we’re preparing a client for testimony.

And when we’re preparing a client for testimony, this means either deposition or trial, but in doing some of the work I’ve been doing over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been doing this for weeks and months. And also in some of my speaking engagements, I’ve been seeing some things that I thought, Hey, this would be a pretty good episode where we just stop where we are and kind of look at what we’re doing from a very ground level, basic perspective.

And so what I want to go through is three very basic concepts. One of them is teaching. We are teaching our clients very quickly about a concept very quickly about information and how can we do that effectively. And our second [00:02:00] one we’re going to talk about is communication. How we’re communicating with our clients.

And last one is timing. Now there may be some other basics that come up that I said, Hey, let’s just do another episode. But I really kind of want to stop and tackle these three independently. And first just talk about teaching. We are bringing our clients in for a very specific purpose when we’re preparing for testimony and we have to teach them the concepts of what we’re going to go through.

We have to teach them information. do it very quickly. Time is always of essence and everything that we do as trial lawyers, we have to be very efficient in what we do. And when we are teaching our clients, we’re bringing them into this completely new world, different world that they’re used to, and we’re having to bring them into the case.

Whereas we’ve been in the case working through it weeks, months, sometimes years before testimony comes into play. So we are inundated, right, with information. We also live and work [00:03:00] regularly in litigation field. So it’s not unusual to us. What is unusual is teaching. Somebody from the outside looking in so I just want to look at this from a perspective of what are the best ways to Teach people and what are we normally doing?

So typically when we are getting ready to prepare somebody we spend time with them on the phone We spend time with them one on one and we talk a lot about concepts. So we do a lot of auditory Teaching with people we may have documents which are always helpful things that we need to go through visually But what I really want to to start looking at is how we can combine on a very basic level, auditory and visual learning.

We know from research that when we can use visual aids to help people learn, the learning curve increases by 400 percent or more. People are really going to retain things when we combine auditory and visual. It’s almost up to 62%. [00:04:00] And remember, we have a lot to teach them and not a lot of time to do that.

So we want to be able to combine those things. So how do we get a combination to get the most effective learning? Just from a basic level, again, let’s think of a simple explanation. I recently prepared a gentleman, late 50s, in a very serious. Car crash. And the car crash happened about two years ago. So again, we’re doing a lot of refresh here.

And there’s been a lot of things that have gone on in the case, experts, things that he again, learning curve here, and we’ll talk about a little bit later, TMI when it comes to some of the stuff that’s happened in the case, you know, taking this gentleman where he was. And then, And trying to talk to him about what he will be asked, what are some of the concepts he’ll be asked.

And one of those things was future medical care. There was a life care planner. He had actually met with this person, but again, months had passed and he had not been back to the doctor. I think it had been a couple months and he went back, he went to a different doctor. Like he just wasn’t [00:05:00] really understanding the concept of this claim of future medical care.

So. We first explained it talking to him. Then I said, okay, I doubled down and stood up and got our rolling notepad out basically and started to write out lawsuit and claims and what they were. Now I wrote that in layman’s terms, not necessarily what the legal term is. So here in Texas we have a claim you can have for physical impairment, specifically.

Pretty broad. It’s really confusing to juries as we know who practice here. So I just did medical bills, right? Medical bills in the future. So very simple concepts and then making sure, checking in with him that got it. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what this lawsuit’s about. Then I went back and I said, now, what proof?

Who’s going to talk about this? What’s going to be the proof for this? So that’s where I wrote in medical records, uh, experts, his testimony, where he would [00:06:00] be talking about it. But that opened the door for us then to be able to say, remember you met with that guy, his job is to project out care. That’s what his job is.

Oh, okay. Oh, now like, Some of these things are coming back together. We’re also refreshing his memory and we’re not getting complicated with our visual aid. I just used a giant notepad and just wrote on it. And that was a very simple thing. And it came together for him very quickly when we use the visual aid.

And so it’s that kind of simple teaching that we can do very quickly with somebody. And even if we’re meeting with somebody on zoom, you can use the share screen and type or write on the whiteboard. Okay. Or you can also develop some very simple templates on a Word document and just share that Word document.

You can do a PowerPoint, but a lot of the reason why I think writing is so much better Or even typing is so much [00:07:00] better. It’s because they’re going to learn at that rate as you write. If you already have typing on the page, they’re reading as you’re talking. And we know our brains can do one thing at a time.

So that’s why I think writing it You can write so fast, you can only type so fast, but also knowing like they’re waiting on you. They’re not going to get ahead of you, they’re not going to be lagging behind you. You’ll be right there together at the same time and I think that is also really helpful. One of the other things that I encourage people to do when we’re teaching People information, especially about their case.

It’s really great to do a timeline, right? Just take one of those giant notepads and start marking things off. It’s a very interactive way to do it that gets them engaged constantly and also even making a list of before and after. Make a giant t chart with them. You’re writing their thinking and it’s all [00:08:00] going at the same pace.

Okay, we’re not going to get ahead of anyone, we’re not going to get behind. Some people, it takes them a while to generate things, so they’ve got to refresh that memory. So that’s why I always enjoy either handwriting it up there or typing it as people are talking. No one’s going to get ahead of anyone or behind anyone.

And again, we’re really solidifying concept. They’re saying it and then I write it. Now it’s visually up there. It’s not going anywhere. One of the things I tell people when we get together to prepare for deposition is that when we talk. Feels very abstract versus something that is concrete, like looking at this deposition notice or looking at this video.

That’s why I think. having it nailed down in black and white, written out their words, really solidifies them learning that concept. And again, very quickly, we’ve got a lot to go over, we’ve got a lot to learn. We just want to make sure that we’re solidifying that so that it doesn’t come back up. That’s another thing that we want to make sure that we nail down some of these concepts before [00:09:00] we get into content.

Some of the nuts and bolts of hard cross questions they may get or hard concepts they may be challenged with. And this is something you can look at, engage with your person when it comes to their learning style. If, hey, maybe I gotta lean a little harder on visuals, right, to make sure that we’re getting where we need to go, that I’m going to get assurance as the lawyer that they’re with me and what I am saying.

And that’s the other really good thing about combining the auditory with the visual. Just going back to this whole teaching concept, we want to make sure that we’re hitting people where they like to learn. Auditory and visually, we’re doing a combination of those things. We’re even just taking very simple concepts of claims that are in the case, writing them up on a board, doing something interactive with them.

Even if we’re on Zoom, even if we’re just sharing screen and I’m just typing things up, that’s still very interactive. They’re still learning and [00:10:00] that retention is gonna stick with them versus if we had only sat down and talked. Or if we’d only given them a piece of paper that had everything written on it.

Okay, so we’re making that learning curve quicker. The other preparation basic that I want to talk about today is communication. A couple of overarching things and one would be the language that we use. This is one thing I sometimes I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but I’m going to talk a little bit more about how we can help our clients feel like we get really caught in when I say we, as trial lawyers, we get really caught up in leading questions when it comes to asking people for information, especially our clients, because we know so much about the file that sometimes we’re not really trying to learn, we’re just trying to confirm when there could still be a whole lot of information that we’re not getting out of people.

Before deposition or for trial if we’re not asking open ended questions on the language piece on the communication piece Looking at how we are asking our questions leading questions [00:11:00] versus open ended questions. We’re still gathering information We’re still staying curious These are people who have A lot of information and sometimes it just gets stuck and it doesn’t always get out to us until we sit down one on one and depo prep.

That’s not necessarily saying that we’re not doing our jobs, asking questions or our staff is not. It’s one of these things that happens like they feel much more on the spot. They know this is the time that they’re going to actually have to talk on their own. A different thing happens in their mind when they say, Oh my gosh, I got to tell you this.

The other thing about language is there are times where we talk to our clients in legal terms and we don’t pair it together with regular people language. And what can happen sometimes is if we’re going along and we’re talking about a concept or we’re working through. Something that happens in a deposition or something that’s happening in the case.

When we use a word and they don’t know what it is, generally they get stuck. [00:12:00] They get stuck trying to figure out what that word is and they either give up or they make a wrong assumption about what the word means. They generally don’t stop you to say, Hey, what is that? Because you’re going, you’re giving the information.

That’s what they’re there for. They’re not going to stop you and say, hey, wait a minute. What was that word that you said? Because then they forget the word altogether as well. So be very cognizant of the language that you use and the question styles that you use. Always, if you can, pair it together. If you have to use a legal term, pair it together with a regular person term or stop And ask them, have you ever heard that word before?

Okay. Let me give you another example of what that word means, right? Don’t leave people in the dust. Don’t ever assume that our clients know what the legal terms are. Even if we’ve used it six or seven times, this comes down to medical stuff as well. People don’t read their medical records and doctors don’t really necessarily go into a lot of [00:13:00] explanation about medical terms.

They don’t know what it is. And so it’s okay to stop and say, Hey, do you know what that is? Has anybody talked to you about that? So that’s definitely a language piece is something to make sure we’re not going too far above people’s heads and stopping to make sure that they know what we are asking.

Another concept under our communication umbrella is TMI, too much information. We, a lot of times overload our. Um, and it’s really important that we provide our clients with so much information when we are trying to do deposition prep. And that really comes down to just not the right time. There’s really only so much information we as human beings can hold on to.

And if we’re trying to get them to really hone in and focus on, What they’re going to say and how it’s going to work, it’s sometimes really hard for them to then take in more information about the defense experts going to say this, and then there’s this motion for summary judgment. And then [00:14:00] there’s just, and it’s so much information.

It’s overwhelm and they just can shut down. There’s just too much. So I always say, Hey, look at what you’re doing for deposition prep. You may get questions from your client about. I want to know what’s going on with this deposition. I want to know what’s going on with this thing. Sometimes you have to just say, Hey, I totally understand.

We are going to a hundred percent talk about that. But today, this time right now, we’ve got to focus in on your preparation because that’s the most important thing we need to do right now. I’m not advising that you withhold information from your clients about case information. I am just saying in the first place, I’m not going to go into that today.

So in the same frame of preparing your client for testimony, you have to bring them back to center. You have to bring them back to that focus and say, Hey, we’re going to talk about that. We can set another time up for a phone call down the road. Right now, this is where we need to be and be present in what we’re doing.[00:15:00] 

Again, that goes back to efficiency. You as a lawyer. You need to keep them on task if they’re going off task. That’s a great example of going off task. Now clients love to go off task. We may be sitting going to do deposition prep and they want to talk about, Oh, this medical provider. And then they, Oh, this Heather story.

And then, Oh, this other thing happened. And. It feels like you’re not getting them to focus in on what you’re trying to do at that moment, but you are still learning stuff. But I’m talking about when the client’s like, let’s go talk about that summary judgment thing, or, Oh yeah, I’ve also got to get you this email thing.

Hey, come on. We are here for this one particular thing, but under TMI, too much information. That’s really where sometimes we. So just give too much, right? So just a concept of communication, thinking about, Hey, there’s only so much communication people can take in and we want to make sure that we look at that, use our time wisely in these preparation meetings.

Not overwhelm them with other things that don’t directly impact their testimony. All right, our two last [00:16:00] concepts under communication are really about brain science and also communication. Thinking about how people learn as well. And that is primacy and recency. Primacy is the first thing we hear, right?

So research shows when we’re sitting down and we’re about to learn anything, right? Even if first thing you hear the jurors here, right? They’re going to learn it, right? So the very first thing that we talk about. They’re gonna retain it. So we need to make sure the first thing we cover is The thing that needs to stick the most so when I prepare people the first thing that we cover is we cover logistics Do you know where you’re going?

Do you know when you’re going to be there? And, have you asked off work? Have you gotten the child care cover, right? And then, what do you expect is going to happen? We don’t cover content first, right? There’s so much content to cover. Liability, damages, [00:17:00] questions, right? Now they want to go there first.

They’re always going to say, I need to know what questions you’re going to ask me. That’s super content. But, a lot of times, we’ve done that. Skip over the logistics, which is hey, I need you to know where you’re gonna show up to play ball I need you to know what you know, you’ve got everything else covered so that when we get in there You’re not gonna be worried about who’s picking up the kids or I didn’t ask off work or you didn’t tell me it was gonna Be two hours, then they’re completely thrown off So I always talk about our primacy for me is we got to set that stage We need to set that frame for them, get their mindset straight, make sure that they a hundred percent know what they can expect when it comes to where, when, how, and do they have everything covered in their life to give their full attention.

And then we go into, what do you think is going to happen? Who’s going to be there? There’s lots of different ways to cover the logistics is what I call them. I like to ask a lot of questions. Some people just like to lay it straight out there. Who do you think is going to be there? What do you think is going on?

And then [00:18:00] we move to content. So, always think about that when you are going to, once you officially start your meeting. Now, I’m not saying you can’t do icebreakers and hey, how’s it going and how’s life been? Like, that’s all fine, but at some point, your job is to start the meeting and that’s where it comes in, the primacy, right?

We’re here to prepare for the deposition. So the very first thing I want to make sure is you got the date, you got the time covered, you know where to go. Now let’s talk a little bit about who do you think is going to be there. And now you’re setting the stage, right? You’ve got to set that frame first and they’re going to retain that.

