Podcast – Page 11 – Elizabeth Larrick

Myth Busting for Lawyers on Focus Groups

elarrickbrand on April 22, 2022

There is no doubt how important focus groups are in helping trial lawyers present to a live group of people. Not only does running practice groups hone your presenting skills, but it also helps you with your materials and it helps you get valuable feedback from those who are completely uninvolved with your case.

However, a lot of trial lawyers are still hesitant about doing it or they just don’t see the value in it mainly because they have certain assumptions and beliefs that aren’t necessarily true.

In this episode, I’m sharing three main myths about focus groups that are circulating around which need to be debunked and clarified. And if you can just get through some of these, it will help you correct those misconceptions as a trial lawyer, and hopefully, you can start running focus groups and get the benefits out of them.

In this episode, you will hear:

Myth #1: Focus groups = mock jury
Myth #2: Relying on focus groups to determine the monetary value of your case
Myth #3: It has to be done in person.

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:

To learn more about different styles of focus groups, check out this quick blog.

If you are starting your own Virtual Focus Groups, download this quick checklist to help you get started: https://bit.ly/30uLFVH

Have a question or a comment? Drop me an email: 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 we sent you.

Episode Transcript

Hello and welcome. I am your host, Elizabeth Larrick, for this episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, a podcast designed to prepare trial lawyers to connect with jurors in the courtroom.

One of the methods that I talk about often on this podcast [00:01:00] and have spent actually several episodes recently is focus groups and how important they are with the ability to get up and present to a live group of folks from the community. Not only does this help you practice, It’s your presenting skills, but also helps you with your materials and getting valuable feedback from those folks who are completely uninvolved with your case.

In episodes 19 and 20, we talked about a DIY, do it yourself, building your own system to run focus groups out of your office. If you want to catch those episodes, please do so. They help with. Setting up logistics of it, but then also like how to plan and think about and craft your presentation and your questions.

One of the things that came to me though was talking about a few of the myths that I hear often about focus groups. And I probably should have talked about those in those [00:02:00] episodes. But I felt like it was important enough, so we’ll set it aside for its own episode here today. And that is we’ve got three kind of main myths that I hear often about focus groups that I just want to tackle and bust them today because I feel like if we can get through some of these, these three very important myths about them, it will really help you as a trial lawyer.

So let’s get started. be able to wrap your arms around starting to do focus groups and also kind of correct some of the misconceptions that we have that are out there. One of the biggest myths that I hear is that focus groups automatically equal mock juries and that’s what a focus group is. It is a mock jury and that is a total myth.

There are 50 or more different styles of legal focus groups that you can run. Mock juries are one really great way to run a focus group. That’s a wonderful style to use if you are on the doorstep of trial [00:03:00] and you need to just run the whole gamut through the focus group. That’s a great way to do it.

However, that’s not the only way and it’s also not really very cost effective if you are a solo or a small firm because that’s a lot of organization. Generally you’re going to have to have a pretty significant space to do that kind of set up. Plus you’re going to need to rely on some close friends to come serve as other parties or other people in that mock jury.

And ultimately it just can be a very long endeavor as far as planning goes. literally that day, mock jury, and then being able to analyze everything. So it’s kind of a large step into it. That would be really intimidating if that was the only way to get feedback on your cases, but it’s not. Um, there are tons of different styles.

There are other episodes that I run where I talk about, you know, five really simple focus groups that you can do right now that are really easy and they’re short. They’re [00:04:00] easy to do. They’re easy to set up and they’re easy to get feedback that you can use. You know, to remove yourself from getting some of that bias feedback that we have.

So that’s one of my biggest questions that I always get and a lot of folks who are looking at trying to start doing focus groups or hearing about focus groups. We have heard for so long, it’s just about mock trial, just about mock juries. It’s not, there’s other ones out there. Let’s just move forward. So another really big myth that I hear about is that focus groups will give me.

The value of my case, you know, the settlement value or the number that I should ask for at my trial. And that is a big myth. It’s really not safe to rely on focus groups to give you the numbers, the value of your case. They can assist, they can give you some bumpers, they can give you some thoughts and feedback on it.

But one of the big things that I [00:05:00] learned very early on about focus groups is that it’s like monopoly money. It’s not real to them. You can struggle and you can try very hard to make a very realistic approach and a very realistic style of focus group presentation to make them feel much more involved.

But still at the end of the day, it’s monopoly money. They’re just. Throwing things out there. It has no real impact to them. There are ways to learn more about what comes behind the numbers. That’s always a good question to ask them, but I always caution people, Hey, that’s, that’s a really, I mean, you as a trial lawyer have a lot of experience.

You have a lot of other tools in your toolbox to figure out the value of your case. This is a big hesitation area when people come to me and say, Hey, I want you to find out the value of my case. I say, Oh man, that’s, that’s danger territory. You really do not want to rely on that because it’s [00:06:00] just monopoly money.

And I really caution people doing that and other other ways, like I said, to find information Other ways to get really good feedback about what gives your case value. Meaning what are important pieces of cases or what are more pieces of information that you would want to present that have value to folks in the community.

Those are a little different than the monetary value. Uh, so let me be very clear. We’re talking about the monetary value of your case. And you can run lots of focus groups. I mean, there are tons of quantitative focus groups where you can get thousands of people to run through, you know, the scenario and give you numbers.

But even then, it’s just still really, I caution folks to put too much credibility on. that monetary value you’re getting from, from jurors. Now I can give you your guidelines, your bumpers if you want on either side, but at the end of the day I think that finding that number is really [00:07:00] something that you are best suited to do knowing what you know about the case.

And that brings me to myth number three, which I’m hearing more of lately, which is that focus groups must be done in person. You’re not going to get the same results. You’re not going to get the same value or feedback online. I totally disagree with this. Although let me just say I was in the same boat when the pandemic hit, you know, I canceled everything that I had focus groups.

Client preparation and just sat and hoped. Through April that things would change, but they just did not and doing a lot of figuring out why am I so resistant to moving to virtual? Can you get all the same information? And ultimately just went for it. Right. And of course it was rocky at first. I mean, I got to learn the technology, you got to figure out the system [00:08:00] and it was rocky, but I stuck with it.

I mean, focus grouping is the same. And just like any other skill that we need as a trial lawyer, it’s something that you got to learn and you got to practice and that’s how you improve. And it’s just like your first opening statement. It’s probably going to think, but you’re going to keep going at it because It’s important, it’s vital, and it’s just what we do as trial lawyers.

And that’s what I did. And at this point, you know, through 2020, 2021, and now in 2022 have run hundreds of virtual focus groups. Now some things aren’t as well suited for virtual. We definitely tried to do an adversarial focus group and. Ran into some troubles there as far as Zoom fatigue and other presentation styles that just work better in person, but overall have gotten great results, great feedback that have significantly helped people through the pandemic and [00:09:00] going into trials.

And we talk about that in episode 18, kind of some really simple, you know, what’s so great about virtual focus groups, convenience. Factor for everybody involved, the cost factor so much better. And, you know, like I always talk about, if you’re just now starting out, that is a great place to start. I mean, where we were when we started the pandemic to where we are now, technology has come leaps and bounds and making it so much easier for us.

Plus I am sure you have endured many, many zoom depositions. So you also have learned what to do and what not to do when it comes to handling some of that technology. But those are three of the main myths that I hear often, and I always try to say, hey, you know, that’s just not necessarily the way that it is.

We can be open to other stuff and find ways to work around some of the things like finding the monetary value of your case, or learning about your case without having to do a mock jury, or [00:10:00] let’s just do a virtual. You know, let’s just do a virtual, we’ll, we’ll work around all the things that you may think need to be done in person.

And if we got to do it in person one, then hey, we can do that down the road, but let’s, let’s move fast. And that’s the nice thing also about virtual focus groups. All right, well, I hope that this episode was helpful. If you have questions about some of the things we talked about, monk juries, finding the monetary value of your case, or learning more about virtual focus groups, please reach out.

My email is always in the show notes of the episode. If you’re thinking about virtual focus groups, I’ve got a free download that basically gives you kind of a checklist. And also some of the forms that I use for confidentiality and forms for finding participants. So happy to share that. I also put that in the show notes, but if you enjoyed this episode, please, I would ask that you leave a review on your favorite podcast app.

This way it will help others find this podcast and maybe help them prepare [00:11:00] better for their next trial. All right. Thanks again. Have a good one.

Jury Trial Preparation: Game Plan the Basics

elarrickbrand on April 21, 2022

Jury trials can be really messy. Changes happen often and frequently every day and it can be different things, whether it be the judge, the jury, or the opposing counsel. Preparation is long. It takes many hours working on witnesses, experts, order of proof, not to mention openings, closings, and jury selection. And that doesn’t even go to tackling the paperwork that you have to do as well – the motions, the jury instructions, the witness lists, the exhibit lists.

All these things are a huge part of preparing for jury trial. And when we do all this, at times, we forget about this one really big piece of trial – an overall game plan for the day-to-day logistics. Talk about parking, lunch, meeting room, printer, even down to getting a bottle of water. This is an important piece because, without these really small things, a huge amount of stress can happen.

In today’s episode, let’s take a look at some trial preparation from a logistics perspective and things you can do to avoid stress. Although this doesn’t take a lot of thought, coming up with a game plan to cover the basics is always helpful.

In this episode, you will hear:

Things to expect before trial
The importance of logistics
Things to think about from a logistics perspective
Preparing for different scenarios
Where to take lunch, checking the courtroom, construction, security, etc.

Subscribe and Review

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

Supporting Resources

Larrick Law Firm

Have a question or a comment? Drop me an email: Elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com

Episode Credits:

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants? Ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively. Then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Hello, this is your host, Elizabeth Larrick, with Trial Lawyer Prep, a podcast designed for how to prepare cases and clients in a way to connect with jurors in the courtroom.

Today’s topic, we are going to look at some trial preparation. Trial [00:01:00] can be really messy. Changes happen often, frequently, quickly, every day, different things, whether it be the judge, the jury, the opposing counsel. Preparation can be long. Many, many hours working on witnesses, experts, order of proof, not to mention openings, closings, jury selection, and that doesn’t even go to tackling the paperwork that you have to do as well.

The motions, the jury instructions, a witness list, exhibit list. All these things are a huge part of preparing for trial. And when we do all this at times, we forget about one really big piece of trial. And that’s not forming a overall game plan for the day to day logistics, like parking and lunch and a meeting room, or even I’m going to the point of like, do we have a printer?

Can we print this motion out? Can we get it filed? Even down to bottled water. And I [00:02:00] feel like this is a pretty important piece because without these really small things, huge amount of stress can happen. If you can’t find a parking spot and you’re late, you are stressed. If you need a bottle of water and they don’t have anything in the courtroom, you are stressed.

you got a problem. So these are really small things, but they play such a big role in having a solid trial and having these things taken care of in the preparation to form a game plan is really low. It doesn’t take a lot of thought, but it can take some planning. But once it’s done, you can design a system for Anywhere you’re going to have a trial and that’s what I encourage you to do.

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today with this episode. And this really comes from a place of recently I was assisting two different lawyers, two different trials, getting ready. And one of the things I always, uh, Talk about with clients or with [00:03:00] witnesses is what I call logistics. Where are you going to park?

Can you walk that far? Do you have the cash to pay for that parking? Do you know what you’re going to do for lunch? And we even go over very basic, like the trial starts at 9 a. m. That means you need to be in the courtroom by at a minimum of 8 45. You are going to meet with this staff, you guys are going to exchange cell phone numbers.

You know, you’re going to be here on this day or you’re not coming until Thursday. And we really walk through some very basic information that does not change about trial. We always talk about the first day because that is really set. We generally know what you’re going to do. After that, it’s a free for all.

So one of the things I really. I encourage lawyers to do and one of the things I always do with my clients and getting them ready for trial is walk through this basic information because after they gain this information, then we have to prepare them [00:04:00] for the mental part of constant change and the inability to always stop.

And be able to ask questions because trial happens really quickly. And as lawyers, we’re ready for that. We understand that we’ve gone through that before. If you haven’t gone through a trial before, that’s what you can expect is there may be a motion that gets filed and you have to argue it in the next morning, there may be a new exhibit.

You have to review that 600 pages that you weren’t ready for. There may be a different witness that has to go out of order. I mean, Um, things are constantly changing and preparing as best as you can for that is what we really try to do. You can’t always prepare for everything, but we can always be ready for change.

And that’s why I emphasize the importance of the logistics as a small piece that we can do to really reduce some stress. Let’s just avoid this stress that may happen in, of course, it happens naturally with clients and it happens [00:05:00] with us, whether we like to admit it or not. And so back to my talking about.

Um, helping out with these two different trials, I kind of start asking those questions with the lawyers. Hey, what do you guys do for lunch every day? Do you have a meeting room where you meet up? Does the courtroom have a room that you guys can take over and lock? Are you going to take bottled water with you?

Are you going to have pen and paper? Do you have a printer there? You know, where do you expect the clients to park? And it was a lot of really big question marks. And we had one trial that was basically going to be out of town for this set of lawyers. And so. Okay, well, let’s work on that, you know, maybe I’ll get a contact and we’ll find you a place that’s really close to the courthouse so you can walk over there, meet the clients, have lunch there, you know, leave your stuff there, walk back to the courthouse.

The other trial that I was helping with was in the same hometown, so the lawyer was 100 percent used to, oh yeah, park here. Oh yeah, I just bring my lunch because you can’t go in the courthouse cafeteria. Like, Oh, these are all really important things to help the client with too. So [00:06:00] what’s the game plan then for them?

Because there’s going to be three of them or four of them, or there’s just one of them. And do you have any staff that’s going to be helping and, Okay. If you don’t have staff, like we really need to let everyone else know what they can expect, that they can’t reach and talk to you during the trial. So these two experiences made me think, okay, let me just throw this out on the podcast because It’s just another thing to think about, but it’s also really, really simple.

And where this comes from for me was I had done several trials and we just winged it, you know, like, Oh, we’re just going to show up and maybe it’s in our hometown and we park, we always park, or maybe it’s out of town and we’re just going to figure it out when we get there. And that’s generally what we did.

But once I did my time with the Keaton law firm and we had three separate trials, In three very different places, you know, Kentucky, Seattle, Vegas. Those are all [00:07:00] very different places with all very different rules. But that was one of the things we always tackled first was logistics. Okay, scope it out.