And that’s really important because once they get in there and they don’t know the rules of the game, then they may totally flop around because they don’t really know. The last concept in our communication, which is, which is also the last thing, right? So we know through research primacy, the first thing they hear they hold on to and the last thing they hear they hold on to.

Now, what I see sometimes is [00:19:00] people waiting until either the morning before deposition or the evening before to have preparation. And the last thing that they are telling people is learning stuff. They’re trying to teach them things at the very end. And at that point, their brain is still processing information, right?

If you give them something else to learn, now they’ve got to process it and process it. The last thing that I like to do with people is empower them. Give them confidence. Reassure them. I’m giving them good feelings. We’re ending on a high emotional note. So that when they go in there, they begin with that high emotional note, not with processing and trying to grasp a concept, trying to remember it.

There’s a lot of brain energy that goes into trying to learn. So keep those things in mind, the first thing they hear and the last thing they hear. We talk about this, and I know David Ball talks about this a lot in teaching from his Damages [00:20:00] book, right, Primacy and Recency. Something we should always bring into our preparation meetings as well, especially again, let me just harp on this.

We need to be extremely efficient and we need to also remember how people’s brains work and use that to our advantage. First thing they hear and the last thing. All right. Now, third and final concept for our preparation basics is timing. And under here, I’m going to talk about scheduling, we’re going to talk about repetition, and we’re going to talk about content.

So, timing. I get this question a lot. When should I prepare the client? When should I start preparing? Now, some people want to start out, Hey, can we start doing some of these things once we file litigation and months out? I’m like, well, you can, but you’re going to have to repeat it, right? Because people forget that’s our forgetful curve basically says as we go on, we’re really only going to remember 10 percent after seven days.

Timing wise for the scheduling of the [00:21:00] preparation, I say, Hey, then if seven days we’re on the cusp of not remember anything, we need to be preparing within those seven days. Now that doesn’t mean you can’t meet with somebody and do some Repetition. And that’s another thing is when I talk about my scheduling and when to prepare, I’m really talking to folks who you’ve got a large caseload.

You’ve got a lot of people to prepare and you really have to be tight with your scheduling and you’re looking at doing, and I’m going to encourage everybody to do two meetings and the scheduling of those meetings is with some time in between there. So that again, the retention level, the teaching and the repetition is going to happen for our folks and they’re going to come back.

And you can do that with the information processed, with some other great questions, or with some other great information for you. So, we want to make sure we don’t schedule too far out, and we also want to make sure we don’t schedule too close. We talked about the morning of. The morning of, you’re giving them a whole lot of information, and they’re gonna walk into that [00:22:00] room still processing the information, and probably unclear on information.

So we definitely don’t want to put people in that position. Same with the night before. We want to make sure we’re hitting in that sweet spot and then my next concept under timing, which is repetition, doing two meetings, even if you’re just doing your first meeting for 30 minutes and your second meeting is maybe an hour and a half to cover everything.

But you want that repetition and you want also that time for what I call marination, because you’re going to give them a lot of information, a lot of teaching in that first meeting. You want to make sure that they’ve retained it. And that it sunk in, they don’t have questions before you start adding on top of that and really getting into some of the content of things.

And that’s why I say repetition, right, because then once you go back, you can ask, you can test, hey, what questions do you have? Still got it, what are your rights as a witness, right, who’s going to be there, we’re still good, any questions about that? And then for our second meeting, come back in and really start doing some content.

And [00:23:00] that’s my last one for content, which is the timing that we are talking about. are really important content. Typically when I do get to my content stages, I’m doing liability first and damages second, when we get there. And again, remember our primacy we talked about earlier, we really want to make sure we cover logistics, right?

What are the rules of the game? Who’s going to be there before we start getting into the meat and taters of the content. And that’s just because again, we want to make sure that we set their expectations properly before we start getting into Cool. The content of the questions and the responses. You want to make sure everybody knows the rules of the game before we start to play.

And that just helps them also get through that as well. We talked a little bit about if language, they can get stuck on a question or stuck on a word. Want to make sure we get all that out there. Um, and through the path so that we can then really start working with the content that we’ve got. All right.

So preparation basics, we talked [00:24:00] about teaching, communication, timing. These are all things that can apply to you when you’re preparing for anything, or even if you’re going to go prepare your staff to do something. But here we’re really looking at how can we be. Efficient with the time that we had to prepare people for testimony, meeting them wherever they learn auditorily.

Visually making sure that we’re improving that retention communication wise, using our language correctly, making sure we’re not giving them too much information, thinking about the first thing and the last thing that we’re doing with our clients before They walk in that door to testify and ultimately also taking this timing concept and making sure again, we’re being efficient with the time that we get and repetition and thinking about when we start our really heavy duty content phase of preparation.

After we’ve set that frame, the mindset, the expectations, making sure they know the rules, the deposition before we [00:25:00] move forward. All right. I hope that this episode was helpful. It’s a little longer than normal, but hopefully we gathered everything up there. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me.

I promise I read all my emails. So if you enjoyed the podcast, please rate and review it on your podcast app. If you are able to in your app, just. Do the plus button to follow the podcast so that it automatically uploads, downloads into the application so that other people can find it until next time.

Thank you.

Don’t skip out on measuring the credibility of your witnesses and seeing the power of influence that they have over the decision-makers in your case. And one of the best ways to do that is through witness video clips in a focus group. 

In this episode, we discuss the importance and the usability of witness video clips in a focus group. You can better understand how clients are perceived by outsiders. Focus groups can help you identify areas where clients can improve their credibility and provide insights into how they can present themselves better at deposition or trial.

Let’s dive in and learn how the use of witness video clips is an essential component of witness preparation so you can help make your client more effective. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Witness preparation is key.
• The importance of keeping a clear mind.
• Understanding the value and power of witness testimony.
• Why start using video clips in focus groups.

Subscribe and Review

Have you subscribed to our podcast? We’d love for you to subscribe if you haven’t yet. 

We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us this episode.

I want to talk about the importance and the usability of witness clips. And I know I’ve [00:01:00] talked about this before, and I’ve talked about it with witness preparation, doing a clip, creating a clip with zoom of your client, and then playing the clip and then asking questions about credibility words to describe the person and that is super helpful.

I 100 percent think that is super helpful thing for you to do to help prepare your client to see any things that. Focus group members are saying that maybe you don’t see, but what I really want to talk about today was an example for some focus groups that I’ve been running here recently on a particular case.

And what was so dynamic was, we had a setup again, we’re doing a series of focus groups, and that’s because we want to compare the data. We want to make sure we want to tweak things. And so basically set up this 6 hour in person focus group. We had 12 people, 14 people. [00:02:00] 14 people in our focus groups, and we designed the setup to be the same and we did basically opening statements with PowerPoints that included exhibits.

Right? So, a larger, more in depth opening statements and then we played video clips from several of the main PowerPoints. Layers in the cases. Now we did not do experts. Well, I think experts can be helpful. I think most of the time in my experience. It’s the main players that get biggest scrutiny that also way more as far as evidence goes in the minds and how jurors decide things.

But what was impressive was we’ve had to focus group so far, and we’ve run the exact same clips. And we have 1 focus group that felt strongly about a particular client and then switched up and they had the opposite view in our 2nd focus group and [00:03:00] super helpful to know, but we went back and looked at it and I said, you changed your things in the 1st focus group.

Focus group with our video clips. Our theme was much more about personalized, the personal struggle of this person and a lot of their backgrounds is very personalized theme and approach to the opening statement versus when we ran it again, they did not take that personal approach to it. And it really showed that they did not appreciate some of the things that the first focus group said.

One way he was likable He wasn’t so likable, but I think also what really set that home was hearing some of the comments and we had 14 people and they had said, had made many comments about the video and the story. particular style of this person’s testimony. And so I just asked, how many people were swayed by the video?

How many people changed their [00:04:00] minds? And out of 14 people, we had almost about 50%, seven hands went up and said, by the video alone that changed their minds. Right. So just based on 10 minutes of information compared to opening statements and documents that sealed the deal for them and move them to the opposite side.

So, to me, 1, I think we’ve got a couple of good things. Roll around in here and that would be, don’t hesitate to use video clips and focus groups, especially of the main players and do it more than once. Secondly, witness preparation is key because. There was a clear difference in testimony styles, but then they actually hit one of the witnesses for being a little bit coach, but they said, you got to at least set up straight, but I wouldn’t even set up straight to answer questions.

You’re really going to [00:05:00] get so much good detail out of those video clips. And there’s a lot of power in doing that. Clearly, when we look at all the evidence and all the information that was given to these people, the video swayed them the most, right? So they put a whole lot of credibility, a whole lot of weight into that.

So let’s keep that in mind. And then one of the things too, that I think is super helpful, especially in this situation, which was a fact finding that was very complicated and very above. What anyone in the room had ever experienced as a business situation. I think that’s one good conclusion to draw, which is if your case matter and your back pattern is complicated, and it could be all kinds of things, complicate back patterns.

It could be things are long. It could be that it’s drawn out. It could be that it needs several different layers to understand it. It could be highly technical, scientific, medical, lots of things can complicate it. But just [00:06:00] the value and the power of witness testimony, that’s where a lot of people are going to draw a lot.

Their decision making all that to be said, I think overall super successful focus groups that we ran and we’re able to get to some comparison data, but really knowing, oh, my gosh, the weight and the power of the testimony in these particular cases, but also getting this comparison data. between these two focus groups on again, something super simple.

We did not complicate this. We made 10 minute clips of each person. It wasn’t all one side clips, right? It was down the middle, some good, some bad, but definitely flavors to, so the jury or the participants can see all the sides. And the person and then just followed up with really simple questions on a scale of 1 to 10.

How credible is this person? What are 3 words you’d use to describe them? What’s 1 question you want to ask them? And people are very forthcoming [00:07:00] about it. And then in our discussion, this is again, after they have additional information, right? More information came out more videos. They went back and they talked about that without being prompted.

Right? So 1 of the big things we can always draw is what do they talk about? What do they not talk about? Anyhow, my point of this episode today is you’ve got to start doing some of these focus groups where you’re making clips and it may be just clips of your client. It may be clips of key players and put it in front of the focus group, but it is such a valuable focus group.

It’s so easy to do. I do video clips a hundred percent virtually. It’s easy to do. We did our clips today in person. Don’t skip out on that. At least measuring the credibility of your witnesses and just seeing the power of influence that they have over the decision makers in your case. So, I hope that this was helpful.

Super fresh example. Literally today was 1 of our 2nd focus [00:08:00] groups. We’re probably going to run it again. And again, just they’re tweaking their themes. Obviously, that’s what I saw today was a little bit of a tweak in the themes. Anyhow, a huge encouragement to start doing some of these video clips. Make it simple on yourself.

Nearly all of my focus groups that we are doing that are an extended length of time, meaning two hours or even three hours where we’re going really in depth, um, almost requiring that we do some video clip of some witness so that we can give them a real face and a real sound and a real human to look at and listen to when it comes to testimony in the case.

I hope that this was helpful, short, sweet to the point, I hope as well. So if you enjoy the podcast, please like it, follow it on the Apple podcast platform. Apparently, if you go push the plus button on the new application, the new update that really helps other people be able to find the podcast [00:09:00] as well as review.

So I hope that you found this helpful and until next time, thank you.

When you’re going to get ready for trial, and you’re building your team to help you pick a jury, you don’t actually need a lot of people. Perhaps one to three people would suffice. Building a small group will help things become more structured for you. That being said, you’ve got to pick people that match up with your ideology on picking a jury altogether. Then let them in on what would help you best as a lawyer.

In this episode, I’m sharing my recent experience of helping a fellow lawyer pick a jury. They wanted my perspective as a female trial lawyer so I decided to show up. There were a couple of things that happened on the fly that I’m going to share here, which are things you may want to consider as you’re building your own team for jury selection. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• A strategy that worked well
• Different ways of taking notes
• Things to consider when you’re building a team
• The benefits of taking notes and having notetakers
• Why you want to only build a small group

Subscribe and Review

Have you subscribed to our podcast? We’d love for you to subscribe if you haven’t yet. 

We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.

Episode Transcript:

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. It’s Elizabeth, your host, and I’m so glad you’re tuning into trial lawyer prep, a podcast dedicated to you trial lawyers getting ready.

It’s just me solo today. We’ve had lots of wonderful guests, but I wanted to jump on solo and talk about a recent [00:01:00] experience that I had helping a fellow lawyer pick a jury. A couple things happened. I thought, you know, this might be a worthy topic. A couple of things that happened on the fly, I was asked by a friend of mine to come help pick a jury and it’s going to be in what we have in Texas, a county court.

So we don’t have 12 jurors there. We just have six. So the panel itself is a little bit smaller. And so I was asked, Hey, can you please come? I’d like to have your perspective also as a female trial lawyer, your perspective in that sense. So I said, of course, here I come. So load up, and we had gotten some of the jury information before, all that kind of stuff.

So I show up, and there’s several folks. We had about six to eight people who showed up. Imagine a courtroom, which is a lovely courtroom. We have a new courthouse here in Austin, so always gotta mention that. And again, it’s a smaller panel. So I think we had a total of maybe 36 people panel. So 36 people panel.

We [00:02:00] have all the lawyers who are assisting her in the jury box. And there’s again, there’s eight of us and then there’s plaintiff’s lawyer, defense lawyer and clients. And that’s really it. It was a lot of people. And I would say in my vote, too many people for a couple of reasons. One is. That’s a lot of people who have a lot of opinions who might all not line up with what you need as the actual lawyer picking the jury.

So maybe just too many people to listen to. Also like I said, it might be just too many different ideas. Like people have different ideas about, Hey, this is what I’ve been taught and Oh, here’s what I’ve been taught. So again, lots of different ideas about how to do your job. And there’s just not a lot of time.

The judge should give us about 15, 20 minutes to kind of get together. And also what I found was a little bit maybe discombobulating is we’re there to help her pick a jury, but we don’t really know the order for questions. We didn’t even really know what [00:03:00] questions she was going to ask. Now I kind of knew because I’ve worked with this person before, so I knew the flow of where she was going.

But ultimately I just. Um, on the fly, just like the potential jurors hearing things for the first time in my gut, I’m thinking, Oh, well, is that a cause or is that a strike? Did she get it all the way or did she not? What are we listening for? I knew very little about the case as well. So when we get back, again, we’re just trying to toss all this stuff around.

I took notes a certain way. Other people took notes a different way. It is helpful to have extra people again to hear the things you didn’t hear. And we’ll talk about how many people I think is probably most helpful. But also something else that really stuck out that, I know was a strategy that worked and let me tell you why.

So the defense lawyer got up and said, geez. It’s a lot of lawyers to pay, just let alone me over here. Now, we already knew this guy, this defense lawyer scheme, we knew that [00:04:00] that was going to happen, or I knew to an extent it would, even if she just had one person helping her. But he kind of the way that he said it, it kind of worked.

And a juror actually stood up, potential juror stood up and said, I feel bad for you. Like, that’s a whole lot of people to pay and gosh, that was kind of like, wait, what? Whoa, hold on here. And I can’t. The judge had said, even the plaintiff’s lawyer had said, these are people from the plaintiff’s bar who are here to listen and to learn.

Of course, that went right out the window, but it just kind of like, oh man, he actually struck a chord. And if there’s one person who’s saying that, there’s going to be several people thinking the exact same thing. And people didn’t raise their hand, but it was not a very talking panel. So. Long story short, it was kind of a little bit of a discombobulation for her hearing all that and then us knowing that we’ve got to pick some people.

What I would suggest and I think that ultimately the panel that came that shook out that she got There were a [00:05:00] lot of things that just were really out of control out of her control out of our control And there were definitely good things that helped her get her some people struck For cause from the jury panel because we were there helping but what struck me was I’m sitting there next to another lawyer And he said well, I’m really curious.

Like how do you take notes? And do you have a system? And I said, I don’t really have a super clear system. I try to make it really simple and it really is simple. It’s a frowny face. If people are making a frowny face, like literally frowny face. I don’t really want to complicate it. I’ve seen people who have lots of different colors, like some big giant notepads.

That’s cool. What I found super helpful, and when I’ve worked with this lawyer before, what she found super helpful was getting down the words that people are using and saying that can get them struck for cause. That’s negative, right? There’s positive things too. Again, there’s my smiley face. But I don’t really have a [00:06:00] super complicated method for writing or taking notes.

What it really made me think about was what would really help people and what I think would have helped. And again, my suggestion is going to be when you do think about going to trial and you’re building your team. Thinking about how many people you would like to get on a perspective point of view for helping you.

But also having somebody in your corner that knows the flow of what you’re asking. And knows that, hey, this question right here, that’s to try to find those rats. And this question over here is really to find information. Who are some people that we want? Who are people who told really positive stories?

And If you know the flow, you obviously can keep the space on your page or your notepad ready for that. Because what I have found is judges want to hear, well, what did they say? You’re [00:07:00] up there doing your deal. You’re just trying to get people to open up. You’re doing the deal. You don’t necessarily remember, oh, that person said exactly this.

And you really don’t want to take notes. So that’s what your helpers are there for, is to take those notes with those things. Well, this is what they said, judge. Oh yeah, that’s right, they did say that. And generally it jogs their memory. Although, most judges will take notes as well, but my suggestion is you’ve got to find somebody who knows the flow of your questions.

Knows that you’re looking on this question to find people to write down those exact words now I understand we’re not perfect transcriptionists. So most the time it’s just oh, no that person said ABC Just a couple of words or these people raise their hands a lot of times what happened was she’d say, okay Now this question if you’ll just raise your hand for me And we’d take down people’s numbers and that was helpful to kind of group people together, but there were so many of us, right?

There’s eight people all helping. And that was the next thing that I had was [00:08:00] you really kind of want to build a pretty small group, right? You want to one, let your group in. If you’ve got one to two people, that may be enough. These are people that one, you trust, you want their perspective. They kind of have the same ideology on building The jury that you want.

So you want to make sure they kind of line up with all those things and you’re teaching them enough to know like, Hey, here’s where I’m going. Hey, this is the thing that helps me the most. And that’s just going to be a communication thing. But once you have a little bit of smaller group, you guys have a little bit of flow.

Meaning you know where the questions are going and what the purposes are so you can write down what’s needed. And then when you get back there to have that discussion about who do you want and who do you don’t want and what they say, it’s much more structured. Some of the best ways that I’ve seen it done when you have 15 to 20 minutes, sometimes you have less, is basically you run through your list of people who are like, here’s the strikes, here’s this, here’s what these people said.

Here’s my worry, [00:09:00] here’s the worry person I have, and the next person goes, and the next person goes, and then having done that because you’ve got a small group of people, you’ve really got a good amount of knowledge to help pick the people that you want and you don’t want. Because again, if you’re up there doing it, you have a hard time saying, Seeing everything else.

You have a hard time retaining everything. And that’s why you’ve got one to two people to help. Take those notes, record those things, find that body language, the frowning, the squirming. And again I know that 100 percent body language is not going to give us any help. It’s hard to predict what people are doing or not doing but sometimes people are pretty clear in jury selection like they don’t want to be there and They say things and then they match it with their body language.

Let me give you examples. So there was a juror who pretty much every question that she was trying to find the people who would not be fair to either But either party and this guy every time hands shot up every single time. I mean, he just, for sure, won it [00:10:00] off this jury. And then the body language matched right up with that.

And other people have body language that you can’t really tell. You’re not really sure they’re frowning. But we’re not really sure what that means. It’s mostly when people are pairing it together. For example, the guy who wanted to stand up to speak to say, I do have sympathy and I think that there’s too many lawyers over there.

All those lawyers getting paid. That seems like a waste. No, that’s a, that body standing up to tell me that. So again, some of these things are little notes, but. It’s easier to have somebody else taking those little notes for you while you are being present with the jury, asking questions, nodding along and giving your attention.

That’s really where you want to be when you are asking questions of the jury for jury selection. All right, so let me do a quick recap. When you’re going to get ready for trial and you’re building your team to help you pick a jury, you don’t need a lot of people, right? We need to have one, two people.

[00:11:00] Whatever those two people are, maybe three people, and let them in a little bit on the flow of where you’re going. Let them also in on what helps you best, meaning some people have really bad memories, so you writing down those specific words to help them go back and talk to the judge, that’s what they want.

Other people have great memories. But because they have a great memory, they may not be able to see everything else in the courtroom. And so they really want you to be eyes and ears around them while they remember those things. And that may also just come down to, hey, what’s your feel? When you heard that, what was your feel?

Mine was good. Was yours bad? Right? So sometimes we just go, hey, you may have felt that way. Here’s what I took that as. But you want to pick somebody again that kind of matches up with your ideology on picking a jury all together. So you want to pick a small team. But pick a team that lines up with your, your fault, your style.

And then also you want to let them in on kind of the flow so they know about [00:12:00] where you’re going and then what helps you best as a lawyer and as somebody who’s gonna maybe get up and argue those strikes or ask the judge for something specific. I hope that was helpful. I don’t have any real advice on note taking.

I think it really comes down to the person. If you like having a giant notepad and Like taking things down, having out like that’s great. That may work for you visually. I have a pretty good working memory. So for me, having just those little symbols sometimes helps enough. And then sometimes having just those key words that people say is enough for me.

Then again, I think also sometimes it comes down to, well, how much time do you have for jury selection? Some people end up getting days. Now, you’re really going to want some copious note takers. Some people get 30 minutes, right? And that’s. It’s very short amount of time. Do you really need eight people to help you?

Probably not. You’re probably good with just one person. So that also something to keep in mind, how much time you have. I hope [00:13:00] that this was helpful. I hope you think about a few of these things when you’re game planning, getting ready for jury selection to build a good system around you and with your peers to help you pick a jury.

All right. Until next time. Thank you.

None of us are smart enough for our audience to even remember anything we’ve ever said. They’re not going to remember anything, but they will remember how we made them feel. Hence, having that sixth sense is what separates great attorneys from the not-so-great.

While you’ll never be able to figure jurors out, you can always at least get a better idea of what is going right and what is going wrong in the cases you’re handling. If you’re interviewing and you want to have a positive result in anything, you should have some background or understanding of that audience. 

In today’s discussion, I’m joined by Lucas Foust to talk all about focus groups, the different focus groups they’re using, and how using them has become a valuable resource.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Their process of running focus groups
• The value of figuring out your hits
• The power of using videos in focus groups
• The benefits of running virtual focus groups
• The impact of using checklists
• Valuable time vs. busy work

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Supporting Resources:

Lucas Foust

Lfoust@foustlaw.net 

Website: https://www.lucasfoustlaw.com/

www.rev.com

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their businesses and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hi there. Elizabeth here. Just want to pop in real quick before this episode gets started to give you a quick introduction for our guest, Lucas Faust.

Lucas and I met several years ago when I was working with Mr. Keenan, when we were doing a lot of reptile seminars. And you will hear us talk a lot about Mr. [00:01:00] Keenan and his method of doing focus groups. Lucas practices out of Bozeman, Montana. He’s done personal injury pretty much his whole entire career.

And a fun fact about Lucas is he is a referee for basketball games. So he knows how to call both ways. So I hope that you enjoy this episode. If you want to reach out to Lucas for any reason, or if you have something in Bozeman, Montana, his contact will be in the show notes. Please enjoy. Hello, and welcome back to the podcast.

I’m your host, Elizabeth. And for this episode, we have a treat coming all the way from Montana. Lucas Faust is joining us today. And we are going to talk about focus groups and a little bit of things that Lucas and I do together. So hello and welcome to the podcast. 

Lucas Faust: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure.

This is great. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. Well, I wanted you to come on the podcast because I know that you love focus groups and you do them a [00:02:00] bunch and you even started your own focus group company kind of like I did. So walk us through, tell us about how you got started and what really piqued your interest in doing more.

Lucas Faust: Well, really the big thing was, I remember an attorney one time explained to me that You will never figure jurors out. You’ll never figure people out. And I kind of took that on as a challenge saying, I think I probably can, or at least get a better idea of what is going right and what is going wrong in the cases I’m handling.

And that started the process of getting introduced to Don Keenan and the pioneering work he did on focus groups has, you know, Constantly evolving and we’re always learning more as this process goes. But I started off running a few focus groups and my wife, Heather, and I started a organization called, or a business we called Seventh Amendment Productions, named after the Seventh Amendment of the U S Constitution.

And it does a couple of things, having a separate business entity from my law firm. I had to find [00:03:00] a way to literally pay people. And that sounds like a silly thing, but if you’re going to pay folks for their time, you can either do it with cash or you can do it with checks. And I didn’t really want to send checks out in the community from my law firm’s operating account.

It just seemed like a much easier way to do it. I could charge the business, could, Cut its own checks, 7th Amendment productions. Those are essentially consulting folks. And we started the process of having our own little business. And really over time, what Heather was able to do, she became very adept at gathering people, finding out where regular folks frequent.

And we started off, Heather started off by just finding folks on Facebook. She entered every. Garage sales site. You could imagine every small town that there is out there and found really just regular people who would. look and sound a lot like a potential jury. And we started from there and she built her bank of people up from there.[00:04:00] 

Elizabeth Larrick: And so what do you use them for? Cause I know there’s people in the audience who sometimes we use them for getting ready for trials or maybe just for mediation. So walk us through what you use them for. 

Lucas Faust: I have a system for the focus groups and for focus groups and how we use them. I will not file a lawsuit until I’ve done at least one and usually two focus groups.

That’s a rule in our office, unless there’s a statute of limitation issue or something and that’s the exception of the rule. But as a rule, I don’t even want to take that case if it’s that late in the process. If it’s two and a half years out, we have a three year statute of limitation in Montana, I’m not going to get involved usually.