Where are we going to park? What are we going to do for lunch every day? Where are we going to meet with the clients? Who’s assigned to meet with the clients? And That way we always knew where to go. We didn’t have to worry about where am I going to be able to go print this? We always had a printer with us.

Who is going to tackle these things? Okay, well, we’re going to assign these tasks to this person, or this is, you know, this issue goes with that person. And if it comes up at trial, you got to tackle it. It’s going to be your issue. But it was always really helpful because we did that first. And then we got to preparing everything else, order of proof, talking to witnesses, practicing opening.

And once we started on the day one of trial, we knew all the daily stuff was easy for us, right? That was not a barrier. [00:08:00] There was no stress there. And so coming up with a game plan to kind of cover the basics is always a super helpful task. Like I said before, it doesn’t take very long, but it’s really thoughtful in thinking of, okay, where are we going to meet?

Some people call it a war room. It’s just a meeting room where basically you can leave your stuff there. If you need to, you can meet with clients there. Witnesses can be there. Experts can meet there. That’s where you’re going to bring your extra printer to print things. If you need to for motions or exhibits, you got your bottle of water there ready for you.

Take it with you to the courtroom. extra paper, pens, pencils, binders, all your kind of supplies of extra things that you may need because you can’t go back to the office in the middle of trial. And it also helps at times if you’ve got a team assembled, somebody can work in that room while the trial is going on, meeting with a witness, getting them ready, or meeting that expert and taking them over to [00:09:00] the courthouse.

But it really It gives a neutral place where you can meet, have open conversations, because sometimes it’s in the courthouse, sometimes it’s not. I recently listened to a podcast for a verdict that came out of Midland, Texas, with John Bailey, and they had a pretty rural courthouse situation, so they just pulled a travel trailer over there.

And that was their place where they were able to meet, they had everything they needed there, and that’s such a great idea. Not necessarily something we could do here in Austin, or other courthouses, but it’s just being resourceful and they really took the time to make sure that they thought that through and took care of that very basic need for everybody.

And then nobody had to worry about where to go. The other thing that you can put in your game plan is parking. This is always, I feel like, an issue for most courthouses and how much is it going to cost and where is it going to be and what is the time to walk over the courthouse. Can somebody drop you off?

All these things. I know parking seems [00:10:00] like such a Really small thing. Elizabeth really, we’re spending time talking about parking for trial prep. Yes, because I have been that person that has not thought about it and just winged it. And then, oh my gosh, I had to walk 10 blocks with all of my stuff. Not a good appearance as you walk in, like super out of breath or completely flustered and everyone else straight to go.

And that really small mental thing can just. really ravage your day because it’s hard to get back from that. It’s hard to come back down from that because then you’re always behind the ball. We don’t want to start that way. So that’s why I emphasize this game plan. Another part of the game plan is where are you guys going to have lunch every day?

I know some lawyers don’t eat during trial. I don’t necessarily think that’s a good idea. Maybe at least eat something. But you want to make sure at least you know where you’re going to have lunch for the clients. Are you going to have it brought in? Is it going to be at the meeting room or the war room?

I always try my best to avoid having [00:11:00] anybody eating down at the courthouse cafeteria because you just don’t want to run into jurors or even create that possibility. So you’d have it brought in or bring your lunch every day or, you know, have a stash of protein bars or peanut butter crackers or fruit, whatever it is that would help you have some energy and kind of keep that energy up.

So food and water are always super important. Another part of the game plan is the courtroom, right? Where is the closest restroom? Is there an elevator that we’re going to have to take up six floors? Are we going to have to wait for everybody else? That’s Going to court that day, and is that going to take time if you’ve got a cart or a dolly that you need to take into the courtroom?

How easy is it to get there? Can you not get it up there? Is it all stairs? All these really simple questions that you would want to know. Before, and I know a lot of people wait until the week before trial, uh, uh, don’t do that, especially on the technology part. I mean, it’s very easy to set up a time to go in to an empty [00:12:00] courtroom and sit in there, check out all the technology, what kind of cords, what things are needed.

Do they have easels? Do they have flip charts? Should we bring our own? But also just getting that visual down because once you have the visual down, you can then use it in all of your preparation as far as thinking about standing there giving that opening or questioning that witness or asking the jury questions.

That visual is very, very helpful in just getting your mind ready for preparation. Is there an extra room? Sometimes courthouses have rooms for the lawyers to use, and they lock it for you every night. Sometimes they don’t. Some courthouses don’t even lock their courtroom, so you want to make sure you take everything out.

But these are really, really small questions that can create a lot of stress. Carrying your stuff in and out every day can be a problem, and especially if you’re by yourself, right? Taking those exhibits back and forth every day, very small things that make a huge impact to you. Other things that I always like to consider for my [00:13:00] game plan is, is there construction in the area?

What is the traffic like? Are there going to be other trials or motions that go on in the courthouse that may impede traffic for you as far as going through security every day? And these are all items, this game plan can be tackled by staff. It doesn’t have to be you. It can be you. If you are solo like me, it would be you, but it just helps you avoid the stress.

It really creates an assurance that you have the things that you need and you’re really giving peace of mind to people. client, to your staff, to your witnesses, that, hey, we, we’ve got these real basic covered. We, you know, exactly where to go. Your basic needs are met. After that, it’s kind of a free for all.

No, no, no. Just kidding. It’s not really a free for all, but sometimes it feels like that. Now you may be saying to yourself, okay, my trials are in the same courthouse every year. I always go. I know what to expect. None of that’s going to [00:14:00] change. Well, it’s post pandemic. A lot of things have changed in courtrooms and courthouses.

Some of them haven’t. But, at a bare minimum, I know security changes often and frequently at most courthouses, construction around courthouses changes often and frequently, all these really small things that could put a cog in your flow, and that’s what we want to avoid, right? So this is a really, really simple concept.

But I think that’s why it gets overlooked, because it’s just so simple. It’s simple to do, simple not to do, but doing it will create a really helpful plan for everybody to be on the same page, create some really basic expectations, and take care of some simple Simple needs that you will have during trial, everyone will have during trial and we’ll just check things off that list so then you can move to the heavier mental things that go along with trial.[00:15:00]

I hope that you found this episode helpful. If you have questions about sketching out a game plan, please ship me an email. If you found this podcast episode helpful, please rate and review it. That is a good way to lead other people to the podcast. Of course, I’d love for you to share it as well. Thanks again, and we’ll catch you next time.

DIY Virtual Jury Research Focus Groups Part 2

elarrickbrand on April 12, 2022

Today is the other half of our two-part series on virtual focus groups, where we specifically tackle the logistics or the backend of virtual focus groups.

First off, there’s a lot of different software and technology that goes into doing virtual focus groups. Although there are ways to use these resources for free, the cost of buying them is relatively low compared to hiring a professional videographer or buying your own video camera and audio system.

Then we break down the setup for a virtual focus group into four buckets: recruiting, communication, the focus group itself, and the wrap-up. We also discuss four parts of the system that you need to nail down to make sure you’re getting the most out of your virtual focus groups.

In this episode, you will hear:

Ways to recruit people who will join your focus group Setting up Google Forms to make it easier for people to respond Why you need to get a confidentiality agreement signed and how to do it Choosing the right platform for running the focus group Ways to pay people online and make sure you don’t Four parts of your system to get all of them in place How to make sure those confidentiality emails are sent How to use Zoom settings that work best for you Why it’s best to have a second person who will help you run the focus group Subscribe and Review

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

If you really enjoyed this episode, we’ve created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just go to the episode page at https://www.larricklawfirm.com to download it.

Supporting Resources:

Larrick Law Firm

If you have any questions about virtual focus groups, don’t hesitate to email me: elizabeth@larricklafirm.com.

Ready to get started on doing your own virtual focus groups? Here is a free download that can help you, which includes several resources like a questionnaire and confidentiality agreement.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants, ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively, then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success? Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Welcome to another episode of trial lawyer prep. I am your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and we are going to talk about DIY virtual focus groups.

Why? Because that’s what this podcast is designed to do. I want to give you a tip. [00:01:00] Um, literally how to do focus groups, witness prep, trial prep, to prepare your cases better to sleep better at night. And today is our second part of our two part series of virtual focus groups. If you’d like to pause and go listen to part one about what on earth are virtual focus groups and why would I want to do that?

And how would I even do one of those? Go ahead and jump back. To episode number 19, or if you feel really confident in that, or just want to listen to what I have to say today about putting together virtual focus groups and stick around because we are tackling logistics, what I like to call logistics, at least the backend of virtual focus groups.

And there is going to be a checklist for virtual focus groups that I use. Also, I think there’s some forms and the confidentiality that I use all that is going to be in the show notes. [00:02:00] There’s been a download for that. So just to kind of help synthesize a lot of this information and just kind of give you a simple checklist.

So that will definitely be in the show notes. And what I kind of want to do is give an overview. You know, there’s lots of different Software and technology that goes into doing virtual focus groups, but it’s a little bit easier to think about, okay, let’s take it step by step and then talk about the software and the technology kind of all at one piece as well.

I mean, most of this technology is free. Uh, there are ways to do it free and some of it. The thing that you do have to pay for is still really low cost compared to hiring a professional videographer or going out and buying your own video camera audio system. And I’m talking about Zoom, you know, the online video software that basically hosts and video records, audio records.

The whole virtual focus group. So let’s take it one step at a time. And [00:03:00] kind of how I think about the setup for a virtual focus group is one recruiting, we’ve got to advertise, we’ve got to recruit these people. Then I always think about communication. Meaning this kind of that lead up time before the focus group, then the focus group, and then a little bit about after.

So that’s kind of four different parts to setting up a virtual focus group. So let’s talk a little bit about recruiting. This is one of the most frequent questions that I get, which is where do you get these people? Where do you find all these people? So I’ve been using Craigslist for very, very long time to find in person.

And still use it to do virtual. So that is a good resource, depending on where you’re looking. You know, most of the Craigslist have a list for areas and, you know, easy to figure out. One of the things that has happened since probably the start of pandemic, but maybe before that, I just didn’t know, cause I wasn’t doing virtual focus groups, is that there are groups that will connect [00:04:00] your.

Craigslist posts to other websites and Facebook groups. So at times you may get bombarded your Austin, Texas. Craigslist posts may get bombarded with a bunch of people from California or New York or lots of other places. So. Just keep that in mind that you may have one ad in your location that will get several people from outside your region that are applying and that’s kind of why that happens.

They’ll pull those ads and put them into groups and put them in different posts or different websites so that other people can apply for them. Facebook is another place that you can totally advertise. You can create a free Facebook business page for your focus groups if you want to. Or I know there are a lot of firms where basically you, or if you have staff, they will join different groups that are on Facebook for jobs and basically kind of post a little something in there.

Hey, we’re doing these virtual focus groups. We just need folks to come in for three hours. Here’s the pay. You know, if you’re interested, [00:05:00] email this email. That’s another really great way to gain. people and it’s a free resource. It does take a little time to kind of build because you got to have several groups to make that kind of fruitful.

I’ve also used next door to advertise. I’ve paid for advertising on Facebook. I’ve also done online newspaper ads. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways to advertise. It just really kind of depends on if you’re looking for a group that is maybe outside of your city, if you’re trying to get people in Houston or maybe Seattle, like you may just want to research what’s in that area.

As far as job boards, some are free, some are not, and just kind of posting your ad up there and seeing what you get. Low bar, try Craigslist. It’s very easy. You write it in there. Sometimes they’re 20. Sometimes they’re 35. Sometimes they’re 45. Just depends on the city. Anyhow, that’s a great way. And inside your ad, Craigslist does not really want you to put an email address inside the ad.

So what I normally do when I am [00:06:00] recruiting is I use Google Forms to create a form that people just click a link and go and they fill out a form and then the results are saved in Google Drive. And, One of those forms is actually in the download that is going to be the show notes. So if you’re curious about that, setting up forms in Google drive is fairly easy.

It’s fairly intuitive. There are a couple snafus that can happen and frustrate people. That’s happened to me. And it’s just a couple of clicks. And Google makes it really easy to watch videos. If you want to do that, I’m happy to jump on a call to I’m going to do a zoom call and show you basically how ours are set up, but that’s kind of the part about recruiting is how are they going to contact you?

Do you want them to send an email somewhere? So got to have that email set up, right? Gmail has free accounts. So you can pay for an account. I wouldn’t suggest using a law firm email unless it doesn’t make a big difference. Or if you want to use a Google form, or if you maybe have a website [00:07:00] that has a form on it, either way, just try to think about how people are going to respond.

Okay. People are not likely to call, they’re really likely to send an email or fill out a form. Think like the most passive way, like, Oh man, click on this and fill out a form. Great. This is easy. Now I’ve applied and I can move on with life. So that’s kind of generally thinking about recruiting. Where are you going to recruit?

How are you going to advertise? How much do you want to spend? How are they going to sign up and what information do you want from them in order to kind of have them sign up? Name, email address. I don’t ask for people’s physical address. IS for email address. Sorry about that. That kind of information.

There’s all kinds of stuff you can use. Yvette, just again, think about if you give somebody 50 questions, they’re probably not gonna answer 50 questions. They’re probably gonna , just walk away. That’s too much information, too much trouble. They’re not gonna do it. And once you have them, right. So recruiting, that’s kind of part one.

Part two then is communicating with them. Again, thinking about having this extra email address, you can set one up for [00:08:00] free on Gmail, or you can pay 6 and set your own email address on there. That’s what I do. We’ll talk about kind of a little bit what I do after we finish our four steps. Cause you want to be able to communicate with these folks.

So they fill out the form, then you want to be able to communicate with them. Hey, you’re invited. Hey, here’s when it is. Hey, I need this like email is a really easy way. Do you ask people’s phone number? Of course you can call them. You can text them as well. All those ways are easy ways to communicate with people and highly suggested.

I love using Gmail because then you have the calendar. You can send a calendar invite for people that goes on their calendar. You know, they accept it or not. You can send reminders that you can even set up templates to make it really easy to just go in there and send reminders for everything. Okay. And on that step, getting a confidentiality agreement signed is another big part of communicating with them and having them sign it before they get the zoom link.

I do not like to give out a zoom link [00:09:00] until it’s the day of just, I don’t want to be zoom bombed. I don’t want it to leak out anywhere. So I don’t give the zoom link out until the day of, which gets cut a little short, but most people, if you’ve gone through the process of being recruited, like you’ve.

Gotten it inundated by emails and calendar invites and reminders because I just think that maybe that’s, you know, over communicating when they’re supposed to be there is more helpful than under communicating and getting those questions. Well, I didn’t know when it was on your calendar. So confidentiality.

Got to have that as a signature. So there are lots of really great electronic signature programs that do not require people to download the software. They just get it in the email and they click through. Of course, most of us have encountered DocuSign. I think almost everybody, most law firms at this point have figured out a way to do DocuSign for contracts.

So same thing. You just plug in that confidentiality form. Pick where you want them to sign and email it to them. I use Adobe because I already pay for the Adobe higher inversion so that I can do redactions and [00:10:00] things like that for the law firm. And then I found out like, Oh, they have their own electronic signature format.

So I already pay for it. So that’s the one that I use. It’s fairly simple, straightforward. And again, nobody has to download any kind of program for that. There’s hello sign. There’s many, many others. So think about that as far as confidentiality and getting electronic signature. Which then leads us to, so we’ve got recruit, communicate, and now we’re doing our focus group, right?

Our virtual focus group, and picking that platform. So there’s Zoom, there’s Google Meet, there’s Teams. I’m sure there are other platforms available out there that I don’t even know about. But you just want to pick a platform that you are very familiar with, and that has the capability of video recording, audio recording, and that people do not have to download.

So that’s one of the nice things about zoom and several other things. They don’t have to download it. Just send them a link. They click it and they join. I prefer zoom. It’s just basically kind of what I started with. And now we’re [00:11:00] down the road. And this is kind of what I use. I think it’s very easy.

There’s lots of great options. There are lots of settings to kind of get used to. Most of them are very straightforward. You know, you can record to a cloud, record to your laptop. There’s chatting. There’s polls. If you want to do polls, there’s lots of great ways to use zoom. So I enjoy zoom. That’s when I recommend, but that, you know, you want to make sure you set up, check all the settings.

Get a good to go, feel really comfortable with it because you’re going to have people that have done a zoom, but sometimes there are people who a weird problem happens and they don’t know how to change a setting. And I can try and troubleshoot, but most of them have to reschedule those people because.

We’re basically starting the zoom. I have people come in early so we can check all their technology. And then we start at a real specific, you know, 1230. So I open it up at 12 so people can start joining and check technology, check ID if you want to do that. And then we start right on time. But. [00:12:00] That’s the thing.

Like we end right on time as well. So if anything’s starting to kind of get in the way, Oh, there’s so much technology or, Oh, I can’t hear you. It’s like, Hey, I’m really sorry. We’re gonna have to reschedule. Cause we’ve got to go, we’ve got to get started at 1230. So either way, and you can always kick people out of zoom too.

So all that to be said, like you want to make sure that when you are. In your focus group, you are in it. You’re using it. You’re using all their time. You’re making sure they’re focused. You’re not losing people. The technology works. You know how to help people through that technology, freezing all that stuff.

So, and have all your share screen, all those little things. So anyhow, that’s like literally the virtual focus group. And then kind of last part, which would be the wrap up, which would be paying people. There’s all kinds of ways to pay people online, Zelle, PayPal, Venmo, cash app. I just pick one and go with it.

I only do one payment. I just do PayPal. I don’t do any other, there are no other options because it just, you can just spend off spending so much time on [00:13:00] that. And if you don’t have the app and it’s not linked up, PayPal seems to be totally fine. It’s also. Venmo. It’s the same company, but some people don’t want to use PayPal and that’s okay.

We tell people very up on the front in our ads on Craigslist and Facebook, Hey, we only use PayPal. That’s it. We don’t use any other way to get payment. So don’t ask. It ain’t available. And that helps again, cut, streamline things down for us. Cause we pay people in the last 15 minutes of the focus group so that when they’re leaving, I confirm with them on video, Hey, did you get your PayPal?

Then it’s recorded. Hey, I got my PayPal. Great. I haven’t had too many problems with PayPal or with people. Hey, I didn’t get my PayPal, you know, that kind of stuff. So it seems to have worked out really well as far as using that. Also you can do follow up. Of course, emails with people once they are done with the focus group.

Hey, do you have a good time? Hey, if you wanna recruit people, that’s a great way to do it. Send an email saying, Hey, if you had a good time, send somebody over. Have a referral [00:14:00] program. We have a referral program. If people send over a first name and an email and I can email that person and they actually show up and the referral gets a $10 electronic gift card.

Just little things like that to help. Kind of recruit other people is great. It’s a good way to find people. Not necessarily super cost effective, but one of the challenges about virtual is so easy not to show up is so easy for people just to say, ah, you know what? I just don’t want to do this today. So, uh, so you gotta have to think about over confirming like, Hey, you want to have eight people in here.

Yeah, you might need to think about having like 10 to 12 people confirmed just to make sure you have that eight people to show up. So that’s kind of the one of the drawbacks of virtual is some people don’t show up, which also means picking the day you have your virtual focus group on can have a heavy impact.

I don’t ever do them on Mondays just in case people had hard weekends. Doing them around holidays is also kind of a challenge. All [00:15:00] right. So let’s kind of go back through in our four parts and talk about thinking about this system, these four parts of your system and getting those in place and thinking through what is it, the technology that I need to do this, how much is it going to cost me and how much, of course, you’re going to pay people.

We talked about PayPal, how much you’re going to pay them. And playing with that, is it 20 an hour? Is it 25? Is it 30 an hour? Obviously, the more you pay, the more likely you’re going to get more people responding, which means you have to vet people more, you know, look through all those people. And then the other part of kind of this back end, this fourth step, is also just keeping a list of all these people.

So that you don’t have repeats or if you have bad participants, like letting know, like, Oh, this is a no, no, we have a no list around here. Maybe that person goes on the no list. You’re not going to do another one. And then also we kind of have a rolling, Hey, if it’s been six months or eight months, you can come back and participate again.

So that’s also helpful for you to track that. If you had some people that, you know, we’re good participants, they showed up on time. They stayed the whole time. They gave feedback. You want to keep [00:16:00] track of that. So thinking back through our system of recruiting, communication. Zoom, I mean, literally the focus group and then the aftermath, right?

Paying people and keeping track of people. Almost all these things are really inexpensive. Like I said, I would suggest using a free email address separate apart from your law firm. You can use a free one. You can pay 6 to get one from Google or from Gmail as well. If you want to set your own email address.

And then that’s going to help you, of course, communicate with them, do calendar invites, do reminders. You need to have some kind of technology to do electronic signatures for confidentiality. And then of course, some kind of platform for the actual virtual focus group that will do audio and video recording.

I use SuggestZoom and then of course, paying people, PayPal, Zelle, Cash App, whatever you choose, just go with it. It’s really nice because obviously you have a receipt for all that. All right. So of course, there’s like little fine tuning things that I would suggest, which is [00:17:00] Get this system in place and then do a test run.

So first couple of my focus groups, we had maybe three people, maybe three or four people, because we knew that we can have some glitches or some other stuff. So we had easy presentations. Cause again, we weren’t really sure how it was all going to work. So do a test runner too, and just get a few people in there.

If you want to use your office, you can do that, but that will help you get used How long does it take to do things? Meaning how long does it really take for people to return a confidentiality longer than you think? Also, those confidentiality emails can get stuck in spam or junk, which is another kind of thing.

So maybe send the confidentiality out the day before, you know, how are you going to vet people? How long is it going to take for you to pick people when they respond to a Craigslist ad or to a Facebook ad? And then zoom settings. I mean, there’s so many different ways to use zoom. There’s so many different settings, what works best, what doesn’t work best, how to save the chat, who needs to host, who doesn’t need to host.

[00:18:00] There’s lots of little kind of technical things that can happen if I’m not the host of a zoom, but I’m moderating and I tell everyone to chat all the answers to me privately when we close it out. Those may not save at all because it wasn’t to the host. So you want to make sure like, okay, who’s going to be the host, who’s going to be the moderator, save that chat, have that ability to save that chat.

So there’s lots of little settings on zoom, like I said. And then I always have someone else to help in my focus groups, whether it be either the other lawyer who’s doing it with me, or maybe a staff member that always helps to have a second set of eyes because. Maybe something happens. Oh gosh. Like, and somebody else has to jump off to go do the PayPal’s not working or, or something else.

So it’s always nice to have a second person. You don’t have to, I’ve definitely done them solo. And as long as most people are very patient, most of our participants are very patient. They get it. They’re not in a hurry. They’re getting paid fairly well to hang out with you. And they know that you’re going to end on time at three 30.

So it’s not like you’re going to be there all day with them. So. [00:19:00] Let me talk a little bit about how I run mine, how I do my backend. So to give you an idea, a little bit more about how my setup is. So I have a separate website altogether. I have a whole separate company. It’s called Advantage Focus Groups, and it has a website.

We have a Google email, you know, info at Advantage Focus Groups. The PayPal is all through Advantage Focus Groups. The Adobe is through Advantage Focus Group. There’s nothing law firm at all. Now, the confidentiality does mention a few things. We try not to say, Hey, you’re coming into a mock trial, unless we really are doing a mock trial, which again, most of the time you’re, I don’t use the virtual focus groups for that, but we do a Craigslist ad and we set up a Google form.

So people fill out a form. It collects name, email, telephone, marital status, kids, education, political affiliation, job. That’s really kind of about it. You may have like another one, like, [00:20:00] Hey, are you, we always ask people to, Hey, do you know that this focus groups in central time zone? Cause got people from coming all over.

You want to make sure they understand central time zone. And Hey, do you have a laptop, an internet connection and a tablet you can join like no cell phones. We kind of put that also in our, so just to double check, Hey, listen, we really don’t want you to join with a cell phone. It makes it really difficult for people to see the presentation on a cell phone.

Once they fill that out, then we go through and we start vetting, like who fits, who doesn’t fit. And we actually will call people as well, just to double check to make sure we’re getting a real life person that’s in the United States. That actually takes a little bit of time. So we try to have a pretty good lead out on most of our virtual focus groups, just so we can vet people.

And then we just start communicating with them. We email them reminders. We email them calendar invitations. I do my confidentiality. I do my Zoom link on the day of, and it can make things a little bit [00:21:00] hairy as far as coming down the line and having people show up, but that’s kind of how I know people are going to show up because we generally over confirm by two, three, four seats to make sure we have enough people to show up.

And then we just use the zoom and then pay with PayPal and then follow up with people and keep a list on Excel. You can keep a list in Gmail or G drive. That wouldn’t be very hard either. So that’s kind of a really large overview of the backend logistics for DIY virtual focus groups. Again, I will put a checklist, I’ll put the Google form, the confidentiality, all those things are going to be in a download in the show notes.

If you are interested to just have a little more information or just kind of an overview as well to have it all in one place. So if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me. My email will be in the show notes, or if you have additional questions about virtual focus groups, please let me know.

And thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it. I hope that this two part series was helpful [00:22:00] for you and maybe encouraging you to do virtual focus groups for your cases and starting out to do that in your office. It’s really cost effective way to get feedback, doing it on your own. You don’t need a place.

It’s all virtual. So thanks again. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, subscribe, share with a friend. Thank you.

DIY Virtual Jury Research Focus Groups Part 1

elarrickbrand on April 9, 2022

What is a do-it-yourself virtual jury research focus group? What does it look like and how do you make one? This is the first part of our DIY Virtual Focus Group two-part series, where we break down why we’re doing virtual focus groups, what virtual focus groups are, and how we do them.

Be sure to also tune into Part 2 of this series as we dive into how to set up virtual focus groups in terms of logistics or the back-end stuff. Think about setting up Zoom, Paypal, and confidentiality agreements.

The goal at the end of this two-part series is to give you a complete picture of how to do your own virtual focus group so you can finally get started. They’re so easy to set up and the benefits are just as great so this is definitely something you need to try doing to better prepare for your cases.

In this episode, you will hear:

What are virtual focus groups?
Why now is the time to start running them and preparing your cases
The benefits of focus groups: clarity, certainty, and confidence
Reasons for doing focus groups
Some simple approaches for starting virtual focus groups
Quick turnaround time
Why do you need to run focus groups early on?

Subscribe and Review

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

If you really enjoyed this episode, we’ve created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just go to the episode page at https://www.larricklawfirm.com to download it.

Supporting Resources:

Here’s a free download to help get your law firm started!

If you’d like to learn more about different styles of focus groups, check out this quick blog.

For any questions or comments, please email me: elizabeth@larricklafirm.com.

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas.

Hello and welcome to a new episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, the podcast designed to help trial lawyers prepare better cases so they can sleep better at night. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and I’m excited to talk about a two part series that This episode number [00:01:00] 19 and next episode, number 20, we are going to DIY virtual focus groups for you.

That’s right. Do it yourself, virtual focus groups. We want to break it down to make it super easy. This episode is going to be about why we’re doing virtual focus groups, what it is that focus groups are, virtual focus groups, how to do them, meaning presenting and, and that kind of stuff and questions. And then next episode, we will dive into the, how to set I’m on the website, logicianst Mcdonald’s, and you can find me on my blog at logicianst Good luck with your journey.

Good luck for you. Bye bye. I love using focus groups for my cases and naturally, all of that in person focus groups came to a halt pretty much [00:02:00] two years ago from the date of me recording this episode. Kind of weird. Didn’t know that was going to happen. And I just thought, well, we’ll be back. April will be back.

May will be back. And uh, We weren’t. So I ventured into doing virtual focus groups, never done it before, never even thought that that would even be possible or would work out or get the good feedback. And I just jumped in. I had a lot of help pushing me to do virtual. So big shout out to Lexley Overton for her help during that time to get me to jump in and it worked out.

I’ve done over. 200 or more virtual focus groups. I’ve done some in person focus groups recently and It’s great. They’re fantastic. They’re so easy to set up. The benefits are just as great. So that’s why I really want to pass on this information to my listeners to help them do their own. Because that’s really ultimately kind of how I got [00:03:00] started several years ago in person was just me and a group of other folks, a bunch of solos wanted to do some focus groups.

So we’ve collected all of our resources. Somebody brought a conference room, somebody else brought the video recorder and I just brought the, okay, I’m going to figure out how to do this and collected the participants and got them to show up. And it was great. And of course we fumbled around a little bit, but we still got feedback and we got better as we went along.

And so anyhow, that’s really what we want to focus on today is passing on an even easier way to do focus groups. And that would be virtual. So, let’s kind of talk a little bit about what do I mean when I say virtual focus groups. Traditionally, we think about mock trials, and what I’m more focusing on when we talk about virtual focus groups are smaller case preparation style legal focus groups, where we’re looking at either real specific issues.[00:04:00]

Real specific pieces, maybe it’s just mediation. And we’re trying to make the case better. Trying to get feedback, trying to make sure that things are looking the way that we think they should for a jury. And it’s much more bite sized. There’s a lot less pressure on you as a lawyer to prepare it, to get it ready, and also it’s done at a time where you can synthesize the information.