But with that very slim exception, we will run a first initial, what we call a narrative style focus group. And what I’ve done over the years and in large part, thanks to Mr. Keenan, his law firm that I’ve worked with on several occasions, we have basically a set standard of questions that we ask in our First Narrative Focus Group.

And those questions are consistent. The reason that they’re consistent is because I can compare [00:05:00] One batch of focus groups to another batch to another batch. And if you’re asking the same questions, you can compare what type of person is going to be more receptive to your case, to your situation or circumstance.

And over the years, I do a lot of construction site litigation where people are seriously injured on a construction site. And because of the type of case that we have, we found people who are excellent demographics for that type of case. You want construction workers. You do not want their spouse. Okay.

Their wives are terrible, terrible jurors because their husband would never get hit by a concrete boom. That would just never happen because he’s Jason frigging Bourne. He’s Jason Bourne. And he would have done a backflip somersault to avoid the situation. Usually the injuries are real serious and they cannot imagine or picture their husband getting hurt like that.

And I can’t blame him. That’s just a natural survival instinct. But you learn. Yeah. Yeah. What types of demographics kind of fit? So we’ll start a case off. We’ll do a narrative style focus group. I’ll do that [00:06:00] sometimes to decide whether or not I’m interested in taking the case. You can get a lot of feedback.

One of the first things we look for is the Keenan Law Firm calls negative attribution. So you have people who will blame your client for their unfortunate circumstance. And ironically, we found that the more seriously someone’s injured, The more likely they are to blame the person for their own injuries.

It’s kind of a defense mechanism we have as human beings. Setting all that aside, one of the things that happens is you develop a basket of information you develop from people. So there’s some generalities, but nothing beats trying your focus group out because your focus group members change over time, et cetera.

But we start with a narrative style focus group. I may run two or three of those. That’s the first group we do that gives us a pretty good idea of just generally where folks are standing right now and we asked the focus group members to assign responsibility, who’s responsible for it. We asked them what their gut check is, what else they would want to know, why they decided the way they decided regarding that.

And it’s impressive how [00:07:00] typically I run a case in about 30 minutes. That’s all the time it needs to get our narrative style focus group. So when we go to the trouble of putting a focus group together, we’ll sometimes run three, four, and even five cases. To one group. So, that’s the typical first step we take.

And then there are any number of types of focus groups. You can let your imagination run wild with them. But the biggest thing is this I’ve discovered over time how surprised I usually am with focus groups. They come back with answers like, Whoa, where’d that come from? And the biggest thing about focus groups that I’ve taken from this process is Somewhere along the line, during my legal education, all of the common sense between my ears was completely sucked out and replaced with a process of looking at a case that is wholly and completely different than the general public.

So, I’ll have friends ask me, what do you think about this, let’s say, hot in the news right now is the Donald Trump indictment. They’ll ask me about that. And my common response is, [00:08:00] Understand that some lawyers put that together. What’s more important is what do you all think? Because there’s a real disconnect and that’s really why these are so necessary.

Ultimately, if you’re interviewing for a job, you should know about the company. If you’re interviewing and you want to have a positive result in anything, you should have some background or understanding about that audience. You don’t know what you don’t know. So you just have to simply ask folks and you’ll get Feedback.

That’s what we found. So, 

Elizabeth Larrick: yeah. I also, one of the things that you said that always strikes me when I do focus groups and working with lawyers is they always say, wow, we just, we learned so much and I’m like, absolutely. And the other thing is I always tell them, and what assumptions did you hear? you didn’t say anything a assume they’re like, oh, So, you know, it’s the ho maybe know were there or they just create things i you just never would have I have 

Lucas Faust: learned over time In the way of their [00:09:00] cases, more than anything else, if you have a very good case and you know you have a good case and you know that the facts are shaped up in a way that’s going to make your audience upset, the surefire way to make your case a good case, turn it into a terrible case is to get in the way of the damn thing and tell people what they should think.

One of the things I was fortunate enough to attend Jerry Spence’s Trial Lawyer College in 2015, I took a few things away from there. One of the things I took away is this, none of us are smart enough for our audience to ever remember anything we’ve ever said. They’re not going to remember anything. They will remember how we made them feel.

And that’s a completely different part of the brain that this is used. And that’s the disconnect that we have. We are so smart. We think we’re so brilliant as attorneys. It’s not the case. Okay. The attorneys who are really good have a sixth sense of what is going to make people feel a particular way That’s what I found over time I have to do it with focus groups because I don’t [00:10:00] have the same gene that Jerry Spence does to Be an amazing trial lawyer, or maybe Mr.

Keenan or whoever the trial lawyer might be, but there is a way to find that. There’s a, well, there’s a way. And those are their focus groups get you there. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I think overall as a profession, we are intellectual workers, we are knowledge workers. That’s what we were paid to do. That’s what we are, like you said, trained and that’s what we look for.

And then we start working and that’s what our brain molds to. And those are our habits. And so going back to that emotional. Thing the 14 inches from here to here from brain to heart, right? Sometimes really hard to do, but sometimes it’s so easy to make those quick emotional decisions. And that’s what jurors do.

And we’re just blown away. Like I just spent four years working and putting this together and they just dumped it in a heartbeat. And it’s like, yeah, and you would rather be dumped in a focus group any day than at the courthouse. 

Lucas Faust: And you’d rather be dumped in the first two weeks of the case that you’re thinking of taking on than you [00:11:00] would in two and a half years later after all the time and energy and money that you’ve ever spent.

And you’ve, one of the things about it, I see attorneys all the time say, gee, I’ve got this great, brilliant expert. He or she is so smart. Oh man, they’re so great. The only expert you really need to know and really be familiar with is your focus group, your audience. What is the general public going to say about that case?

Because chances are They’re never going to remember anything about anything that the expert says. They’re not going to remember it. They’ll go back and they’ll tell you how they feel and until you know how they feel, you’re kind of at a loss. So we start early. We do them often. There are a lot of things that are really convenient about doing multiple focus groups at one shot.

You go through all, it keeps the cost weight significantly down and you’re able to save on that. And that’s, to me, it’s an invaluable process. It’s something that we absolutely do every time and don’t wait. That’s the key. Have it set in your checklist of stuff you do before you file suit. Get a couple of those in for [00:12:00] sure.

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. So talk a little bit about once you file, because sometimes I’ve talked about in this podcast and with other people, sometimes people want to do one after they have some depo transcripts or some videos to do the players, folks, group players, some people I find love to do it like right before the depo, they’ve gotten some written discovery, but they really want to know what would a juror want to hear, from this corporate rep or from this supervisor or this driver.

So tell us a little about what other places that you like to do a focus group. 

Lucas Faust: No, absolutely. We’ll do them. Everything you listed is something that we consider before a 30B6 type witness, that type of stuff. Usually you found most of the stuff. If you do a narrative self focus group before you file, you found that out.

But if you have filed, it’s not the end of the world. Just stop what you’re doing and really think about going in the right direction because A couple of things that happened. I take my discovery. I take my focus group information and I’ll turn them into discovery requests. [00:13:00] There are things that they want to know documents that I never thought of that are important to my potential audience that never occurred to me as important.

I’ll use them for that. I will use them. Boy, I will use them after a deposition. And there’s a whole process. I’m at the Kenan Trial Institute now. I teach hit lists at the program. And one of the things we’re doing now is in our hit list, the program that we’re doing is you ask folks whether you got the point across that you were hoping to get.

You’re able to take video clips, figure out, make sure to see if you got the hit, see if it made sense. And. That is one of the things that is amazing to me is just how high the bar is. They expect us to be Jerry Spence and it’s like, holy cow, really? I mean, I’m doing a heck of a lot better than 90 percent of the guys that people that I’m out there with, but you, they really have a high expectation of being able to really pin that person down or do it properly.

So figuring out your hits, whether you get them or not. On the back end of this process is absolutely invaluable. [00:14:00] Then when you do your cross examination at trial, it just is, it falls right into place. You’re going to either get it, not get it, whatever that might be. You have the video clip to back it up, all that stuff.

I no longer take a deposition without a video. I mean, I can’t imagine doing that anymore because. That’s so useful for focus groups. If for no other reason you take the clips, see if you got them, that type of stuff. As the case moves forward and down the line, we do safety focus groups. We’ll do a focus group asking folks, Hey, how could this have been made safer?

How should it have been made safer? Those are the types of literally we’ll spend 20, 30 minutes just talking about that and they’ll come up, these folks, they’ll come up with some, every time I’m impressed with what their thoughts are. 

Elizabeth Larrick: So 

Lucas Faust: I use them there. I’ve had people approach us asking about. whether they should claim a certain particular type of damage and I had a guy ask me, he said, I’ve got a client who was injured.

She got shot in the leg. Okay. Bad injury. It has impacted [00:15:00] her work in the adult entertainment industry. Should I bring that as a damage? So great question. And I was like, I don’t, man, I’m telling you, I think this is not a good idea. This are going to really nail her. The seven focus group members we had virtually to a person said, Oh yeah, no problem.

The most adamant of this, I’m sorry, I was nine, the most adamant of the nine people. was the Christian bookstore owner. As long as it was not illegal, he did not care because his point of view was different than I thought it would be. His point of view was not self righteous. His point of view was a lot of countries, I couldn’t do what I do.

I appreciate that. So he was a hundred percent on, Hey, it’s not illegal. Knock yourself out. Right. So I thought that was fascinating. So I was, again, they always surprise you that you never, you’ll get interesting questions and I was chastising the guy and I was embarrassed afterwards saying I could not have [00:16:00] been more wrong about this.

Elizabeth Larrick: And sometimes that’s the fun part is to say, you know what, I was wrong, but thank goodness we actually asked some folks who would have to answer the question. So, well, you mentioned virtual and I know that you’ve been doing focus groups before the pandemic and we had the switch. So tell me a little bit, are you going back in person at this point?

Are you sticking with the virtual? Walk me through that. 

Lucas Faust: Well, with the exception of getting ready for a trial or doing preparing for a voir dire, which is kind of an interpersonal situation, I really encourage people to practice their Regular folks and see how the flow goes. It’s critical. We’ve been doing them virtually almost exclusively and what we found are a couple of things.

First, folks really like the convenience. They’re able to get home from work. They watch it. They show up more often. People don’t bail. There’s nothing that physically gets in the way. They’re already home. They don’t cancel on you. And when we were doing them live, we would get 15 people and hope 10 would [00:17:00] show up.

That’s kind of where we were. Now we get 12 people expecting at least 10 will show up and it’s convenient. I will say this. This is, I have found this as well. People actually pay more attention. It seems crazy, but we all, we have been, since we were little kids, just. Hunker down in front of a television. So we actually pay more attention to a screen than we do to the other in a room where there are other distractions.

So that’s the virtual, I’ve found people to be more attentive because there are many more distractions in a room that you don’t think of, like clock or the look at what the person’s wearing over here. I mean, that type of stuff, it doesn’t happen on a, on a screen. Also, they know you’re looking at them.

They know that you can see them. They know that if they doze off or whatever. You can see them. That’s their faces right there at one time. 

Elizabeth Larrick: I also love this aspect of it, which is I use Zoom and I think you use Zoom as well. Zoom has really upgraded many, many, many times since the pandemic started. And now, [00:18:00] which they always had like the gallery view.

What I love is. If you’re doing something long, like you’re doing an opening statement. And when I say long, like that means you’re having to talk to these people for 10, sometimes 20 minutes, right? It’s great. Cause you know, when they stop paying attention, because the screen is so close, you can literally see.

And if you’ve done any virtual, when someone has turned on a TV because the flash of the light or when their eyes are down or what, so it’s like, Oh, that part got really boring or you need to do some, you know what I mean? Like, so it. It’s helpful, even in those senses of when we’re looking at the content piece, but also like, okay, you lost them.

Like what happened in that moment? Because everybody went somewhere else because when you’re in person, it’s really hard to get that close up. Our cameras are good, but sometimes I feel like having that camera right there virtually, you really get to see that reaction. 

Lucas Faust: And the chat section is invaluable.

That chat bar is something that Everybody, no problems with it. They’re [00:19:00] brutally honest, especially, I mean, you can set the chat bar up. So other people don’t see what they have to say. And they know if the other folks are seeing it, these are really what that’s really what they’re thinking. It’s kind of automatic.

And exactly like you said, you can see when you lose them, they’ll tell, they’ll tell you, they’ll be brutally honest about. that part of the process. So it’s a little more challenging when you run a focus group for your opening statement. You don’t want to run your own focus group for your own opening statement.

We do those very early on. If I have any chance at all, I have my, I will run a focus group for my opening statement before I file suit. That is a rule in our office. We have two focus groups. We do a narrative, at least one narrative, and then at least one opening statement, and your opening statement’s ready to go.

And that may sound crazy, like, oh my gosh, how could you do that? Well, you know your case already. You know kind of what you want to say already, and how it’s set up, and if there’s no reason you shouldn’t be ready to do an opening statement. Some things will change. They won’t be exactly the same. You’ll have new facts pop up.