Apply it immediately. Maybe you go do some more depositions and come back and run a different focus group or inject that new information you have in that focus group. So they’re intended to be bite size. They’re intended to be used more than once. And most of the focus groups when we do them virtually are really down into bite size, either an hour, you can do two hours, three hours.

You can do them longer, but we’ll talk about what happens if you do it too long. Everybody just kind of zones out. So that’s what I mean by, like, the types of legal focus groups, which is something that’s easy, digestible, easy to prepare, that can be [00:05:00] done in an hour, can be done in two hours, or, you know, multiple cases in two hours.

So that’s really kind of what we’re talking about when we say legal focus groups or virtual focus groups. And I really think that now is the time. That all law firms have the ability to do this. No matter how big you are or how small you are, even if you’re a solo like me, you still can put these together in a way that is very cost effective.

It gets you the information that you need. And really you’re going to gain a lot of confidence in the case that you have, which is fantastic. So, Zoom is everywhere. All our kids are doing Zoom for class, even college is doing Zoom. We all see our doctors through Zoom or some other kind of platform like it, Google Meet, you name it.

There’s all kinds of online video technology out there, which means it’s everywhere. Everybody’s got it. I have not run into a single problem about people not having experience with Zoom or know how to [00:06:00] use it, which is great. I mean, that would probably have been my concern before if I was trying to do virtual, which is like, wow, nobody has the technology, but now it’s just easy.

Everybody’s got it. Everyone’s used it to try to talk to loved ones. When we were really during lockdown in 2020 and at times in 2021. So the technology is readily available. You don’t even have to worry about it. It’s free as well to anybody who’s joining in. It’s really cost effective for law firms and solos, you know, before.

You’d have to have a space, maybe you can have a space at your office, but basically you’re going to have to feed folks. You’re going to have to host folks. I mean, there’s a time and there’s an energy factor in that for you and your staff. Maybe you have to get in the car and go somewhere. If you have to do that, I mean, all those things are really going to cost you, but with virtual, just a click of a button.

So it really makes it very helpful convenience wise for you and everybody else. If you’re going to do a focus group with another lawyer. They could be anywhere. Be a lawyer up in [00:07:00] Nebraska, up in California, and all they have to do is just tune in with you. So it makes it really easy to collaborate with folks across the country if maybe you all need to get together to do a focus group.

You don’t have anybody locally that needs to do one. It’s easy to collect folks up to join in with you, cut those costs if you need to. Or split up the responsibilities, which is also a great way to make it cost effective. Virtual is also going to give you that same fantastic feedback that you need.

There’s always a worry about, well, we’re going to miss the body language or the group is not going to have the same interactions. There is a slight bit of that. I mean, naturally, because we’re virtual, but really I’ve not had a problem where people were very disconnected or did not voice their opinions.

And it actually is. It’s really helpful because you really are seeing their face and it’s all, their faces are recorded up close. I mean, that’s really difficult to do unless you hire a [00:08:00] videographer to basically zoom in on every person who’s speaking and even then that’s really difficult. So the recording is fantastic in that sense of gaining the feedback, but also being able to see that visual of their face reacting to other people, which sometimes gets missed when you’re in person.

You’re still going to get the same great feedback that you would need if you were in person. So again, super beneficial. Super cost effective and convenient as far as for you and staff. And I mean, you can put them together on a dime. That’s really, really easy. And a lot of folks, everybody out there is looking for extra work.

They’re looking for other stuff to supplement what’s going on or There’s still a lot of people that haven’t entered back into the workforce, or maybe they’re changing their job and doing something else and they have opportunity or time on their hands. I’ve run into lots of participants who are changing jobs right now, or they’re interviewing for another job.

So they have some time on their hands and you know, obviously [00:09:00] technology is easy. They’re going to click on and, you know, make a couple extra dollars. So there’s lots of people out there looking for this type of work right now. So we know we’re going to do them and we know that they’re helpful, but really why are we doing them?

I talked a little earlier about how virtual focus groups can really be bite size, meaning very easy, one hour shots at information or feedback that you need. And one of the things I always stress about focus groups and still the same way about virtual focus groups, which is finding some clarity in all focus groups, no matter what you walk in as a lawyer and you give your presentation, whatever it may be.

Let’s say you give an opening. Let’s say you give a timeline. Let’s say you just walk in and you just have a conversation with them. Just ask them some questions. What they give back to you is basically their understanding, which generally is always going to be a simplified version of what you gave them.

That alone. is so significant because we tend to [00:10:00] complicate things. I think that’s a result of being in law school and being told to look at every minute piece of everything and turn over every rock and look for everything and complicate things. And, No matter what happens, you’re going to gain simplification from focus groups.

They’re going to make things simpler back to you. And that alone is really, really helpful for any case, simplifying the presentation, simplify the issues. You’re always going to gain some level of clarity. on your case. So that’s always helpful no matter what you do with any focus group, virtual or in person, you’re going to gain that clarity, that simplification.

Another thing we use focus groups for, and I mean, definitely for me, I personally need to use focus groups to gain certainty, right? So I have my point of view on a case and I think, well, that’s going to be the jurors point of view, but there may be something that is causing some doubt. Right? [00:11:00] So, for example, you’ve got this point of view, you’ve been working up the case, you’re ready to go to mediation, you’ve taken depositions, and you walk into mediation and the defense comes in very strong, almost aggressive.

Causing you a little bit of doubt, like, wait a minute. Maybe this isn’t as strong as I thought. Maybe I have some doubt going on. I’ve been stuck in my own mind, my own point of view. Holy mackerel. What do I do? Well, let’s take to a focus group. Let’s just see what a focus group says. If there’s any credibility in that defense argument, they’re going to tell you about it.

And in that sense gaining some certainty about, is my point of view. The juror point of view, or is it just a little bit flawed? Am I just a little bit too sucked into things? Did I miss something? That level of certainty is so helpful. Especially if you’re investing time, you’re investing money. I mean, that means time and money, you’re not spending on other cases and [00:12:00] I mean, these are huge resources that we really need to make sure that we’re picking the right case to do that with.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been in that place where I have spent a lot of money and a lot of time on a case that I just got lost in that point of view. And guess what? It wasn’t the right point of view. So, you know, avoid the pain, get some feedback along the way. And that’s why I love virtual because it’s just.

It’s simple. You can do it one hour and you’re going to get so much back. That’s helpful to you. And then ultimately confidence, knowing that you’ve done the hard work, you’ve done the preparation and what you give the focus group comes right back to you. That is really going to give you a lot of confidence to turn down that low end offer to feel good about we’re going into trial and that confidence.

You’re going to be able to translate that also to your client, right? So knowing that you’ve kind of really prepared in every single facet. And take into account the jury along the way with you, which [00:13:00] I think sometimes is what we forget. It’s okay. It happens. I’m a sucker for it, too. It’s happened to me, too.

But, like I said, focus groups will help you with that. So let’s kind of turn and talk a little bit about how. How are we going to present? What are we going to present? In these virtual focus groups, I’ve got a couple of resources and I’m happy to post them in the show notes as far as a blog that goes into a little more detail about some of these styles of focus groups.

We’re going to talk about. So I’ll put that in the show notes, but I do want to think about let’s think about crafting this. So we’ve got a virtual focus group. Let’s just take it down and let’s just say you’re going to use two hours. And okay, so you’ve got these folks for two hours. Maybe you’ve got a burning case, like it’s about to go to trial, or maybe it’s going to go to mediation, or you’ve got a couple that are leading into mediation.

Those are great ones to pick. Something that’s on fire and you need to have something immediate. Sometimes it’s great if you’ve got a new case that just came in the door and you want to make sure and get some feedback [00:14:00] before you file that lawsuit. That’s another really good one. And here’s why. So the earlier in the case, sometimes it’s a little bit easier to craft a presentation.

So one of the easiest presentations you can do in a short amount of time, 30 40 minutes, is to basically just put together what I call a snapshot. Just a real brief set of facts. Neutral both sides, but mostly all facts, no opinions yet. And couple that with some pictures of things to give everybody kind of a visual of what’s going on.

And you just basically kind of read through those facts, show the pictures, and then just kind of ask some questions about what happened. And when I say ask some questions, I mean, ask open ended questions. What happened here? What else would you want to know? If you already know that you’ve got two sides of the story, you can tell people the two sides of the story.

The thing about the snapshot is to, you’re always going to give an even amount of information on both sides. So if you tell, well, the red car says that they had the green light. Well, you need to go ahead and tell me what the [00:15:00] black car says to you, right? To even that out. That’s why you’d want to have a picture of the red car and a picture of the black car, right?

Snapshots try to be very even handed in the information presenting kind of both sides in a very neutral way just to see, Hey, what do you get back? And the earlier in the case is a little bit better because then they’ll tell you, Hey, I’d want to know about this witness or is there a camera somewhere?

And. Sometimes there’s not. That’s okay. Just keep that in your mind because if you don’t have that information or it’s not available, that doesn’t mean the jurors aren’t still going to have that question in your mind. That’s still good information to write down and keep in there if you do have to go to trial to remember that.

If you want to even make it more simpler, just create a timeline of the case and put the timeline in front of them. Use PowerPoint or You don’t even have to get that fancy with PowerPoint, just put a Word document up there that basically lays out the timeline of the events of the case and just ask people what happened, right?

Very big open ended questions. Another great, small, simple virtual focus group is to do witness credibility. I recently did one of [00:16:00] these for some folks that were going to go to deposition. They had four separate clients, four very different clients. This was not a family situation. This was just a case that had four clients with four different claims.

It was an employment case. And all we did was we took five minute videos of the clients and then played that video. And they answered three simple questions. What’s your name? What’s your job? What’s this case about? What’s your claim? That’s it. Three very simple questions. They answered however they wanted.

And we put that in front of the focus group and we said, Hey, are they credible? Is what they’re saying makes sense? Is it clear? What else would you want to know? Those are four really simple questions. That’s all we did. And that was our time. And then we got some great feedback to help with these individuals with their deposition prep so that we knew, hey, there’s a tendency here maybe to go off story.

So we need to back on the facts. We got to make things really clear on the [00:17:00] front end when these folks are talking in their deposition. So that’s another great one. I’ve also used witness credibility where we kind of paired it up with a snapshot, meaning We had a very disputed car wreck case. Have you ever heard one of those?

And some guy was going straight and then ran off the road. And anyhow, at the scene, only one side of the story got told and the client was very adamant. That’s not how it happened. I have a Google map and the police really wouldn’t listen then, but they did listen later. So anyhow, we really did have two kind of separate stories about what happened.

So we told the story with the visuals, right? Meaning here’s the story, here’s the visuals, there’s all the pictures. And then we played some video clips from, here’s what driver in the white truck says, play. Here’s what the witness says, play. Here’s what the driver of the black truck says, play. And then we said, okay, what happened?

Who’s telling the truth? Who’s the most credible person? What’s going on? And so helpful, [00:18:00] right? Because That was basically going to be trial. So there’s ways to pair it up to make it easy for you to put together, right? Those were just putting together the facts, gathering up a couple of pictures, the testimony in that last one I just talked about was actual deposition testimony.

So all that just had to be clipped out, put together. I mean, you can share a screen so quickly with zoom, so you don’t have to put it in anything fancy. If you just, as long as you have the window open, zoom will open that window and you can play that video, make it super simple. And with the shorter ones, what I always tell people.

If it’s an hour, you really only need maybe 20 minutes of information because you really want to spend most of the time talking and with virtual, it’s really easy to make sure every person talks. And that’s generally what I say at the start of my virtual focus groups. Today is really about gathering every person’s feedback.

So I’m going to individually call on everybody to give their feedback. So now they’re ready. So when we go through, Hey, My first question, you know, what happened here? [00:19:00] Ross, will you start us off? All right. Thank you so much, Ross. Okay. Ryan. Okay. And if I want everyone just to jump in, then I’ll say, hey, free for all.

Here’s a question. Anybody wants to answer it, go. But that way everybody has a chance and they know that that’s what the moderator wants. So it’s really helpful to be able to call on people. You’ve got their names right in their square. You’re not going to forget someone’s name. Sometimes that happens in person, of course, you know, their name tags big enough, but with the shorter ones, just big, broad questions, you can write the questions out in front of you.

That’s the other really nice thing about virtual is you can have your webcam up looking at you and all your notes in front of you. And they don’t even know you’re looking at notes and they don’t even know you’re taking notes, right? And write notes along the whole way too. So that is also a really beneficial part about virtuals.

You’ve got a lot of stuff you can have in front of you to make sure you don’t miss anything. And the shorter they are, you know, easy, short questions, gathering everybody up. Even if you had a two hour one, you could do two different cases, maybe three cases, depending on the information. [00:20:00] Three would be kind of a squeeze for two hours because you got to kind of do a few other things in there housekeeping wise.

So that would be kind of a couple of different ones. We talked about doing a snapshot, which is a very neutral set of the facts. Just do a timeline. Talked about doing witness credibility or even combining, you know, witness credibility with a snapshot. Just to do a one hour or a two hour virtual focus group just to get some real quick feedback on one or two cases.

When to run virtual focus groups. So because they are so easy to set up and you can do it so quickly and get people very quickly, ready to go, you know, the turnaround time is really quick as far as being able to say, Hey, you know what, my mediation is on March 31st. Let’s do a virtual focus group next week.

Done. You’ll have it done. You’ll have time to process all the feedback, maybe make clips if you need it for the mediation, plenty of time to do all that. And again, because such a quick turnaround, it’s really easy. So, that’s nice, but really what I was explaining was [00:21:00] when you would do them, you can do them any time.

Right. Talked about how the earlier you do the virtual focus groups, you can do more of them again, because we’re talking about doing bite sized one, we’re not talking about doing six hours, you know, four hours. You can, if you have enough information, but sometimes the, we have cases that just come in, we just have really a brief set of facts.

Maybe there’s something glamorous about it. We want to test it out. Maybe it’s an unusual claim. We want to know more about what people think. think about the claim. That makes it really easy to jump in there and get something done 30, 40 minutes, an hour, but you can really conduct them anytime. And we talk about how if you want to do multiple ones and you’re gathering information along the way to kind of set up and make a blueprint, a plan that was another episode earlier on in this podcast about how do we make a blueprint

So if you think about it, if we’re going to do virtual, we’re going to do one hour for a case, yeah, it’s not unrealistic to think that you could do [00:22:00] five virtual focus groups for a case. Think about opening statement, doing a timeline, mediation presentation, witness credibility, and a snapshot. There’s five.

You know, boom. And all those can be done along the way as you get more information and building a better presentation to get better feedback. So there’s really no wrong time to do them. It is a little bit disappointing if you wait too long to do one, because then we talked a little bit earlier, been stuck in our point of view, if you get stuck in your point of view and you spend all this time, money and effort, and then you do a focus group to realize, uh, I was focusing on the wrong thing.

Okay. That’s a bummer. Let’s not do that. Let’s avoid that bummer moment that like, Oh man, I just missed the mark. I’ve been there, had that pain. So I really try to do focus groups early. And that way I can have that feedback in my mind as I’m getting ready for deposition. As I’m thinking about [00:23:00] mediation, I’ve got even just the smallest things or clarity in my mind about How to make the issue simple, how the jury talked about this set of facts, super, super helpful, even if it’s just an hour long.

So, okay, let me just do a little recap here for this episode. We kind of talked about what a virtual legal folks group would be. Why now is a fantastic time to start running these things to prepare your cases better. And we talked about why are we doing them? And then a little bit about like how to, how do we think about putting together this time and do we use it for, and what are some simple approaches for, if we’re just starting out with focus groups, we’re just starting out, like what’s the easiest thing to do?

Low impact on you so that you’ll do it. And then ultimately when, which is. Whenever you want, because they’re easy to put together, your staff will get it down and throw one together very quickly for you. And when we [00:24:00] start our next episode, we are going to dive deep into the back end setup, the logistics, literally how we are putting these things together on zoom so that you can feel confident in that setup.

And then you can boom, start doing them. Paired that with this episode, number 19. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I hope that it was helpful and gave you a little bit more information about DIY virtual focus groups and how they’re easy. You can do them. They’re great for your cases. They work wonders on your mental status.

So reduce some of that stress. So again, thank you so much for tuning in this episode. If you enjoyed it, please rate, review it, subscribe at that little plus button at the top corner. And also share it with other lawyers that, you know, always helpful to have other people join in the podcast. So thanks again and have a good [00:25:00] one.

Benefits of Virtual Focus Groups LIVE Replay

elarrickbrand on April 7, 2022

In this episode, I’m sharing a very short and simple message that I delivered just a few weeks back on social media where I discussed the benefits of virtual focus groups.

Especially in the face of this pandemic where our safety is compromised, we have the opportunity to run virtual focus groups, which are so easy to put together. But do they work? Absolutely!

In this age of technology, there’s practically nothing we cannot do on the Internet. And being able to leverage that to run focus groups puts you at an advantage – logistically, safety-wise, and even time-wise.

If you haven’t done it yet, consider running focus groups virtually so you can make better use of your time, energy, and money – while still getting all the information and feedback you need to prepare for your case.

In this episode, you will hear:

Why use Zoom for virtual focus groups
Logistics: No location is needed
Safety: It keeps us COVID-free since you’re just in your office
An opportunity to put together a variety of focus groups
The availability of time
Other great features when using Zoom for focus groups

Subscribe and Review

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

Episode Transcripts:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Sometimes the shorter and simpler the message, the more likely we are to receive it. And that’s what today’s episode is going to do when we talk about focus groups. Tune in. Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants, ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively, then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success.

Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world. Understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process. Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas.

For this episode of Trial Lawyer Prep, we’re going to be listening to a [00:01:00] very short and simple message that I delivered just a few weeks back on social media live, but I felt like it was important enough that we play it here to this audience just in case you missed it. Because Focus groups can give so many wonderful benefits, and sometimes we get lost, forced in the trees.

So let’s listen in for this short, sweet message about the benefits of focus groups. Hello and welcome coming to you live from our home. Hopefully you’re joining me either on Facebook or on LinkedIn. If you don’t catch it live, that’s okay. Check the replay. I just want to jump on today and talk really quickly about benefits of virtual focus groups and why do I want to talk about this?

Well, As you can tell, if you haven’t noticed, we’re still stuck in a pandemic of sorts and riding the surges and the dips and the waves of all the things that are going on with trying to have in person [00:02:00] meetings, events, you name it. And so let’s talk about it because I feel like virtual focus groups can offer you such great benefits right now for feedback on cases that you need.

Let’s talk just really briefly about how easy it is to put together a virtual focus group right now. Hopefully at this point, you’ve been on a zoom for either your kid’s school or for job or work or meeting up with friends or people across the U. S. or even across the world to get some connection with people because we haven’t been able to meet in person.

But also. I don’t know if it’s happened to you, but we’re meeting our doctors online through Zoom, even financial planners, a lot of the business people, our consultations are all via Zoom now too. So the technology is widespread and it’s really, really easy to use. So I use Zoom, highly suggest using it for virtual focus groups because it has super easy built in [00:03:00] technology.

For automatically recording and there’s lots of varieties for recording that they make it easy to record up into the cloud with them or it’ll just go straight and save to your computer or laptop that you’re using. They make it easy to chat with people to set up unique IDs and be able to screen people before they get in.

So the technology is super easy to use. Also, you know, as far as logistics for virtual focus groups, there’s no location. When I got this location here in Austin, I schemed out to have a big room for having focus groups and it’s kind of sitting empty now, but it’s so nice to be able to throw together a really big room.

Fast, quick focus group. You know, if you need to do one tomorrow or next week and you just get online, start recruiting, send emails, and then set up that quick zoom link, which means it saves time for travel for me, for any other people who are going to join in and watch it makes it super, super easy. So I love [00:04:00] it from a logistics standpoint of saving time and about getting placed together and getting food for people.

Virtual makes it so much easier. And From a huge standpoint of safety wise, you can sit in your office and tune in and all our participants can tune in from home as well. So it definitely keeps us coven virus free in our virtual environment. I think virtual focus groups also give a great variety of the ability to do a one hour focus group.

two hour, three hour, you know, four hour focus groups. Sometimes the longer ones can get a little bit harder to keep people to pay attention to, but it gives a variety versus it’s really hard to sometimes put together a one hour focus group for one hour. There’s a lot of effort that goes in to get the location ready to get people there.

This way people just click and join. So super easy to set up a variety of different. time availability, plus you can recruit people from all different time zones, different locations, and that [00:05:00] makes it obviously something we couldn’t do when we were in person. The other thing I love about the variety for virtual focus groups is using the chat.

People can put in their answers and it saves the chat for you. And so it makes it a lot easier versus like people taking notes and showing their note up to the screen. The chat is great for that. Also, you can take polls along the way. We’ve actually even created Google Forms so that if we need to take a very quick survey that’s a little bit longer, we just.

Put that link in the chat, they click on it, go fill it out, and then they never leave the Zoom screen. So it’s really great. Sharing screen is a super fantastic function, you know, create PowerPoints and visual aids to help conduct and present to the focus group. They can see everything and it makes interactive videos are easy to show.

Just share screen. So you don’t have to worry about like, okay, do I need to download it onto my laptop and put it on the USB and transport it to the place and make sure the laptop can show it correctly. It’s so easy. You know, do you [00:06:00] just share screen and get going? So a couple of other things really quickly, logistic wise, that make it easy as well.

Virtual, paying people virtually is easy using PayPal or Venmo. DocuSign makes it super easy to sign confidentiality. And so thanks for tuning in. Just want to give a few extra easy benefits of virtual focus groups. If you have any questions, put them in the chat and if you liked it, please share it with somebody you knew may need some help.

All right. Thanks so much. Thank you so much for listening in today of this episode of trial lawyer prep. I hope that you found it helpful if you would please rate, review, share this podcast with somebody else who you think could benefit and we’ll tune in next week. Thank [00:07:00] you.

Trial Lawyer Neil Anthony and Stories That Resonate With Your Jury

elarrickbrand on March 2, 2022

Neil Anthony, a trial lawyer from Florida, joins us for an excellent interview on his recent verdict. He shares about how he built a meaningful connection with his client even through telephone and Zoom meetings and how he was able to connect with the jury using stories that resonated with them. Neil also shares his experience in terms of the changes in the trial due to the COVID situation.

Neil practices personal injury law in Southeast Florida, mostly in Palm Beach County. Neil handles a ton of auto cases, premises cases, slip and fall cases, trip and fall cases, as well as a lot of sexual abuse cases, which he considers like a premises liability case. He has also done a few negligent security cases, dram shop verdicts, and a wide variety of personal injury cases.

Today, Neil walks us through the basic facts of his client’s case and how he prepared her for deposition and trial, including a small piece in the deposition that actually helped him win the case.

As a trial lawyer, it’s 100% your job to teach the client the medical records because the defense lawyer is going to read those records in detail. They’re going to be ready to try to get and capitalize on a client forgetting something. Even if they know that the client simply forgot, they will still unfairly cast them as someone who doesn’t tell the truth. And you can’t do this work effectively without knowing and teaching the client prior medicals.

Get some powerful takeaways from this conversation including how to answer questions without holding back, crafting the right questions, and how to use stories that resonate with the jury.

In this episode, you will hear:

The basic facts of Lisa’s case
When Neil figured out it was a case that went to trial
Neil’s approach to deposition prep
The small piece in the deposition prep that helped him win the case
How to answer questions without holding back
Creating a meaningful connection with a client even through telephone or Zoom
How he used stories that resonated with the jury
How Neil did his voir dire during jury selection
Asking for an amount that’s credible
Changes for this trial based on COVID
How to craft the right questions
The jury verdict of Lisa’s case

Subscribe and Review

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

If you really enjoyed this episode, we’ve created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just fill in your information below to download it.

Supporting Resources:

You can learn more about Neil Anthony here: https://www.injurylawyers.com/partner-neil-anthony/

If you have a question or comment, please let me know: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com

Episode Credits:

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] I have a very special guest today on the podcast, Neil Anthony, trial lawyer from Florida, will be joining us for an excellent interview on his recent verdict and talk a little bit about connecting with the jury and also some of the COVID things that he had to go through. So tune in for this interview.

Welcome to trial lawyer prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants, ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively. Then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s [00:01:00] Elizabeth. Hello and welcome. I am so excited for today’s episode. We have Neil Anthony joining us for a wonderful recording today about his trial that he had back during our pandemic days.

We’re still there, but of course this was well before our Omitron, Delton, all of our versions. So I want to welcome Neil to the trial lawyer prep podcast. Hello, Neil. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. This is a treat. I am super excited to have you on. Neil and I have been friends for many, many years.

We’ve actually gotten to work together on a case as well. So I got to see the inner workings of Neil’s brain when it comes to being a trial lawyer and his brilliance. He’s been hitting them out of the park for a really long time. And so I’m excited to have him come talk about this particular trial, because I know it has a place in his heart, like all of this trials do.

So Neil, you practice in Florida, if you don’t mind, just give us a little bit of snippet about, you know, what’s your specialty. [00:02:00] Well, I can’t let that go. Like, yes, all of my cases have a special place in my heart. Even cases that I tried more than 20 years ago. And I still remember so many of the moments of them blow by blow.

Um, And what was really so important emotionally and socially and for the client and something really deep within them so many times. That comes out in trial that’s so important Back from my days when I was a public defender I mean, there’s like some really special trials from back in the 90s that I still remember And so yeah, i’m thrilled to talk to you about this one, which was in april of 2021 And yeah, I do personal injury law In southeast Florida, mostly in Palm Beach County.

This case we’re going to talk about was over on the west coast in Punta Corda, which is known as a conservative venue where it’s hard to get verdicts. I don’t [00:03:00] really, maybe I don’t have so much experience at that, but I’ve had good verdicts in smaller venues. And I enjoy trying cases in smaller venues. I do tons of auto cases, premises cases, slip and fall cases, trip and fall cases.

I’ve done a lot of sexual abuse cases, which I kind of consider like a premises liability case. I’ve done a few negligent security cases, dram shop, pretty much a wide variety of. I would say that’s a pretty wide variety. I know a lot of people specialize, but I know a lot of your dram shop verdicts. I think there was a daycare for, uh, that’s how I first met you was through that verdict, uh, many, many years ago.

Awesome. Well, I’m excited to have you talk about this one only because, you know, we are really looking at trying to understand for the audience a little bit about what are the COVID differences that you had with this trial, knowing you’ve had many trials before, but also A lot of the [00:04:00] things that you did with your client and then translating that to the jury.

Let’s just back up and give everybody a good glimpse. Tell us a little bit about kind of the basic facts of the case. My client was coming from Buffalo, New York, to visit her friend in Punta Gorda. She had like a week off in February from her nursing job. And being a nurse meant everything in the world to her.

She was actually an oncology nurse. This was so important to her because decades before her older sister, who was her hero in life, died of ovarian cancer. And so back then, you know, Lisa was either a cashier or working as a security guard. Or she had a job like that and she had two kids at home and that’s what she could do to support her kids and her husband who was disabled and she was the [00:05:00] breadwinner.

Well, when the kids got a little bit older and didn’t need as much at home care, she was actually able to go back to school for nursing and like pursue this lifelong dream. And so she gets into the nursing profession and finds her way into an oncology practice. And so in talking to her so many times, getting to know her, and this was a client that I really liked, and I just enjoyed spending time with her.

So, um, I mean, I’d be on the phone with her for hours and my paralegals would be coming in, you know, you have this, that, or the other to do. And I’m like, no, that’s fine. You know, I’m enjoying myself today. I’m talking to this client. So I really got to know her and I really started to figure out she was.

Doing for her sister after her death what she couldn’t do for her sister while she was alive She was helping people with cancer Helping cure people [00:06:00] and then I talked to her manager and I found out that she was like a favorite nurse For the patients and they would ask for her and I talked to her husband who talked about how much she loved being a nurse and how when she would Come home after a day’s work.

She would light up talking about her day and I’m comparing them I know how hard a day is, you know in any job and even a nursing job and to Light up at the end of the day Like it was really telling me how much that meant to her and I talked to her daughter and her daughter was saying things like my mom’s my best friend.

I talked to her every day on the phone. I see her as much as I can. So I really got to know her. And so she’s down here in Florida. Not on my coast not on the east coast, but on the west coast of Florida and an elderly driver A snowbird who we I think everybody’s familiar with that term snowbird. Just tell us what it is All right.