Good, bad, ugly, but you have a pretty good idea where it’s going to go. [00:20:00] Or you shouldn’t be filing suit. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Well, and I would say, let’s give a little background here, Lucas. And that would be, one, having known you for many moons now, like, your practice itself, to me, just again, as an outsider, like, has really significantly changed because you’ve, I’ve seen you take less cases, but also, like, Again, we’ve all learned from Don Keenan, the checklist of all these things to do, the investigations, the interviews that we do before filing suit that so many lawyers, because we’re bogged down with so many cases, can’t do that.

So I think to fill people in like, You do a whole heck of a lot of work before getting to that filing point, just in the file research and investigation and experts and making sure pieces are in place before filing. And if there’s other stuff that I’m missing too, that you guys do, but that’s definitely one of the things I would say, as far as a little bit of background that I think really helps people know, and you tell them, [00:21:00] like, has that been a good thing for your practice?

Lucas Faust: I went from a caseload of over 30. I have eight cases now, and on a high it’ll get to 10. My wife is my paralegal and there’s a very simple rule in our office. When we get to 11, she will walk upstairs and she will ask me, who are we gonna fire today? Because at 11 you’re a jerk. And at 10. You’re okay to deal with.

8 is better. 10’s okay. 11, you’re done. There’s a saturation point. But I will say this, one of the things that learning all this stuff that I went out really worked hard with the Kenan Trial Institute and took all the colleges, really worked my tail off, my income’s tripled. I mean, it just does. You take fewer cases, you’re more selective.

And maybe it’s just one of the things is this, I have a kind of a set parameters for cases that I take. If you’re a large law firm and you have 30, 40 lawyers, You’re going to take the automobile crash cases that are 20, 30, 000. I can never handle those. Or you’re handling workers compensation cases in a large volume.

Your business [00:22:00] model needs to, if it doesn’t fit this, it doesn’t make any sense to you. But for what I do, I’m a solo practitioner. I have a set number of cases. When I get a case and I have set it up like this, I am ready to try the case. When I file suit, I can try it within 60 days. Period. I’ve got my experts.

Everything’s done. I have 24 things that I have to finish before I file suit. And if you’re disciplined and do that without, even though you don’t want to do it, I mean, you don’t want to do your case selection criteria memo. Just do it. Just get it done. If you’re disciplined and you don’t want to do your hit lists.

Where’s my hit list? But if you’re disciplined enough to do it, it will absolutely, a little stress now will save you a ton of stress in the future. I’ve gone from 30 cases down to about 8 to 10. And cases that I thought would, well, the first case I had with Misha Keenan’s firm, I thought it would be maybe valued at 3 million bucks.

That’d be great. It’d be a great resolution. We settled for 8. And that happens just because of the way I work the case up. 100%. [00:23:00] So you’ll spend more time, but it is per case. It is more valuable to do that. We have a whole process we go through. It’s maybe more relaxed. I’m not stressed out. I’m not putting out 35 fires all the time.

I’m more selective with my clients. I have a tighter relationship with them. Even kind of the weird guys I hang out with, I know their families really well. And, uh, yeah, so it’s been career changing, cutting down. Less is absolutely more. You make more money. You can learn to say no. One of the things I’ve done is this.

I say no so much now that I actually, I have a guide for people. So if the case is worth under a hundred thousand bucks, I literally tell folks, you don’t need a lawyer. The carrier is not going to treat you any differently. So if you’re going to get a lawyer, I mean, seriously here, just there, you can figure a lot of this stuff out yourself.

Here’s a guide. I’m going to send you a guide, figure this out yourself. You don’t need me charging a third of that. And I get more people that comment and are thankful for that, that you can imagine. So they’ll maybe get a 50, 000 car [00:24:00] crash settlement and they didn’t have to pay anybody anything. 

Elizabeth Larrick: So, because.

Lucas Faust: It’s laid out in the guide. So 

Elizabeth Larrick: I appreciate you pointing that out too, that like, there are people who the business model is just set up differently. And, but I think most of the people that are in the audience are like you and I solos or have a medium sized firm with just a few lawyers. But one thing that you said that just want to repeat, which is that there’s maybe more time on each case, but the value it’s valuable time.

It’s not just busy work. And I think sometimes as lawyers, we can get caught up in the busy work, especially if you’re a solo or have one partner, because we have so much to do in the business and on the business. So it’s easy to get caught up with that, but having that valuable work that you’re doing.

And sometimes, like you said, you just get it done and it’s done. You don’t have to do it again. You just get to go back and look at it and be like, Oh, that’s right. Okay. Now write the 

Lucas Faust: memo. If you don’t want to sit down for an extra 30 minutes, but write the stupid [00:25:00] memo, it stays in your file. You will forget it.

I guarantee you, you will forget it. The other thing I’ve done is this too. I work with people who are smarter than me and better organized, which is a really low bar for me, but the people that are smarter at, I have an appellate counsel that I go to. And that gets the case out of the left side of my brain completely.

So if there’s an appellate issue on a substantial claim, I just send Jonathan in, Jonathan, here you go. This is what the deal is. Answer this, reducing my caseload and then getting help in that area has been a tremendous, I mean, I could do it. I was a law clerk. I think the judge, I mean, I was a law clerk at the state Supreme court.

So I know, I know how to pellet stuff goes. I just don’t like it and I’m just not, when you don’t like it, you’re just not as good at it. Yeah. And that’s been me. So fine. I understand. Well, you will always excel at what you like to do. It makes it so much easier. And that’s what I’ve learned over the last five, six years really has been changed things for me.

So. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, absolutely. And we talked a little bit about this earlier [00:26:00] about why you set up and that was the, your own focus group coming just to keep things separate. Right. Absolutely. And that’s taken off. I mean, that has, it’s made its own world now. So tell us a little about that. And I just want to make a little comment here to put a little pressure here on Heather.

We’re going to have her on the podcast so she can come talk to us about it. 

Lucas Faust: She’ll be voluntold that she’s going to be on the podcast. There we go. So the business, you’ll all get to hear an opportunity to hear about Heather’s business from her, what she does, kind of the nuts and bolts of it. And I would encourage you to have your paralegal or whoever your support person is to, to come Manage this and listen, Heather set up the business and she actually is hired all the time by other law firms.

And when I say all the time, it hardly a month goes by where we don’t have a two or three law firms. And this is in Montana with a very small population, just in Montana that are asking Heather to run a focus group. And I’ve learned to let them go and do their thing because it is what it is. It’s very bizarre sometimes what they think they need to get, but let them [00:27:00] go, but you have different processes for it.

So she’ll either set the group up, let you do it. She’ll set it up, run it herself. She’ll set it up and then have me handle the focus group. There’s different packages that she has. But that alone has been a business model for Heather. It’s not a tremendous amount, but it’s worthwhile. It’s worth doing. And it’s been extra income for her and she hasn’t, you know, She can just tell me, um, she reminded me, maybe she does better than me in a month.

There you go. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Well, and I think half the battle is the system and the system takes time to set up and work the kinks out. And I think that’s where a lot of times, cause we talk about on the podcast, like I have lots of DIY stuff, but sometimes it’s like. That is a whole like other thing to set up and I’m sure as you’ve experienced, you can do it a different way.

You can group it together. If you have bad participants or you have a group that is just full of people who aren’t from the U S which has been [00:28:00] happening or people who they just got off their last focus group and they’re just going to tell you whatever the next person said. Oh yeah, I agree with that.

Like, oh yeah, people don’t actually tell you anything. They just are there to collect the dollars. It is so helpful to have that system to kind of avoid those pitfalls. The 

Lucas Faust: nice thing for when you’ve built a bank that Heather has, Heather has, I think, a seven or 800 percent bank when you have in different communities, I don’t care where the focus group members come from personally, I mean, I just don’t there as an occasion, if there’s an issue in.

I’m bringing a claim against the Yellowstone Club. So I’d like to know what folks in Gallatin County think about the Yellowstone Club folks. If it’s that specific, yeah, maybe I want to get some, but otherwise it doesn’t matter where they come from. I don’t care so much, but I’m more concerned about demographics, like ages and work, how they’re going to interpret the information they take in.

On a construction site case, but Heather keeps track of those folks. And she has somebody that becomes a crummy focus group. And there’s no good call back. Just takes them off the list. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. 

Lucas Faust: And they don’t, they don’t come back. 

Elizabeth Larrick: We call it the no list, 

Lucas Faust: [00:29:00] no list. And what’s interesting, we still save our, it’s kind of falling out of fashion with the Keenan law firm, but.

We still save our shit happens, superstars, the people who you never can convince it. We have a repository of them. And at the end of the case, if I get to where I can convince those folks, then we’re going somewhere. So we know people are really good, tough focus group members. And that’s so, so we keep track of it.

Oh yeah, that’s hurt. He’s going to be terrible. We know that from the get go. 

Elizabeth Larrick: I mean, 

Lucas Faust: not on my case, somebody else’s, Oh, he’s going to be bad. This’ll be good. Cause he’ll be bad. Yes. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. Well, is there any, we’ve kind of covered the gamut. Is there anything recently when I mean recently past year where you were in a focus group and you’re just like, wow, that really helps me do this in the case or this really.

So do you have an example that maybe we could walk through? 

Lucas Faust: Well, we have an example. I have a client who sustained a traumatic brain injury and he and his wife, they didn’t just, you know, whoops, have a baby. They [00:30:00] actually went ahead and did in vitro fertilization after the brain injury to get her pregnant.

So she’d get pregnant. And so they went through this whole gamut of I mean, IVF and all this other stuff, which If your family’s been through it, my family’s been through, it’s tough, it’s challenging by itself. After that, we were concerned that folks would hold it against him. And my gut was, they’re going to hold it against this client of mine for he and his wife going out and having IVF.

Well, that was part of a focus group that we ran that part of one of four focus groups we ran that day, but just the facts alone to a person again, they surprised us to a person. They were like, no, that’s great. That is part of being a human being. He should not lose that aspect. And then he may have challenges, but this will probably help him.

It’ll probably be good for him, which blew me away. I thought they would say, how stupid are they? How reckless are they? I mean, he’s not going to be able to take care of them. [00:31:00] It was the opposite. They absolutely should be able to have a child and they’re not going to hold it against them. So that actually made me relax about that development.

I never said a cross word about that to my client. You have to know your lane sometimes. I mean, really on that deal, Hey, that’s a life decision that they had to make. And they took it. Congratulations. They have a baby now. And we, one of the things that happens when you have fewer clients, you get a closer relationship with them.

I mean, we Heather babysits the baby. Now you get a lot tighter with people and that’s been a positive thing for us, but that didn’t save us. That definitely eased my mind. As far as a specific question is concerned. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. What I also love about when you kind of go in with the like, ah, you know, I think this is not going to turn out well.

And then it does the opposite. What I also love is like, they’re giving you all the language and the ways to talk about it later on down the road when it’s like, cause you know, an adjuster is going to be like, Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to throw that all over the place. And you’re like, well, just parent [00:32:00] back what those focus groupers are saying, because, Hey, they say it best.

You’re just repeating it. 

Lucas Faust: Absolutely. And my best, I mean, As lawyers, we speak our own language. It’s really important that you ground yourself in what regular people, how they communicate. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I just had that yesterday where we ran one and it wasn’t like total shocking, but it was just the way they talked about it was like, Oh, this is how we talk about it because it was just kind of like, how do we say this?

It’s very difficult, touchy topic. They nailed it. And it was just like, okay. So sometimes that’s why I would say like with focus groups, I’m like, Listen and go back and read through. I mean, I love getting the transcripts because then you can really say like, how did they really talk about that? I know they were on my side, but how did they describe it?

It was just like, aha, here’s the words they use. Here are the phrases that were so helpful. 

Lucas Faust: And I really encourage people to, we use Rev. com. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Me 

Lucas Faust: too. Buck a minute [00:33:00] and you can do an hour long. I mean, can you imagine, I can’t imagine transcribing that for any amount of money, let alone 60 for a full hour of transcript time.

And you can do your focus group for 60 bucks an hour. It’s hugely helpful. There’s a process when I do the focus group, then I’ll read the transcript and then I’ll watch the focus group. Eventually, I kind of pounded into my head what is important for these people, for your audience. And if I skipped any of those steps, I’m doing myself a disservice.

If I’ve already invested the time to do the focus group, just go ahead and read the transcript. Watch it again after you’ve done it. And don’t just think you have to figure it out the first time because they’re almost always, almost every single time I will get stuff either reading the transcript. We’re watching the group every time.

So it’s a three part process for sure. And being disciplined, I don’t feel like watching that, but just go ahead and do it. That’s worth doing. 

Elizabeth Larrick: I appreciate you saying that because every time we’ll do it and then you’re there and you get that first impression. And then when I go back underneath, I’m like, [00:34:00] wow, I totally missed that person said that like, wow, or you can’t gather it all in.

And then it’s going to marinate. And you’re gonna be like, oh yeah. So I love that you said that. So many times people. We’ll do it and the thing we did it, we did it. And I’m like, well, but you could squeeze that orange so much more. And then that value level goes up a couple more notches for you. So it’s not just one and done.