Well, it’s like, you know in Florida the people that come down for the [00:07:00] winter who aren’t full time year long residents here who get out of the cold, you know, and come here for the winter. So an elderly snowbird who I had figured out through Lisa, because Lisa went and tried to tend to her after the crash, because she’s a nurse and helps people.

The elderly snowbird had lost her faculties. She was lost on the road. She didn’t know where she was. She told Lisa, my kids left me down here for the winter. I’m here all alone. And it was really, really sad. But this elderly confused driver made a improper turn in an intersection and hit the driver door of the SUV Lisa was in, and Lisa experienced it as a very violent, scary impact.

However, the dent to her door was quite minor, and she was able to drive the car from the scene. [00:08:00] And in fact, Was able to drive back to buffalo in that vehicle before it was fixed a week after the crash or the accident and then She got to her friend’s house in punta gorda and her friend opened the door and saw lisa crying and saw her husband lauren and they were both shook up and Her friend like made her go to the doctor three days later so the defense took all that and Spun it into well, it’s a minor impact You Wasn’t injured at the scene, didn’t call for an ambulance, got out of the car on her own power, went to her friend’s house, didn’t see a doctor for three days, had her entire vacation there in Punta Gorda.

And didn’t seek any care until a week after she got back home in Buffalo. And so they just saw it as this is a no injury case. And they believed very strongly that they were going to convince the jury [00:09:00] that she was asking for something from nothing, that she was making a mountain out of a molehill, that she is a woe is me type person.

Who just wanted to lay it all down and give up. Okay, and I say that because She had neck fusion after this crash. She was never recommended for a procedure like that before and she didn’t get a good result. She had resulting nerve pain down her left arm and she couldn’t do all the things that she needed to be able to do as a nurse, particularly as an oncology nurse.

So she lost that. She lost the ability to do that. And it was horrible and devastating for her to lose. It’s like a death. You know, it’s like a death of someone who’s extraordinarily close to you. And there was just an enormous loss for her and enormous grieving and pain and confusion. And then they called her in the trial, a woe is me type person who hangs it up.

And they started to try to embed [00:10:00] that. In their four dire nine. I’ve gotten a little bit farther. No, no, no. I think it’s helpful. Let me just go back and ask a couple of questions to kind of clarify. And that is, tell us when it actually happened. What year did the crash actually happen? I think it was 2016.

I think it was February, 2016. And we tried it in April of 2021. Okay. So several years gone by. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I mean, five years. Yeah. Right. And when did you learn or figured out this was a case that’s going to trial? It was not going to settle. I started to figure that out During Lisa’s deposition when my opposition counsel was asking her questions and Lisa was answering so earnestly and I thought like giving very impactful answers and I could just tell.

That the defense lawyer wasn’t accepting any of the answers she just like the very next question would [00:11:00] come out as if Lisa hadn’t said anything at all And just the tone and the way she was pitching the questions at her and pitching her voice I could tell she didn’t believe a single thing That lisa was saying i was like wow, this is two completely different worlds And it was then that I was starting to feel like the case would go to trial And then when we did a few expert depositions for trial Because the doctor her surgeon was in buffalo.

So I had to do that by video and I mean this surgeon testified fantastically And he loved Lisa. And I remember the last question I asked him was just summing up, doctor, what stands out most to you about Lisa, about your care of her, about her condition, just about her, everything you’ve seen, what stands out the most.

And he said something that really surprised me. And I thought it was so powerful. He said, I’m just really sorry. [00:12:00] I couldn’t fix her. You know, I was like, wow, this guy, this guy cares. He like loves her. Like he gets it. And he was conveying the severity of her injury all through. And he just landed on such a high note.

And still, you know, I tried to negotiate with opposition council and nothing, nothing landed. Yeah. And so I was like, they’re not accepting anything that I can so clearly see is true. I believe a jury is going to be moved and persuaded by. And yeah, I mean, it sounds to me like, you know, pretty early on, at least like your intuition was telling you in the, in the client deposition, like, okay, it seems like they’ve already got their mind made up.

Then you really start moving towards trial preparation and then it just gets solidified more and more as you keep working up for trial. Yeah. A hundred percent. I want to go back to the deposition preparation. So when you’re preparing her for her deposition, I always get this question about, do you hold [00:13:00] back or do you not hold back?

Meaning with the stories and the examples and things, what is your general approach? And then did you take a different approach for this case? Okay, can I tell you something before I answer the question directly because I definitely have an answer to it But there’s something that was so huge in the depo prep that the whole case hinged on You know because when you’re doing the lower impact cases and the client walks away from the scene And then there’s the argument.

Is it a disc? bulge or a disc herniation. And they did, they need surgery or not. It’s not like a shattered arm or something. It’s not an injury that everyone agrees is indisputable. So the client’s credibility is so critical, right? So I had all of her medical records. And when I was talking to her about, you know, have you ever had neck pain before?

She said, no, I’ve never had any pain in my neck before. My neck has always been good. Well, I found [00:14:00] in a record where she had slipped and fallen on ice like three years earlier and she was diagnosed with a shoulder injury, but all in the records, it was talking about neck pain, radiating to her trapezius, radiating to her shoulder.

It was there. And so if I hadn’t really gotten all of her records for the deposition and pulled it up on the screen and showed her in a zoom depo prep, no, look, here’s the record. You’re a nurse, you know, what cervicalgia is. This is what they were saying. He says, she’s like, Neil, I don’t remember having neck pain.

I’m like, well, you, you must address this in the deposition. And even if you want to tell them, I don’t remember having neck pain, but I know that I was diagnosed with cervicalgia when I hurt my shoulder. It was a shoulder injury. To me, the doctor said it was cervicalgia. So she was able to come out and say that because of the depo prep.

If she had said, no, I never had a problem with my neck before in [00:15:00] my life. They would have cross examined her effectively and made her look like she was a person who didn’t tell the truth So I don’t think I would have been able to win the case if I didn’t have that small piece of deposition preparation No, that’s a huge piece because I think a lot of people like kind of skip over that whole credibility piece because We don’t necessarily do the back work get all those extra records or we just rely on you know, our client’s memory which You It’s not that they’re lying to us.

It’s just that we all have memories of goldfish. Now, like we are bombarded by things like we have to make space when things happen, you know, other things just come out of our brain. It’s not that it’s an intentional life. They really just don’t remember, but in these soft tissue cases in these, you know, low impact, and it could be a car wreck could be slip and fall.

Like credibility is just so important. I really appreciate you like keying in on that and sharing that. [00:16:00] And I can also say, I mean, I believe it’s 100 percent my job to teach the client, the medical records a hundred percent, because the defense lawyer is going to read those records in detail. And they’re going to be ready to try to get and capitalize on a client for getting something, knowing that the client simply forgot and then casting them as someone who tells the truth.

unfairly. So I think it’s my job to do it. And I can’t imagine any of us doing this work effectively without knowing and teaching the client the prior medicals. Absolutely. Absolutely. Super important part, but let me, can we make you answer my question, the stories and the, you know, the, the impact. stories and the, and the damages.

Do you, you know, some people are in the camp of thinking like, okay, maybe one or two, but I want to save a lot of this powerful stuff for trial. Other people just, Hey, put it out there. We’re not worried about it. Just give it all over to them. Which way do you lean? [00:17:00] Well, I see. Yeah, that’s a great question.

I don’t have plaintiffs hold back from their damages. from how they’ve been harmed physically, emotionally, vocationally, functionally, there’s just like, I don’t have them hold back at all on anything. And so even when I prepare them, they always come in with that. Okay, just keep your answer short, right neil, right?

Mr. Anthony. Just keep my answer short Only answer what’s being asked. I was like, well, right, you know If it calls for a short answer give a short answer if it’s a blue sky, what color was the sky? It was blue, you know, you don’t need to elaborate much more, but if it is How has this affected your ability to do your job?

Well, you can take a question like that, and you might be able to speak for five minutes without stopping on a question like that. How has this affected your relationship with your spouse? You might be [00:18:00] able to really talk in paragraphs and pages. And I let them know, you know, don’t hold back on things like that.

That’s my preference and choice. And I’m in that same camp. I wasn’t trying to set you up to be in opposition of me or with me, but yeah, I know I’m, I’m definitely at the camp that do we hold back for trial? And I always say, no, don’t hold back, you know, let they need to know this is You know, one, this is their life.

This is their story. This is their truth. Let’s get it out in the deposition trial or not, but also there’s going to be more. I mean, just like you demonstrated with your case, it took five years to get to trial. I mean, we, a lot of people are facing that same issue where it’s just going to take time because the pandemic or because criminal trials take precedence and there’s going to be more.

And I always say, time is on our side. As plaintiffs, because it is like it’s time will tell, you know, in so many ways. So no, I appreciate you answering that question about hold back or not. So you mentioned [00:19:00] early on really spending a lot of time with Lisa on the phone. Is that you said you spent a lot of time with her, a lot of phone calls with her.

Is that accurate? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And what I love about this is obviously she’s in Buffalo, you’re in Florida. So do you feel like you could make that connection with her effectively using telephone conversations? I really did. Yeah. I know I made a connection with her. I mean, she’s my friend now, you know, I mean, we, we text every once in a while.

I’m getting Christmas cards for life from her. I mean, I know we communicated. And got to know each other and connected. I mean, I could tell when I met her face to face in Punta Gorda, Florida for the trial, we already had a bond and her husband too. So, yeah, we were able to connect by zoom and we were able to connect on the phone.

In a meaningful way that wasn’t kind of [00:20:00] diminished because we weren’t physically in the same room with each other Yeah, and I just point that out because I know a lot of times we can’t all be together because of covet so we use zoom and We can still make those really powerful connections and a lot of times You know, there’s a mantra, you need to go to their house, you need to go spend time with them physically.

And sometimes that’s just not really possible. Maybe you live in different places or maybe there’s an illness or, you know, something else that may prevent that from happening. But I mean, you’re proving us the point that you’ve spent. a lot of time with her. And I think the word you used meaningful time.

All right. So you learned so much about her. You’re gearing up for trial. How did you know which stories, you know, that Lisa had would resonate with the jury or maybe fit in with your, with your case theme? Well, it’s just what resonates with me. Well, Neil, you’re not the jury. Come on now, this is a jury and not a [00:21:00] lawyer’s.

I always say thank goodness to my focus groups that lawyers don’t decide things. No offense to us, but no. So tell me, you know, what was resonating with you and then you knowing in your experience that a jury would, would resonate with. I mean, figuring out that Lisa was giving back after her sister’s death in a way that she couldn’t give to her sister in life, like feeling that and putting it in those terms, hearing the story about how she worked very low paying jobs so that she could support her husband and two small children before she could get the opportunity to get educated as a nurse.

and pursue her dream and having that taken from her. I can’t imagine how themes that universal and powerful and aspirational and then how the loss of those things is so traumatic. I [00:22:00] can’t really imagine that that’s not a universal The people wouldn’t universally understand that. So I didn’t really feel the need to focus group or test those on people.

I did not do any focus groups for this trial. It was probably one of the first trials where I didn’t do focus groups in a long, long time. Well, those things were obvious to me, I guess. Sure. And I think that the gift that you were, a couple of gifts that you were given from the defense were basically their hard nosed line that like, this was, Soft tissue that there’s no injury here and she’s just a woe is me person, right?

That’s right. That’s right You mentioned earlier. They started to weave that into Deposition questions and ultimately jury selection. Tell us a little bit about some of the examples from that jury selection. Well One of the things that I haven’t said I learned from lisa it bothered her so much That they were [00:23:00] calling her a liar You In other words, they didn’t say ma’am, you’re a liar But in their tone when they deposed her when they deposed her family members and friends and just like she knew That they were in so many words calling her a liar and it was terribly hurtful to her It was painful and she shared that with me And so that along with the love of her nursing profession and then the loss of it and how painful that was for her when I knew that they were going after this, she’s making it up and she’s a woe is me type person and she’s just hanging it up.

So she can collect a paycheck or collect a disability check instead of going to work. I started weaving into my vordire things like who here has ever been in a situation where their Spoken word their truthful spoken word that was important to them was minimized or disbelieved [00:24:00] or rejected By other people, you know, and it was like people wanted to talk about it And then I did the flip of that You And I said, and who, who here has ever disbelieved or rejected somebody and then realized they were wrong.

You know because I felt like it was important to Not cast the defendant as taking a position that no one would ever take because we all do that at some times But we do everyone has a responsibility to figure it out When it becomes very clear that they’re wrong and that’s what I knew the defendant was not doing it had become very clear that they were wrong and they were Sticking to that position.

There’s a word for that But I was setting up that part of it intransigence, you know, is the word, you know, and so I was setting that up in Fort Dyer because I knew that that’s what they were doing to her. So that started there. [00:25:00] And then I set up the passions and who, who of you all have passions for giving back in life, you know, when you finally get that opportunity and the jurors were really talking about that.

And then Talking about who have you have been fortunate enough that you’ve been able to pursue your life’s purpose and got them talking about that. Cause those are all things that Lisa was doing and that were taken from her. And so then by the time that he got up and did his, so everybody, everybody ever think that, you know, uh, somebody gets hurt in a crash, they might say things that, uh, you know, make a little bit more out of it than it really is.

Y’all seen that kind of thing happen. And then he didn’t really even like wait, like they just all kind of raised their hand and he’d move on and I could see he wasn’t connecting, but then he called her a woe is me person that hung it up in so many words, like, are you a woe is me person that just hangs it up when something happens?

Or do you [00:26:00] just get up, dust yourself off and get back on the horse? You know, he was like saying that you really use those words. Woe is me. Yeah, he did. And I wrote it down. I was like, he’s going to pay for that. Like I’m going to make him pay for that. Like, no, because mad. Well, right. Because I think, you know, I mean, I’ll admit to having a bit of not physical violence, but the feeling of violence when my client is.

Being betrayed like that and wronged like that. I take that very personally What I really want to know now is how did you make them pay with the woe is me? How many times did you use that? Oh in closing, you know, just again and again and again and again And that’s what they tried to sell you and did that ever turn true?

Did she ever do one thing in her life? That was a woe is me type person Look at the way lisa has lived her life from the very beginning all the way up through today What single example have they shown you in the evidence? They want to cast [00:27:00] aspersions like that in a public forum in a court of law with no evidence to back it up What do you do with evidence like that?

You know, so I didn’t say it exactly like that because in florida if you demonize or even criticize the way That the defendants have wrongly maligned your client, you’ll get a mistrial. So you have to be careful. But I said that in so many words. Gotcha. Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about direct really fast.

How did you kind of craft your direct knowing again, that he basically put the target on her back. What was me, you know, painted the words on her back. How did you, had you already crafted direct before? Did you change any opening? Tell us a little bit about that? Not really. I mean, I had all the building blocks to build the wall of the excellence of this woman, you know, I didn’t need to use those words in my examination of [00:28:00] her.

Sometimes I have to be careful of being overly defensive. So I didn’t bring that up with her in her direct examination that he had called her that, and what’s her response to that. And have you ever been that kind of, I just showed who she was, you know, that’s a pretty big, it’s a pretty big decision.

Tell us about the time when your kids were small and Lauren was disabled. And what were the things you did to hold the family together? What were the challenges? What were the ups and downs in all of that? You know, and I had her talking about that for a while and then as they got a little older, did you make a decision to go to nursing school?

What went into that decision? Did you talk with your husband about it? Were you scared? Were you excited? What feelings were around that? Did you do it? Yeah. Tell us about that. I had her tell me about nursing school and then she graduated with honors. Wow. What an honor. You know, [00:29:00] what was it like to come home with that diploma that said you graduated with honors?

How did you feel? Were you proud? And then you found your way into an oncology nursing position. How long did you dream for that? Was that a dream come true? You know, and tell us about your work as an oncology nurse. And like it all came out and she started talking. Like she still was an oncology nurse.

Like everything was present tense. Well, first I have to mix the medicine and there’s these sleeves I have to put my hand into because the medicine is toxic and you can’t work with it directly. So you always have to be behind a screen. So I put my hands in these, you know, and then I see the patient and, you know, she’s talking and you can see the passion all over her and how sad it is that she’s talking about it in the present tense.

As if she hasn’t really [00:30:00] accepted that she’s lost the ability to do the work. So yes, it might have been a hard decision or a big decision, but it was one of those decisions that’s just very clear and like no other way about it for me, you know, not entering that defense is calling you names thing with her.

My feeling is she’s above that. I’m above that. We are here for her dignity and we’re not going to let the defense like rub any more of their dirt or smear into it. We’re not going to do that. If they want to get up and do that, they can get up and do that. I’m not going to do it right now. And you know, their cross examination of her was no more than 10 minutes long.

And I, I didn’t even do a rebuttal and I can’t like, I can’t remember the last time I didn’t do a redirect level plaintiff. I didn’t do a redirect because I felt like the cross was just, they never hit, they [00:31:00] never hit anything. So, yeah, I think that’s a really strong point to emphasize is, you know, how you make that decision.

If you hear something in opening or you hear something in jury selection and do you make that decision to call attention to it? But like you said, we didn’t want to call attention that if that’s what they want to do, let them do it or call attention to it, depending on, you know, what it is. But no, I appreciate you walking us through that because I think a lot of people would be drawn to do that because it does fit into the case scene that you have.

It does fit into, you know, the facts and, and how they’ve behaved for sure. Well, and I also wanted to say, because of the way I did my Vore dire, and I did having a life that’s Purpose driven and passion driven and then having your truthful word rejected, disbelieved, minimized, or forgotten. I had already laid the foundation of my case when he came in with the [00:32:00] woe is me stuff and picking yourself up and dusting yourself off and getting back on the horse with all that.

I think that that his voir dire would have really hurt Lisa. It would have our case because he was good at it. And It would have really struck. It would have been good for him and bad for Lisa if I hadn’t disarmed all that in my four tire. Did you know that was coming or did you just you made your plan for what year for what iron?

I didn’t know it was coming. Okay. I never tried a case against that guy before. I didn’t know anybody who had and I had no idea what was coming. I didn’t even know what he looked like. He didn’t show up until the trial. His partner of his did all of the discovery. He was like the big gun brought in to win the trial.

Gotcha. Well, keep it all the way coming through. Let’s go to closing now. And what stories or what themes did you repeat in closing that, that [00:33:00] Lisa had testified about, or maybe other people testified about to really tell the damages in the case? It’s hard to remember. You know, it really is. There’s one thing that stood out to me like in the whole trial more than anything else.

Um, her husband, just such a down to earth man, testified. I think the question was something like, what was it like for Lisa to come home from the surgery? still have the radicular symptoms and realized she couldn’t go back to work. He like, he’s just like this big guy with these big thick forearms. It’s just like, almost like his, like a Fred Flintstone, you know?

And he goes, his voice just cracked and he looked down and he goes, she was broken. And his voice broke and his voice cracked when he said it, you know, and I just sat there and it was like the, I just [00:34:00] lit up like my body lit up like I knew it was like, Oh my God, that’s just like, there’s a truth to that, you know, so, you know, you can be sure that those are the kinds of moments.

I was looking forward to talk about. In the closing argument, you know, because it’s like I just have, I could just redo my opening almost because the opening is such an argument the way I write it, you know, without being pitched as an argument, I could just redo the opening. But, you know, I’m doing those same themes again, and I’m looking for the points in the testimony that really lit me up emotionally in the trial, and I’m re showing like the pictures that meant the most.

And. I’m showing how insidious the defense theme is, and so it was a stipulated liability case. And so in Florida, when the defense stipulates the liability, you can’t say, well, they [00:35:00] only stipulated the morning of trial and they fought us for five years and now they’re only stipulating so that they can pretend like they acted nicely in front of you.

The appellate courts don’t let us do that. They’ll reverse it. You know, so the way I pitched it or said it was. Here is all this evidence of what happened to this woman and here’s all this evidence of the truthfulness Of her case and her dignity and her family’s dignity and all that she suffered and gone through All she wanted to do at the scene of this incident was help this confused elderly woman who she has nothing but compassion for But now these lawyers for the estate, they come in and they say, you know, they call her a liar in so many words, they criticize her character.

They tell you she shouldn’t be believed. And for what and on what evidence did they do that? And so when you have a case that’s so clear What do you do with evidence like that? Which is [00:36:00] something I heard like 20 years ago that like bob montgomery used to say that was like a refrain From like one of the biggest lawyers ever in florida bob montgomery.

He used to ask that question and i’ve never used that before But for some reason, it just felt right to me because it I wanted to criticize what they were doing. I wanted to show the jury like these people need to be punished for conducting themselves this way. But that’s a clear mistrial. So instead, I just said, here’s everything that happened.

And what do you do with evidence like that? You know, it’s stipulated liability. We know That Mrs. Anderson made a mistake and caused these damages. And this is how it’s been, you know, this is the trial that we’ve had over it. What do you do with evidence like that? So it just became like a, like a question or refrain.

And I did ask for money. I did ask for exactly the number that they gave us. And I put my medical bills in [00:37:00] I put my future medical bills in I put my lost wages in I put my future lost wages in and I asked for a number for Uh, you know pain and suffering and they gave us exactly The number that I asked for and I think I did a want ad argument, you know And I like want ad arguments for the intangibles for the pain and suffering because it lets me say what happened to her in a way that’s very direct and to the point and I say Something like and I’d have it written up because I write everything I say it would look something on the paper like You know, imagine that you’re in one of the old printed black and white newspapers, and if any of you remember those want ads, it would say wanted.

In this case, it would say wanted, must be in a vehicle and struck from the side, be injured, have a neck [00:38:00] injury, the neck pain will shoot down the arm into the hand. It will be progressive. It will worsen. You will have no idea when it will ever end. Surgical innovation becomes necessary. Bones must be fused with metal and screws.

The range of motion in the neck will be forever lost. The job, the career that was the most important thing will be lost. The relationship with the spouse will be altered. With the children will be altered. How much? Would it take to pay for that job and you can imagine that you can imagine how much it would take to pay for that job and something like that, you know, and so I think I said something like 350 000 in the past and 350 000 in the future.

So like 700 000 And that’s exactly what they [00:39:00] put in their verdict, you know, and then a lot of people will say oh well You know, then you ask for too little You know, uh, because if they only gave you what you asked for Like you could have asked for maybe twice as much but I don’t get too concerned with that because I feel like I have to be credible credibility’s more important than anything else in the world to me in trial And I have to pick a number that I feel like is credible and that’s what I felt like was credible So I i’m not going to second guess that But people did say that to me after, well, you know, isn’t that clear evidence you didn’t ask for enough?

I don’t know. You make up your mind. I’ve made up mine. I’m okay with it. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s also like clear evidence that they totally a hundred percent trusted you and took your word for it, you know, like. Which is really what you all you can ask a group of strangers to do when you’re making them sit in a courtroom for three or four days against their will.[00:40:00]

Right. I want to also point out something you just mentioned kind of on the fly there, which is this defendant had passed away. You went to trial in a pandemic. With an empty trial. Was there any worry about having to explain that or, you know, did the judge take care of that, that whole like suing the estate thing?

Yeah, the judge did take care of it. The judge just said, Mrs. Anderson passed away after this crash for causes completely unrelated to this crash. The law required that to maintain the claim. The plaintiff had to substitute her estate for her in the lawsuits, and I might have done a Vordire question on that.

I saw that Vordire unleashed in a trial maybe six years ago where I was second chair to the lawyer that had the case, and it felt like the jurors hated it. You know, no, I would never, no, I’d never sue somebody’s estate. [00:41:00] I don’t like it. It bothers me. But that just didn’t happen here for some reason, and I think In for dire so many times when we ask that question who here has feelings against And then fill in the blank pain and suffering large verdicts You know I’m starting to really believe that there are people that raise their hand and say I do Just because of the way that we ask the question and not because they really sit at home and like sit there smarting over these things like they’re really upset about them, you know, so I think that that’s what happened in that trial like six years ago.

I think the way the lawyer put the question and it was like, Oh God, yeah, that sounds really bad. Yep. I got a problem with it. Let me raise my hand. Yeah. I don’t think that anybody really had. just like a deeply held conviction against it. And so I think it was really important to me in the trial to [00:42:00] show how concerned Lisa was about her at the scene and to show how much Lisa was a caretaker for her at the scene and to show how much they talked and shared stories.

at the scene to show that Lisa was compassionate toward the elderly driver who died. So this wasn’t like an animosity thing. I felt like that was really important and part of why was because of the concern that you just raised. You know, suing someone’s estate after they’ve passed after they’re gone.

Yeah, I think a lot of, I mean, a lot of people have, you know, concerns about the chair and especially if they passed away. And, you know, I think one of the things you point out really clearly was how we ask questions, is huge, right? How we ask that question and jury selection will get a raised hand no matter what, you know, and the same thing happens when we ask our clients questions on direct, like how you word it, how the jury receives it.

Like it makes such a huge [00:43:00] difference. And I always try to encourage people when they’re looking at, you know, crafting direct questions is like, Rita’s just say that out loud. Like, okay, you wrote it out, but just say it out loud to somebody and get their reaction to you just saying out loud, because it might sound icky.

And when I say it icky, it means like, Oh, like lawyering. And like, like you’re just setting them up for sad story or sympathy. You know, we really want them to get sympathy out of the box. So you’ve led us all here. We’ve got like a drum roll. We know they gave you exactly what you asked for. So what was, what was the jury verdict?

It was a million four. It was a million four. And, um, how did it all break down? I mean, if you want to give us that you can, but we know they gave you exactly what you asked for, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, it was. So it was 75, 000 for medicals in the past, 47, 000 for medicals in the future, 700, 000 for [00:44:00] pain and suffering, and 204, 000 for wages.

So that’s pretty amazing. First of all, that like your pain and suffering number way exceeding your, your, your medicals. I mean, I think a lot of people would be really worried about your medicals being, you know, lowering the verdict, anchoring the verdicts is sometimes what people say, but that’s, that’s pretty amazing.

Yeah, you know, I think so many of us are taught that the past medicals if they’re small like that to leave them out Because they’re like you just said an anchor on the non economic damages. I just haven’t done it yet you know Here I am like 25 years into practice 20 years into doing civil trial law and I still haven’t tried it.

I still haven’t tried it I don’t know. I’m doing okay. No criticism here. No criticism here. We’re here. We’re here. I know, you know this, you know, our, our, this podcast is really trying [00:45:00] more to gear towards like being in tune with the jury and being able to give them the things that they need to do their job.

And, and, and. them listening to you. And I think that your verdict and the way that you built this case and took it to trial is a true testament that you listened, that you resonated with them and that they truly believed your client and what had happened to her. And that’s amazing. I mean, that’s all you can ask, right?

Thanks, Elizabeth. Yeah, that’s awesome. I think it’s important like for me to express though, and the reason I said what I said about the past medicals is I’m a lawyer who doesn’t think that there’s one way to do it or think that, oh, because I did it this way and got a good result. It was the best way.

You know, I’m always, always thinking it through again. I’m always making the decision over again. It’s never just like, hey, like, I know the best way and this is the best way and this is how it’s going to be for me always and this is the [00:46:00] rule. Yeah, I mean, I break a lot of rules that I know in these trials.

That’s one rule that’s broken. You know, another rule that I broke was never pick a juror that’s more injured than your own. I broke that rule. There was a couple of rules I broke. I think it’s more important to make the decision in the moment based on You use that rule as maybe a guide, maybe some information, but at the same time figure it out in real time and look at all of the other circumstances surrounding it.

I know that’s kind of like a very technical thing to say, but I guess I think that that’s super helpful to people because we have so many in a good way of putting it is there’s different sets of rules and how you should do things and how do we try cases now and things can get so confusing that sometimes we forget like you need to have those things in your mind but you really need to be in tune with and being present in that moment trusting your gut [00:47:00] like really listening to what they’re saying and you’re gonna get cues back from them if you’re being in tune and being present.

Yeah. And Neil has definitely taught me that being present and really listening and being in tune. I mean, this verdict is a good example, but I know you have many, many others, especially the case that we worked on together, where it’s, you are so immersed in not just like the details, but with your client and you know, your case backward and forward.

And I think it just really, really helps you when you’re sitting down to write things out or getting prepared. So one last question, pardon me, I should have probably started with this whole thing, which was, did you make any changes for this trial based on COVID or, you know, those kinds of concerns? I mean, everyone in the courtroom, including the judge and all of the courtroom personnel were wearing masks and all of the jurors were wearing masks.

I had obviously never tried a case where you couldn’t really see only, [00:48:00] you know, but only half of somebody’s face, you know, from the bridge of their nose up. So what I did is I kind of just decided I’m just going to go with it. We’re all the defense is in the same position. We’re all in the same position.

We all have the same handicap here. I’m just going to go with it and feel it through it and check it out and do my best with it. And you know what? I’m going to figure it out as I go. So I kind of had to tell myself that I had to like give myself a pep talk And say that to myself because otherwise I would have been mired down in that.