You can get more info. And I got to cheat when I watch focus groups again, I’ll speed it up one and a half times or slow it down, but it’s just getting that back in there and then sometimes you don’t have to ever do it again. You’ve got that memo or just the high points. 

Lucas Faust: One of the things when you’ve done a lot of focus groups, a lot of them, I’m reading an interesting book by a fellow by the name of Trevor Moad.

He’s developed a thinking, he calls it neutral thinking, not positive thinking, not negative thinking, but neutral thinking. You take in the information and you don’t let it rock you. It’s like, okay, that’s fine. What I do find from, there’s almost this, the problem when you’re so wedded to your [00:35:00] case, you will just look at it and you so badly, cause you’ve worked your tail off on everything, want it to go the right way.

And then. The problem with getting negative from what the feedback you’re getting is you’re not listening to everything. Because it is so tough on you. The closer you can get to being neutral and just sit there, take it in, you’re less likely to skew your focus groups. Number one, that’s very interesting.

That’s got to be, that’s your mantra. That’s very interesting. So it’s okay that an adult film star lost money and you think she should recoup it. That’s very interesting. The best advice I can give is don’t be wedded to your preconceived notions. If you said the better, more, you can set those aside and do, that’s very interesting.

It just takes a lot of being proven wrong. And if you’ve been married, you have a spouse, maybe tells you how wrong you are. Sometimes you kind of learn over a while that that’s very interesting. You’ll learn that it’s okay to be wrong because you’re just going to be. And that’s the fun part. That’s where the fun stuff is.

Um, sooner you [00:36:00] prove, figure stuff out that maybe you’re wrong earlier on in your case. You can recover from it. The longer you wait, the less chance there is to recover, but you got to do the process first, or you don’t know what you don’t know. That’s the biggest 

Elizabeth Larrick: takeaway. I think that’s the hardest part when people want to come to me and they want to do their own focus group, which I of course encourage, but I also say like, are you too close because you got to go in there and you got to get everybody and you just say, okay, gotcha.

but sometimes you don’t w person because you want t get the 

Lucas Faust: people that call some focus group clips fo you’re like if you don’t don’t need to manufacture already in pocket, then t because they’ll always se they naturally flow and i does surprise you, it wil you. It’ll surprise the o probably to understand this.

The people on the [00:37:00] other side of the case, they have an interest, but they’re not stupid. They’ve thought their way. And maybe the only way to kind of sort out where folks really will think is this process. And if defense counsel is convinced it’s the other way, well, maybe just take a step back and ask some regular folks.

And if they’re right, they’re right. If they’re wrong, then they’re wrong. And then you feel confident then it’s that level of confidence you get after you run four or five focus groups and they’re consistent, sometimes they fall out, you’ll run number three and it’d be like, wow, that was weird. What happened there?

You run a back again, it’s back on track. Or there’s almost always a, when there’s a wrinkle, you kind of know what to do, but you have to do multiple to get there. So if you make it efficient, get in, get out, you can do three or four at a time. It doesn’t cost. As much money as you might think. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And that’s, I was going to say, I think one of the things that I would repeat about what you’ve said and what I’ve said in past ones, which is you can do some of these things in 20, 30 minutes, which means if you’re running three hours or even two hours [00:38:00] virtually, because again, Like Lucas, you’ve said it’s way more convenient.

It’s also going to be much more inexpensive than having to host people in person. You can do so many cases. And then that just cuts that glass and that pie up to get more cases done. So I don’t think either one of us are advocating, okay, you need to spend three hours on the same case, just to learn the narrative, you know, 

Lucas Faust: cut it up and then compare the previous focus groups with one another.

Cause you’ll eventually find a, a, a. There was that case in Seattle you work with Mr. Keenan on, you broke down, as I recall, you broke down the type of demographic that you wanted to see, and if that took, and not see, and not see. You did not want to see the bookworm. You wanted to see the active outdoors person.

I mean, so you found the demographic that fit and it repeated itself, but you only get there by running multiple focus groups. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Oh my gosh. That 

Lucas Faust: happens. 

Elizabeth Larrick: They had 13. Yeah. I mean, it was, it was, it was a lot, but 

Lucas Faust: it probably took at least 10 to get it right and figure it out. Oh my gosh. There you go. 

Elizabeth Larrick: When I think the [00:39:00] other thing too, which we face here in Texas, and I know lots of the people listening and you probably the same thing where it’s just like cases take so much longer.

So, it’s not like we’re running 10 focus groups in a year because we know. It may take some time. And what I find is if I’ve set something down for a while, for whatever reason, and I go and pick it back up, like sometimes just running a focus groups just gets me back in there. Cause I get back in there. I, you get back in it, you get excited about it again.

So those were in that particular file. I’m in that head case gone on for several years. Those were not done. Boom, boom, boom, boom, 13. They were along the way and just keeping it going with the new information or retesting that opening again. And so focus groups. Really? And at some point I do also agree, like some point there’s a cutoff.

We don’t need 

Lucas Faust: to return at some point, but as long as you’ve kind of planned out where you’re heading with it, they make sense. So I mean, you go from your narrative all the way [00:40:00] down to your adversarial at the tail end of this. And your adversarial focus group, if you’ve gotten to a point where your adversarial focus group is ready to go and you’re winning your adversarial focus groups, you can go into trial, feel pretty doggone competent.

That’s going to show in your presentation. And it’s going to, it’s almost like a self fulfilling prophecy. You feel a lot better about it. And everybody knows you feel more, you’re more confident, understand your weak points too, but no, this is the, the focus group process has dramatically changed my practice.

It’s something we’ve done for about seven years now. And I really appreciate having Heather run these because it, again, it takes a team to get one of these things up and going, and I think the biggest thing is, is you get so wedded to your case. That’s just the toughest thing. You want it to turn out so badly that.

You’ll put blinders on. 

Elizabeth Larrick: That’s totally natural. It’s like you’ve got three kids and someone’s your favorite. Well, yeah. Someone is your favorite. 

Lucas Faust: There’s always, that’s just the way it is. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Natural phenomenon. Yes, exactly. So Lucas, thank you so much for taking some time to [00:41:00] share your knowledge and information, the wealth of it about focus groups with our audience.

Lucas Faust: Absolutely. And Elizabeth, I just, I’ll put this plug in as well. I’ve worked with Elizabeth getting clients ready for testimony, and I can say, without hesitation. That is something that you must do as well. It is something I do in every substantial case and every substantial claim. And we take the time to do that if for no other reason, because I’m too close to it as well.

That’s another important thing to consider. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lucas. And just for everybody else listening, we will have all of his information in the show notes. If you have a question and I look forward to having Heather on our podcast too, to talk about seventh amendment productions.

I love it. 

Lucas Faust: All right. Thank you so much. 

Elizabeth Larrick: All right. Thank you so much. And again, thank you for everybody for listening. If you could leave a review or rating on your favorite podcast platform, and also with the new OS opening a new update, if you could do the plus follow sign for me on your Apple [00:42:00] device, that would be really helpful.

And until next time, thank you.

Many successful attorneys learned to be successful by being louder and stronger. And for women, being louder and stronger doesn’t necessarily mean success. Sometimes louder and stronger means aggressive and shrill. 

In today’s episode, Rena Cook joins us to talk about how she helps women attorneys command a great deal of authority and strength without being shrill, and how you, too, can improve your voice as a trial lawyer.

Rena Cook is a TEDx speaker, author, trainer, coach, and the founder of Vocal Authority, a training consultancy serving corporate clients – attorneys, politicians, teachers, sales teams, and CEOs – who want to use their voices in more commanding and authentic ways. 

Rena is the author of Empower Your Voice: For Women in Business, Politics, and Life; Her Voice in Law published by the ABA; and Voice and the Young Actor, used in drama programs throughout the US and the UK. She co-edited Breath in Action: The Art of Breath in Vocal and Holistic Practice. Rena taught high school drama for 16 years before she graduated to higher education. 

For the next two decades, she taught professionally bound actors, many of whom can be seen on Broadway, film, and television. Through Vocal Authority, Rena adapts actor training techniques to help individuals and groups be more confident and dynamic communicators. 

In this episode, you will hear:

• Breathing deeply to keep the brain engaged
• The importance of the last word of sentences
• Techniques using breath and space to improve your voice
• The power of change and variety
• Common mistakes people make with their voice
• How to plan out your movement on transitions

Subscribe and Review

Have you subscribed to our podcast? We’d love for you to subscribe if you haven’t yet. 

We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.

Supporting Resources:

Rena Cook

Email: renacook@cox.net 

Website: www.myvocalauthority.com 

Book: Her Voice in Law Purchase here

If you have questions or a particularly challenging client preparation, email Elizabeth directly for assistance: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.

He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their businesses and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: Hello and welcome back to the podcast trial lawyer prep with me, your host, Elizabeth Larrick. And today’s episode, we have a lovely guest with us. Who’s going to talk about something that we all possess. Always work more on Rena Cook is going to come and talk to us about how to improve our [00:01:00] voices.

So Rena, welcome to the podcast.

Rena Cook: Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me, Elizabeth. I’m really excited. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Well, good. Well, I had no idea this was even an option. When we first met, we met through Lori Kohler, who our fellow listeners will know. She’s been on our podcast and a good friend of mine at Oklahoma, practicing out of Tulsa though.

And you had worked with Lori specifically, and we met kind of at a little bit of a women’s trial wear collective. So how, how did you and Lori 

meet 

up? 

Rena Cook: Well, Lori, of course, is, what do I want to say, a self improvement hound, right? She’s always looking for the next thing that’s going to make her a better attorney.

And one of her mentors, David Ball, who is a major name in personal injury trial law, he told all of his students, his mentees, that they needed to have voice coaches that the people who use their voice in the most compelling ways are going to be [00:02:00] the best trial attorneys. So she sought me out. She found my information.

Oh, I think another attorney. Ah, it’s all coming back to me. Another attorney recommended me to her. I was teaching at the university of Oklahoma. She was living in Tulsa. So she drove to Oklahoma City once a month to work with me and we worked for almost four years together. And then she decided to pull me into some retreats for attorneys that she was having.

And then that’s how you and I met on one of her retreats. Absolutely. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And so, you know, again, for four years, it seems like a long time. So did you guys work on anything specific? Something we’ll know about that. 

Rena Cook: Well, she was usually prepping for trial, and I would deal with her opening and closing statements, and I would coach them in the way that I coach actors.

You know, I come from an [00:03:00] acting training background, and I would coach the opening on, Where to get slower, where to get faster, where to get louder, where to get softer, how to get the jury on her side, how to get the jury to feel what she wants them to feel. And so we worked on that half of the time. And the other half of the time we worked on voice technique.

Many women come to me. Many successful attorneys who have learned to be successful by being louder and stronger. And for women, louder and stronger doesn’t necessarily mean success. Sometimes louder and stronger means aggressive and shrill. And, and I help women attorneys command a great deal of authority and strength without being shrill.

And so we [00:04:00] worked on voice quality. We worked on the importance of breath for keeping the voice warm, compelling, not high in light. You know, I’m not about making women sound like I am like women. We want women to sound number one, like themselves. But the best version of themselves and so we worked on those kind of exercises and then of course, as I said, coaching openings and closings and if you’re an active trial attorney once a month for four years is really not that long, you have work ongoing and there’s always something new to work on.

Yeah. And one of the things that 

Elizabeth Larrick: you, you said, you know, kind of triggered for me when we got to do the retreat together was the, the power without press. And I know that you have a really cool Ted talk on that as well. So tell us a little bit about the power without press. 

Rena Cook: Ah, well, the way I found or discovered power without [00:05:00] press was analyzing people who come on too strong.

And we see them in both genders. And I looked at where their energy is, where they carry the energy in the body. And most of the time, it’s chin up, shoulders pulled back. Now, you can’t see me right now, but what I’m doing is pulling my shoulders back, lifting my chin, and assuming my armored stance. What that does to my voice is hardens my voice.

I have released the effort in my shoulders. I brought my chin down parallel to the floor and I’m breathing in my center and I’m feeling my energy low in my body, not high. In my throat, in my chin, you can hear the difference. When I move the energy down lower, I find power [00:06:00] without press. And it’s the pressing of the chin and the upper chest and the shoulders that makes us sound shrill, aggressive.

Lori calls it the Mr. Lawyer suit sound. I’ve put on my Mr. Lawyer suit. And we want to find that power, the authority, the competency, the trustworthiness by bringing our sense of our own energy lower into our center around the navel area, around the stomach as being the source of our power. And that also keeps us breathing deeply, which keeps the brain engaged.

Oftentimes women attorneys will say, I get nervous and my brain shuts down. I’m prepped. I know what I want to say, but my brain shuts down by breathing deeply and keeping the power low. [00:07:00] It keeps your brain online as well. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And I think for me, like, When you were explaining it, like breasts, I mean, it’s literally just to get your breath out, you’re just pressing it out so you can really project and then you’re literally not breathing.

Exactly. Exactly. And just, just being able to keep breathing, you know, keeping that the brain flowing and, you know, is sometimes half the battle. When you were talking and I think one of the things too in the retreat was about like when you’re able to keep The the breath low you’re keeping it regulated.

You’re keeping air in there and it’s easier to keep the thoughts going, but you also helped with like when to breathe, like literally. Yeah, that’s, 

Rena Cook: that’s hugely important when to breathe. I recommend that a speaker breathe at every punctuation. semicolons, periods, commas. The only place that you wouldn’t breathe with [00:08:00] commas is if you have a list and you’re saying oranges, comma, kiwi, comma, lemons.

You wouldn’t breathe after each one of those. In that instance, it’s a list. You just keep the list going. Other than that, breathing at every punctuation is really important. And we often write differently than we speak. So if you’re an attorney who is used to writing it out, you then need to read it out loud and breathe at punctuation to see if you’ve given yourself enough punctuation.

An audience can only take in, and this is audience a jury, can only take in seven to nine words that they need the speaker to breathe. That’s how they process information. And if too many words are linked together on one breath, the audience doesn’t take in the content. So the first run through when you’re [00:09:00] practicing an opening or a closing, the first run through is always do I have the punctuation in the right place to allow me to breathe often enough to power my words.

And you want to power your words with breath. If I say too many words on one breath and I start to rush because I think I’m going to run out of breath and the words that I’m rushing there, the audience will not understand. They need me to breathe. They need me to take my time and they need me to empower the important words with breath.

Elizabeth Larrick: I mean, even if you just think about this from like a very simplistic standpoint, because one, we always want to have simple sentences like, right, that’s good. One point, but then also thinking about like, okay, I want to have more. So I will slow down and breathe at every punctuation, like, We’re doing so many [00:10:00] things.

We’re helping ourselves, but like you said, helping our jury or even our judge, because I know sometimes when I’m getting up to do a motion and I know, like, you’ve got to get your stuff out there. You’ve got to get it out there quickly, you know, and she, you know, whoever’s up on the bench could be rushing you.

It’s, it’s almost like, okay, it’s okay. Take your time, ride it out, you know, because again, Most of the time they’re having to learn at the same time. They haven’t read anything beforehand. There’s like a jury, 

Rena Cook: right? And if you rush it, they are going to miss it. And also if you rush, you can’t give the words there.

Do let me just give you an example. Let’s just say, hypothetically, you are saying to a jury, this young man was raised in a ghetto. All right. We’re setting up the background information on the defendants. All right, so if I just say this young man was raised in a ghetto, they may intellectually understand it, but they don’t get in their [00:11:00] heart what that was like.

So you say, this young man was raised in a ghetto. So I have enough breath to power what I think a ghetto feels like, looks like. And I infuse the word with my feeling and my breath. And then the jury is much more likely to get that image than if I just say, this young man was raised in a ghetto. Yeah, they’re going to miss it.

Exactly. At least they’re going to miss it in their heart. They may get it in their brain. Well, but that’s what we want 

Elizabeth Larrick: them, right? It’s the emotional places where we make these decisions. We want them, yes. They think. 

Rena Cook: You know, a jury thinks they’re making their decision with their brain, their intellect and their rationale.

But we know that we make decisions based on emotional response. And then we find the facts that fill in the blank for our brain to think, oh, yes, we’ve done this based on facts. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, we [00:12:00] find 

Rena Cook: the facts to 

Elizabeth Larrick: support our 

Rena Cook: feelings. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And I know I’ve seen you do this as well, where we basically, you know, you take an opening statement with these principles.

I’m going to breathe at every punctuation. I want simple sentences that you have make a point, but then also go in and realize word placement, word choice, that emotional illusionary get them into that understanding things deeper. 

Rena Cook: Exactly. And, and because of training actors, as I have, I know how actors use language to make the audience feel what we want them to feel.

And there are specific techniques. It is talent, partly. The other half, fully, is technique. So I will have an attorney look at the text of the opening and circle all the nouns. so that you know what the important words are. And the nouns are always [00:13:00] your most important words. And you want to give the nouns Time.

In other words, you don’t say a noun quickly. If I want to say, for example, look at that house. If I say, look at that house. It’s like, okay, what? Look at that house. I take more time and infuse the word with what I feel about it. Look at that house. You know, you know what I feel about it or look at that house.

We communicate how we feel by how we use the words. So we have to acknowledge these are the nouns and these are the important words that I want them to see and I want them to feel something about. The second most important word are the verbs, the action verbs, like action. He stormed into the room.

Stormed being our verb. If I just say he stormed into the room, well, we kind of understand, but we don’t get it until we hear he stormed [00:14:00] into the room. We make the words sound like what it means, and then the audience feels it in their bodies, not just in their brain, they feel it in their bodies. Now, let me just, let 

Elizabeth Larrick: me just take a, take a pause here because we could have some folks listening and definitely I will say sometimes I feel this way too.

I am a very low traumatic person. Like, I’m just not. And so, are we saying every sentence needs to have this powerful expression 

Rena Cook: or? Well, we clearly 

Elizabeth Larrick: can. 

Rena Cook: Clearly no. And I am, and you know, actors like me tend to be very, very expressive. And most of the attorneys I work with fall more into the, I’m a little bit more relaxed than you are Rena.

I’m not quite that expressive. And so we find a way to help the individual be true to their authentic self. And also empower their voice and their language [00:15:00] within the range of what’s comfortable for them. Right. So if you are typically low key and there’s very little affect, you’re just giving information.

If you’re breathing and you know what words you want to bring out, you’re not going to throw those words away. Many, many people throw the last word of a sentence away. Particularly if they’re reading from a script that they’ve written. And so our usual thing is we read, read, read, come to the last word.

Come to the last word, right? And it drops away. Well, we need to, they come to the last word. It’s like lift the last word and it’s not like punch it or throw it. It’s just Let it go forward into the ears of the jury and not on the floor in front of you. So there are techniques to help us [00:16:00] break that habit of how you get the last word of every sentence, and know that the last word you say of a sentence is always the most important word in that sentence.

We do that. And if we make it as we deliver it, the least important word, then the jury, the audience has missed. a major bit of information. So it really is about some principles of presentation, and there really aren’t that many, and they’re pretty easy to practice. It doesn’t happen automatically in performance.

When you’re under pressure, you will go back to the old way of doing things. But if you practice intentionally, like I said, practice the breath, read the speech, just breathing at punctuation to see if that feels right. if it feels appropriate. And then we add another [00:17:00] layer. Maybe it’s let me circle the nouns and let me just give each noun its importance.

And then maybe it’s reading it again for verbs. Then it’s reading it again to make sure you’re not falling off at the ends of your sentences. So that there’s a focus for each run through and that helps it move forward. It helps it get better. If you practice it in the same way every time without thinking about what’s going to be the focus of my practice this time, you will just be reinforcing old patterns.

You won’t be learning anything new or moving the speech forward. Because by the time you present, you want it to sound like it’s totally authentic, that it’s off the top of your head, that you haven’t written out every word, and that you’re just speaking from your heart. Right. And most, most attorneys can’t do that.

There has to [00:18:00] be some preparation. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Oh, I would say anyone that, you know, when I think to say, Oh no, I just, I’ll just go off the cuff. I’m like, you’re going to miss something. I mean, I talk about a lot here in, in right about, it’s like, there’s so much to be said about just writing it out. And I love that idea of like, okay, let me write it out now.

Let me go back and write for, for speaking, right. With the sentences and the punctuation and then like every single run through you’re doing something different. But for us, like, we are memorizing, like, the concept that we write so that when it comes out, like, We may try a different word, or, but we’re still going to have that breath with us and know how to get the message out.

Rena Cook: For people who don’t open their mouths enough, I mean, that’s a huge habit. For example, if I don’t open my mouth very much, Right. This is how I sound. I’m just not opening. I’m not making space. And so I have to help some [00:19:00] clients break the habit of speaking with a very tiny mouth and making more space because space is your megaphone, right?

Breath and space is your volume knob. Breath and space. And I will have someone do a whole run through just making space in the mouth. And I have some tricks to help you do that. Like I’ll cut a little inch of a soda straw and have an inch and put the, the soda straw between your upper and lower teeth and tell you ha ha and the where , right?

But then you take the spacer out, but keep the sense of the space. And automatically there’s more, more easy sound because your mouth has kind of gotten used to making more space. So we have little tricks that we can practice with. [00:20:00] Tricks that release our tongue. Tricks that release our jaw. And the tongue and the jaw are million dollar tension points.

For any speaker and how we relax the tongue, how we relax the jaw to get ourselves ready to speak in our best voice. So part of the practicing is also practicing good vocal usage, because when we’re presenting, we don’t want to think about breath. We don’t want to think about space. We don’t want to think about the nouns and the verbs.

We want to think about our message and is our message landing on who it needs to land on. So I take care of all of those details through my rehearsal. And the more times I rehearse, The more of it is going to stay with me when I’m in front of the jury. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And so that leads me to my question. How many times should people be doing rehearsal?

But let’s take opening statement. Let’s take opening statement. 

Rena Cook: Okay. Well, let’s, [00:21:00] let’s not include the writing portion and the research portion and all of that. You’re going to do that anyway. Once you have it in a form that you can practice, you need to practice it on several different times. In other words, the night before you present is not enough practice, right?

If you have it done a week, or two weeks even before you’re going to present. And then you spend 15 20 minutes a day with it, practicing breath, practicing space, using nouns, using verbs, not letting it fall off at the end, maybe finding a place where you’re going to get louder, maybe notating a place where you’re going to get slower, right?

Or big pause, big dramatic pause. You practice those things. And they will be there when you perform. 10, 20 minutes? I’d say 10, 20 minutes a day would be [00:22:00] optimal. Every other day would do the trick, but you can’t do it the night before and expect all of the bits to be there. I also encourage where it’s possible to go into the space you’re going to into the the courtroom into the space The night before if you can the morning of get in the space and try your voice in the space You know, this is where the jury’s going to be.

This is where the jet. Oh my goodness Look how far back that wall is. This is a big room Am I going to have to breathe a little deeper? Am I going to have to make a bit more space to be heard in this room? And then try some words. as you are going to give them so that the space is your friend and not your enemy.

When you start every space is different. Sure. And it feeds back voice in a different way. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Whenever I was going to law school, I was an intern at a courthouse and it had, um, [00:23:00] very beautiful courthouse, but the very center had this like dome and the judge told us, and of course, work. You know, he knows where I said, there’s something special about this room.

He says, because I can sit where I’m at and the sound swirls in the dome and comes right back to me. So I can hear what you’re whispering at the council table because it gets up and I’m just like, Oh my gosh. 

Rena Cook: Yeah. Yeah, and that’s a perfect example how every room is different and handles sound in a different way.

Some rooms are very live and you have to, in a live room, you have to slow down a little bit or your words bump into each other. If the walls are absorbing, then you have to breathe a little, a little more. You know, to make the sound a little louder. And if you have a partner, you know, a paralegal or a co counsel, go in and try the room together and give each other [00:24:00] feedback.

You know, go stand in the farthest part of the room. This is the level I’m comfortable projecting. Are you hearing it? And so you, you get that information before, and that’s really valuable information. So 

Elizabeth Larrick: as far as like, let’s just, you know, you work with lots and lots of people, what, what’s a pretty common mistake people make with their voice?

Rena Cook: Well, the most common is not breathing, you know, it really is because untrained people don’t realize the importance of breath and they just breathe whenever they feel they need to. The other thing is not making enough space in the mouth. and not dealing with words, not making words matter. I mean, when we write, we will agonize over this word or that word, right?

But when we speak it, we just take it for granted. We just say the word. [00:25:00] So if we’ve chosen it that carefully as we’re writing, we need to speak it as carefully as we chose it because we chose it for a reason and we want the word to land. And the power of change, the power of variety. Most people have a rate variety that they always speak at.

They have a volume level that they always use. And they have a limited pitch range. Couple three notes of pitch variety over the course of a sentence. Those are very common issues that come to me. And I help them in each case, find a way to, maybe it’s find more vocal variety. Vocal variety in inflection.

Vocal variety in rate of delivery. In volume, some things can be louder, some things can be softer. Thank you. When we get to major points, we want to slow down, right? Another [00:26:00] thing is that movement trumps word. So if I have a big notion, a big statement that I want to make sure everybody hears, if I move while I’m saying that statement, the audience will not get it.

They will watch me move. So, you know, that’s a pretty big one because I know most of us love to walk around Well exactly walking must be deliberate When I move from point a to point b, it’s for a reason It may be a focus. I want to talk to someone specifically. I want the the jury to look at something specifically.

I move for intention. If I’m randomly moving, the audience quits, listening to what I say, they start watching me randomly move. And if I am moving on my key [00:27:00] sentence, the audience will not get it. So I help attorneys kind of choreograph their movement, you know, stand still for this, and then you can move here, you can move to here, and we’ll map out, you know, what we think the courtroom is going to look like in my studio.

We’ll put things out and we’ll walk through You know, in the end, the attorney will say, well, this is what I, what feels natural to me. Ah, great. Let’s keep that. But you’ve got to stop moving on this word or on this sentence or they’re not going to hear you. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. One of my mentors would say, we would want to choreograph the room.

So if you’re going to talk about one particular subject, you go stand in that spot. Right. And it’s, and that helps you get a little bit choreographed too, because then you’re, some people won’t move at all. Right. They’re like trees. Right. A ton. And so like having that, like, okay, if you’re going to talk about that [00:28:00] thing, you need to go over that spot.

Right. Are you talking about the thing? Or like you said, a lot of times people will talk while they move, if they’re trying to get to an exhibit or get over to a board. No one’s they’re just watching you move. They’re not listening to what you’re saying. 

Rena Cook: Exactly. So you plan your movement on transitions.

transitions from one subject to another. It’s like, I’m going to finish this paragraph or this point, and I’m going to focus completely on this person in the jury, and I’m going to stay there until the end. And now, new subject, I can move somewhere else. Or, and I usually do eye contact leads movement. So I’m standing, say, center, center.

Right. And I have just said something to the judge. So I have made eye contact with the judge and now I am going to walk toward the jury. I look at them first and the look leads me in that direction [00:29:00] because it gets what they do. They’re going to look, 

Elizabeth Larrick: they’re going to look where you’re looking. 

Rena Cook: Exactly.

Elizabeth Larrick: The other thing that I’m hearing me say is like, we have permission to stop talking if we’re going to be walking because you don’t want to walk and talk because they, they’re not, they’re not listening 

Rena Cook: to you at all. Yeah. Unless you’re making a transition, right? So you’re saying something like, and now in the meantime, or we’re going to turn our focus to.

So as I’m giving signposting information, right, you’ve moved your, you’ve moved and now you’re going to, like you said, walk. Walk to it, and I walk to it on the transition pieces, the signposting, meanwhile back at the ranch kind of things, you know, that aren’t crucial, that can cover my cross to another side of the room or to an exhibit or something.

Just be aware not to make your important points [00:30:00] when you’re walking or moving. Get where you gotta go and then make it. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I will even deal with gesture. You know, what would be a strong gesture at this point? And I can usually see, you know, when your hands kind of move, you know, you, you get that, the typical movement, hand movement.

And I will say your hands are kind of moving. Your body is telling you, you need to gesture. What would be a strong gesture in that moment? And then we will brainstorm and try out various gestures that amplify the point and not distract from the point. 

Elizabeth Larrick: And I want to say almost all this stuff, because I have Empower Your Voice, right, is one of your books that you have.

That’s a lot of it’s in the book that you have. 

Rena Cook: It’s all in empower your voice and then Laurie and I wrote a book for attorneys together and it’s called her voice in law. It [00:31:00] was published by the America Bar Association and we wrote it together. At her suggestion, after we had worked together a number of years, she said, Rita, we ought to write a book about this.

And I thought, hmm, that’s a great idea. And so what Lori did is to contextualize the work. In the legal environment, right? I come from a theater environment, and then I started working in the corporate world with vocal development, but the legal world is a whole beast of its own. And Laurie would say. Say, no, we don’t call it that.

We call it this, or this is where I would use this kind of voice and this is the situation where I would need this kind of thing. Mm-Hmm. . And so that’s what she provided as we worked together on the book. She was invaluable as I translated this work into the legal environment. [00:32:00] Mm-Hmm. . That’s awesome.

Someone could pick up that book and just follow the book. And I have video component that shows the exercises and demonstrates and so on. So that someone could, without the presence of a coach, do the work on their own. I would hope they’d want to work with a coach because it’s better that way. But, but the book is for in the absence of a coach, you can do this work yourself.

Yeah. And although as we talk about it, it sounds complicated, just breaking it down step by step and then putting it all together, the work is done and you’ve had a good time doing it. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Well, and I love that you, that you have a book because I love. Reading books. And I love to, to do all that. But I also know like working with somebody, working with the coach, it’s like leaps and bounds.

And the progress is so much faster than just reading, [00:33:00] reading the book. So, but I know you do, I know you do several other things, right? So tell us a little bit more about, you know, when I got the book out and you have a podcast as well. So tell us a little bit more about, uh, podcasts and other speaking that you’re doing.

Rena Cook: Okay, my podcast is called Let’s Get Vocal with Reena and it grew out of the pandemic like so much did at that time. It was like, how can I keep working? How can I keep getting my message out when I can’t be out and about? And so I started the podcast and I wanted to talk to a variety of people. It turned out to be all women.

And, but that wasn’t my initial thing was I wanted to talk to people. who got me excited about things. Often it was voice trainers. I studied voice in London, and so several of the people that I interviewed on the podcast are voice trainers in London, and we talk about dialect. We talk about a range of [00:34:00] topics.

I’ve interviewed some attorneys, some therapists, just things that interest me that I wanted to talk about. Thus, let’s get vocal with Rina and, and I hope that I put out some information that people want to hear that, you know, and I kept it to about 30 minutes, kind of the length of a workout. Cause that’s when I do my podcast listening is when I’m working out.

I also speak to various organizations, not just legal organizations, although I love to do that. I did a speech for women. They were called women in equipment distribution. They sell tractors. And they were the most amazing group of women, clearly in a male dominated profession. And we talked about how a woman holds her ground Holds her voice, carries authority and [00:35:00] competency, again, without pressing.

And, and so I travel the country speaking primarily to women’s groups, women who want to use their voice to further their mission. And, you know, as women in the last, what is it, five, six, seven years now, things have changed culturally for women, not as much as we want it to change, but it is changing. And we have new hearts, new imagination, new inspiration for sharing who we are and what we have to offer.

But if we are using the same voice, that we have used through all of those years of either subjugating ourselves, making ourselves smaller, or making ourselves more puffed up than we need to be. So finding the grounded and centered and confident voice that can communicate our truth in any situation seems [00:36:00] to be where the energy of my work is going.

And you like that work. I do. I do now. I’ve gone back to teaching actors again. Two days a week. I go to Oklahoma City University. I found that I missed mixing it up with actors. And the reason is when you’re Training professionally bound actors, you go into the nitty gritty, you get into the depth, right?

And, and I was missing that kind of depth. So I’ve taken that job two days a week. And then I work my consulting business the other days of the week. And it seems to be a really happy balance for me right now. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. Awesome. And are you still doing like helping people, you know, one on one? 

Rena Cook: Oh, yeah, that’s pretty much the bread and butter of my business is the one on one coaching.

I have a studio in my home or I go to their office if that’s more convenient. So I work both places, either their office, my [00:37:00] studio, and I have packages, you know, like some people say, Oh, I think I just need three sessions or I need 10. And 10 is really the number that I recommend for lasting change. You need to practice with the coach at least 10 times until you get it in your body and then you can carry the work forward by yourself.

Without a coach. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. And you do it virtually too as well. 

Rena Cook: Oh yeah. Yeah. Of course I discovered that during the pandemic. It’s not my favorite thing because when you’re working on a voice, you need to see the body 360. What’s happening with the feet? What’s happening with the knees? What’s happening with the breath in the center?

So I found ways to now turn your camera so I can see your feet, right? And then I’ve gotten to where I’m, my intuition is better. It’s like, it sounds. to me like your knees are locked. Is that true? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they were. [00:38:00] So I’ve gotten better at kind of trusting my intuition on the screen, but I’m an extrovert.

I want to be in the same room with people. Yeah. Right. Technology drains me. Human beings refresh me. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. 

Rena Cook: Yeah. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Well, I, I love that, you know, the pandemic and again, same here for sure. Definitely made me become much more flexible and I enjoy doing a lot of virtual stuff now, virtual focus groups, helping people virtually.

It is nice to be in person, but it also, you know, I love the flexibility as well. So I’m glad to hear that. But if somebody wanted to connect with you, what’s, what’s the best way Platform or where should they go if they wanna, and just not anybody who’s listening, we’ll have, uh, rena’s email in the show notes, but tell us what the best place that they wanna just come follow.

Rena Cook: Well, my website is my vocal authority.com and, uh, there’s a contact route on the website, [00:39:00] but I, I love for people just to reach out to me at email, renaCook@cox.net. Pops being cox. net. And that’s really the most direct route to me. Okay. Well, I know you’ve got Facebook page. I know you’ve 

Elizabeth Larrick: got some other things.

I just want to make sure. But 

Rena Cook: yeah, yeah, I do. I do Facebook and LinkedIn. LinkedIn because my speaking agent, Says I need to have you active on LinkedIn. So I am, and I just use Facebook or this is fun. Look what I did. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Well, there, I know there’s just so people know there are lots of really great resources on your website, videos and stuff to watch if you people are curious, but Rhea, before we wrap up, is there anything that I missed, but I didn’t, I didn’t ask you about that you think our audience or this audience would, would 

Rena Cook: really appreciate.

Actually, there is one thing that we didn’t talk about that I want to just take a couple of minutes. A way to memorize a speech, because memorizing the speech is like the big old bugaboo. [00:40:00] And if you memorize word for word, you will get lost. A word will slip away and you’ll go, Oh my God, I have no idea where I am.

I was doing a focus group with an attorney. And he wanted me to, to hear this very complicated opening and he broke down three times, broke down meaning forgot what was next. It’s like, Oh my God, I am totally lost. I have no idea where I am. So we went back to his office and I realized that what he was saying was very, very visual.

He was wanting the jury to see a whole scenario. And so it’s like, okay, look at your first paragraph. What is it you want the audience, the jury to see? Draw that picture. And he said, well, I, I, I’m not, I don’t care. Just draw it, stick figures if you need to. And then we put it on, on the wall with a piece of tape.

And so we storyboarded essentially [00:41:00] every image that he wanted the jury to see and put them on the wall in order. And then I had him, because we can all talk about a picture, right? I want you to see this. And in this picture, this is happening. So he did his whole opening just by looking at pictures. It’s easier for us to memorize images than it is to memorize pictures.

this word, this word, this word. So he was able to recall the main details by recalling what is the picture I want the jury to see right now. And so that was an alternative way of memorizing and corralling all that information without getting tripped up and memorizing word for word. 

Elizabeth Larrick: I think that also helps too with order because sometimes we get Uh, we, we may memorize and then we just, we go to the next thing and we’ve skipped a whole paragraph.

But if we have, we have [00:42:00] this, the visual story, we may not have it perfect, but we’re not going to skip over that visual. Exactly. Let me ask you one question too, because this is, uh, I’m just curious. So I have heard some people talk about, as far as opening statements, doing a large portion of it, silent, just showing visuals.

What would you, and again, what would you, what would be your maybe comments? Well, 

Rena Cook: you know, I don’t know because I haven’t seen that to know if that’s effective. If you have really strong visuals, I can’t help but think you’re going to need some narration to tie the visuals together. And so, you know, I would love to coach that challenge.

Someone says, no, I do my opening with all visuals. What else do I need? And then to work through that in a creative way to see if voice helps to tie all of the visuals together. [00:43:00] Because the jury is going to find their way to link all of that, and it may not be the way you want them to link it. So you may need to use the voice and words to say now this is why this is here.

Now we’re going to go to here, and this is why this is the next step. 

Elizabeth Larrick: I think there’s also for me a factor of wanting to be a little bit of the teacher. And the leader and not having that you’re taking a very much a very passive role. Like you’re saying, like you would have to, in my mind, you would have to really focus group it to make sure people aren’t making the wrong assumption, like creating their own story, you know, that everything is so clear, you know, the visual.

Rena Cook: And another thing occurs to me, Elizabeth, is that if I don’t talk, the jury is not forming a relationship with me. I help the jury attach to me by talking to them by [00:44:00] making contact with them. I need them to like me to go into the jury room to fight for me and my client. They have to believe in me. They have to feel good about me.

They have to trust me to take me in their brains and in their hearts into that jury room and maybe battle for me. You know, and the way I form that relationship is by talking to them. That’s just a thought. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, well, I just think, you know, communication is what we say, but, you know, how we say it and you can say less.

You totally can. I think they would all, we all said less, but how we’re saying it and with that short amount of time that we have with jurors, how can we use that as best as possible? And maybe a portion of it is being silent, you know, big space. But maybe the portion of it is, like you said, growing that relationship and being that leader, if you will, and teacher.

So well, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Let me pick your brain on [00:45:00] that. Thank you so much for making some time to join the podcast today. Super helpful. I know that thinking about our voices. It’s our main tool when it comes to depositions and motions. Mm-Hmm. . And even talking to clients and getting people to sign up.

Mm-Hmm. . So I think it’s all like very helpful things to help prepare better, uh, be better lawyers. So thank you so much for joining us. 

Rena Cook: Oh, it was so my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Elizabeth. I really enjoyed myself. 

Elizabeth Larrick: Good. Well if anyone wants to reach out, Torina, like I said, I’ll put all the contact in the show notes.

For email and website and then also a link to the book if you’re interested in buying the book that she has her voice in law. So, all right, well, until next time, thank you so much.