Well You know What am I supposed to do with them wearing masks? How much of the body language can you see when you can’t see the face? And like trying to figure all of the technical details of it out. I didn’t have time. I don’t have the knowledge, but I can do it. You know, I can do it without all of that kind of knowing.

I can do it intuitively. And I made a decision that I would trust myself to do it [00:49:00] intuitively. And, you know, I feel like I really knew those jurors through their masks. I feel like I all over them, their body language with those masks on and bore dire, and then at the end of the trial, like when I saw them outside, they waited for us to like, congratulate us and high five us.

And they were really happy for Lisa. We all had our masks off and their faces looked completely different than what I would have imagined them. So I had a whole. imagination of what they looked like. It was totally different than what they really looked like. So I would think that that, I would say that that would be the biggest thing was just trusting myself to be able to do it, to get through it and to understand people, even wearing a mask and making the decision to trust myself to be able to do it.

And that’s what I did. Did you practice at all, just like wearing a mask and having a talk in it and like that kind of stuff? No, because I hate wearing masks and I didn’t want to have one on any more than I had to. Okay. I just said to myself, you know what? [00:50:00] I’m going to just do it. One thing I did not do is I did not wear my glasses because the mask fogs them up and I can read without them.

I just read more easily with them. So I just didn’t wear glasses the whole trial. That makes sense. Yeah. Fogging up would be. Yeah. Be a, be a problem. So, well, thank you so much, Neil. This was so helpful walking us through this trial and just letting us dig through your brain about trying this case. And I think it’s a lot of good things here that we talked about.

So I appreciate your time. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. I appreciate this too. Thank you so much. It was fun. Thanks, Elizabeth. Thank you for joining us for this episode. Special episode with Neil Anthony, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with somebody who you feel like would benefit also.

I would love and be so grateful if you would rate and review our podcast or this podcast on your favorite [00:51:00] listening app. And as always, please tune in next week for some new content on how you can connect with your client and the jury. Thank you.

Client Testimony Preparation Phase 3: Role Play

elarrickbrand on February 23, 2022

This is the final part of our three-part series on client testimony preparation where we discuss Phase 3 of the client testimony preparation: role play. Just a quick recap, Phase 1 is getting into the right mindset and expectations. Phase 2 is the organizing phase where you help clients organize their truth, not mold them or change anything.

Phase 3 role play or the testing phase will give clients a good glimpse at what it’s going to be like inside the deposition or trial. It’s not just testing the client, but also your ability to prep them.

Now, it’s important that you follow these phases in order, and not just start your client testimony preparation immediately with Phase 3. Sure you could do that, but that’s not really going to help you understand much if you haven’t already done some work in the first two phases. Not to mention, the damage this might cause because you’re only setting them up to fail – and they would see that.

Therefore, even though it sounds like testing is all the phase you need to do, you’re going to be doing your clients a disservice if you miss the first two phases since it can create problems of trust in the future – and by building trust, you’re able to take away their fears.

In this episode, you will hear:

The importance of Phase 3
Why not start immediately with Phase 3
The two parts of roleplay
How to craft questions for better results
How to do the hard roleplay in segments
The nuts and bolts you need to talk about after phase 3

Subscribe and Review

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

Supporting Resources:

If you have a question or comment, please let me know: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com

Larrick Law Firm

Episode 014: Phase 1 of Client Testimony Preparation

Episode 015: Phase 2 of Client Testimony Preparation

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Hey, hey, we’re completing our three part series on client testimony preparation and getting to what I consider one of the Best phases. No, I’m just kidding. I don’t have a favorite. I think they’re all equally wonderful, uh, but this one is definitely fun. So stick around to figure out how you can best help your client.

Welcome to trial lawyer prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants, ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively, then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world.

Understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process. Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom.

Now, here’s Elizabeth. [00:01:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of Trial Lawyer Prep with me, Elizabeth Larrick. This is a podcast dedicated to trial lawyers working through some difficult cases to’s To hopefully get some resolution with those clients and improve our outcomes and sleep better at night. So thanks for joining us today.

We are going to finish up our three part series. If you’re just now joining us today, you can pause and go back and listen to episode 14. which is going to cover phase one and episode 15, which is going to cover episode two. Those are going to be really helpful building blocks to understand what we’re going to be talking about today in phase three, or if you want to just stick around and see what I have to say, that’s great too and catch those two episodes at a different time.

But just so you do know this client testimony preparation [00:02:00] does follow the Pretty strictly on the phases, so we really want to make sure we’re doing this in order and not out of order, and I’ll talk about that today. Why that is so essential. Why can’t we just start with phase three? Sometimes that’s what we want to do.

All right, so let’s jump in there. So we’ve talked about just to kind of recap really quickly. Phase one is mindset. We got to get the client’s mindset straight. We got to get expectations under control. We got to really give them a very good framework for understanding what is going to happen. If we don’t do that, There is a huge amount of fear that the clients will have going into the deposition and Generally that fear will basically shut them down or cause a bunch of other problems that you just don’t want So phase one is really about getting that good mindset that framework set up so that then you can move into [00:03:00] phase two Which I call Organizing.

We’re really working with our meat and taters, our questions and our answers, and looking at, okay, what are the targets and what are the facts we got, right? And organizing, not just about targets, but also we’re going to work on organizing damages. We’re going to look at doing some nuts and bolts of medical timeline, if that’s part of the case, of course, or job history timeline, if that’s part of the case, of course.

Again, organizing is super, super important. But now we’re into phase three, which I call our testing phase. And this is where we’re really going to give them a very good glimpse at what it’s really going to be like inside the deposition. And this phase, super important, not just for the client, but really for you.

And it’s testing not just the client, but really your ability to prep them because it’s. it’s all going to come out whether they’re actually listening or whether they’re ignoring [00:04:00] you or they’re just going to do whatever they want in the deposition which we all have had a client like that where it seemed like they were following and listening and paying attention and doing the hard work of organizing and then they get the deposition and it’s like we never met that nothing stuck they’re doing their own thing or just being Completely new stuff comes out at the deposition, that’s kind of where phase three is really geared for is to really give a true experience of that pressure of a real deposition.

So I like to break my phase three kind of into two parts and really, it’s called phase three testing, but this is really about roleplay. And so I break my roleplay into two separate parts. Part one would be kind of the hard role play where we’re really aiming at some really hard cross examination style questions and different styles that they may see in a deposition and really going hard at it to make sure they get a really good [00:05:00] experience of that pressure and those questions.

And then part two, which would be kind of the easy easy role play, right? We’re coming in with kind of some softball questions, not that they wouldn’t happen, but you know, just a little bit easier questions just to make sure they’re navigating it and we’re building some confidence there. And so let’s talk a little bit about part one, which would be our hard role play.

A lot of times people ask me like, how do you do this? And so I want to take it first with how are we crafting these questions? Because the more effort you put into those questions, the better the results. So again, I’m going to go back to our, our lawyer prep memo, which I feel is like really, really important, which is a memo that you’re going to do and sit down and go through the file before you sit down with that client to prepare them and write a bunch of information out.

So And this is a place where I love to write my hard cross exam questions for them. And try to make them really difficult because I do know a lot of information. I can craft those questions [00:06:00] really well in that moment versus me trying to do it on the fly in a hard cross exam situation. So, crafting the questions.

Do it ahead of time. If you need to pull questions from old depositions that you have. Or questions that you know are stompers, put those all in there. And once you have kind of a good bank, then you can just kind of take them as you go. It’s not as difficult if you’re as than if you’re doing this for the first time.

Really good important part of the hard cross, the hard role play is having really good quality questions and crafting those ahead of time. Another essential part of the hard role play is having someone else do it. You cannot do it. You’ve just worked. 30 minutes. And you’ve built up some amazing trust.

You’ve done some really hard work with them organizing. Right? You’re on their side. You can’t all of a sudden flip the script and be the complete [00:07:00] opposite. It’s a total mind trick. Just don’t do it. The other part of this is, it’s so easy now with Zoom to have somebody else join you on Zoom for 30 minutes.

And just do a hard role play, hard cross exam role play. If you have done the work and got all the questions ready, it’s really easy to hand that off to somebody else and they just put their personality on it and ask the questions. So Zoom makes this really easy to find somebody else. To do the hard role play.

And like for me, for example, there’s another lawyer here in Austin and we trade back and forth all the time, and she knows, and I know because we respect each other’s time. If I ask her to do this, I’m gonna give her a little bit of facts. I’m gonna give her maybe some key photographs if it’s necessary, and I’m gonna give her the questions and I’m gonna give her the targets and I’m gonna say, Hey, these are some of the weaknesses, like go get ’em.

Or if we know we have a particular style of. Opposing counsel. I [00:08:00] always put that in there as well so that she’s basically all she has to do is jump on the zoom and we’re there for 30 minutes and then she’s off and she gets to do something else. And same way for me, right? Just jump on, jump off. And if you make it really easy like that, it’s really hard to turn somebody else.

Oh, I just don’t have time. It’s 30 minutes. Right. And you can do a lot of damage in 30 minutes, so don’t hesitate to use that 30 minute block. Plus it allows you, we’ll see, to have time then to go back through. So hard role play, craft really hard questions. You do all that work before you even get there, right?

Write them all out to get somebody else. You can’t do it. If somebody else in your firm, if you’ve got a great paralegal that can come in, you can Or I think I’m a part of at least three or four or five listservs where I could put a message on and say, Hey, can somebody help me for 30 minutes here? I’m going to have everything ready for you.

You can jump on the Zoom for 30 minutes, just do your thing and then you get to go. Hard to say no to that because again, you’re going to [00:09:00] reciprocate. I’ll do it for you. All right. So let’s talk about literally how we’re going to do this. I prefer to do the hard role play in segments. What I mean by that is I take my phone and we basically set it for eight to ten minutes.

And, you know, I tell the client, Hey, this is how we’re going to role play. I got my friend Debra. She’s going to come in. She’s going to play the defense lawyer. You’re going to play yourself. I’m going to play court reporter, timekeeper and myself, and we will go and tell the timer goes off. So don’t try to break character.

Don’t say, wait a minute. I need to ask a question. No, just in it to win it until the timer goes off. That makes a really digestible amount of time because you want to be taking notes. Okay. You want to be making notes of difficult questions or places where they could have done better or maybe they didn’t, they completely skipped, you know, all the organizing that you did and you just want to be able to make notes along the way.

You [00:10:00] also want to make it to where they don’t feel like it’s never going to end because you want them to give their best effort. So this 10 minutes, the eight to 10 minute mark is really great. Once the timer goes off, come back, check in. How’s it going? And I’m talking to the client, like, how’s it going?

How are you feeling? Were there any questions that you didn’t like when the questions that were tricky? Right. And again, we are taking notes. Okay. Okay. Okay. We’re making notes along the way again, because we’re going to go right back at it because again, I got this lawyer. I’m going to respect their time, what they’re doing, and then we’re going to go again.

And it’s a different set of questions, right? So then we go again, it’s 10 minutes. Okay. Great. Here we go. Okay. And we do it again. Right? So generally we’re looking at three timed sessions of hard role play with breaks in between, so we can take a break, regroup, go again, [00:11:00] different sets of questions every time.

And once we finish all three sessions. Then the person who’s helping me gets to leave. Bye. Thank you. They leave the zoom and then we go back through and say, okay, let’s look at these questions. Right. And we, then we go back through one at a time, nice and slowly and talk through it. What felt like it stumped you?

And then we get to really digest the question, really digest what they were feeling. If you’re able. Make body language notes. Hey, this is what your eyes were doing. This is where you were fidgeting. You look down, you know, this look like question that really, really stumps you. And here’s why. And you get to just to really slowly go through all those questions and take time and help them, you know, really understand the question and what is the fact that they have to answer that question or, or what is it that they already have to answer that question?

What was the resistance to actually giving the information? And that’s why I would say the 30 [00:12:00] minutes is great because it’s really an amount of time that is helpful for the other person coming in for cross, but also for the client, but also for you. Okay. Because you have to be able to take notes along the way and then basically go back through that and that’s going to take probably another 30 40 minutes after that, right?

This testing, hard role play, really will tell you, lawyer, in your lawyer brain, did this person really adhere to any of the, organizing that we did any of the mindset that we worked on or did the fear come right back? Do we need to go back? Right. Or maybe they just had a little bit of stomach block and they just need to remember, just go back through our organizing, go back through what was our track, our facts, our truth.

Maybe just need some more reassurance there, but either way, like it’s really in your mind, a place to see like, okay, well, how’s our work been? Has it, is it [00:13:00] working or is it not? Do we need to go back? Did we do something that just didn’t fit? And you now have the proof to have that conversation with them.

Hey, client, we, we worked really hard in organizing, you know, your facts for this particular target, but you never talked about them. You actually said this instead. Let’s talk about that. Right? So now you have ammunition instead of saying, Hey, if you go in there, And you give a hypothetical, right? It’s not going to really stick as much as, Hey, we just had this experience and this other lawyer who came in just scored all the points that we were trying to like not allow them to do.

So it really helps give you a backdrop, right? To actually say like, Hey, we need to go back. Things aren’t sticking. And maybe it’s just, maybe it’s not going to be as bad as you think, but either way, like, that’s why we call it a testing phase. The second part of roleplay, which I’d call easy, is what you can do.

So depending on how long it takes to go [00:14:00] back through all those hard cross questions, like going back through and regrouping, or maybe you have to go visit, re back and visit organizing, then you’re just going to want to do some really easy roleplay, which is basically a lot of easier questions. And that’s just going to be to basically go back through those questions, build some confidence.

And again, just give them as many looks as possible at different kinds of questions, right? Because that’s really going to help them when they get in there. They’ve heard something somewhat familiar. All right, so we have covered the hard role play, the soft or the easy role play as part of phase three testing.

And this is really going to help, you know, did all your work, did it stick? Did it not? Do you got to go back? Or do you have a better idea? Bigger issue going on like a client who’s just going to ignore you either way. This is what we’re going to find out in phase three testing. [00:15:00] Once you have finished all three phases and we’ve, you know, we’ve built confidence or whatever, there may be some extra nuts and bolts of things that you need to talk about.

For example, discovery responses. Maybe there’s some Facebook pages or some Facebook posts. Maybe there’s some other kind of paperwork that you need to go through with them that they’re going to be asked questions about. Now is that time to do that because once they finish all three phases, they really have a good idea what’s going to happen.

They feel like they’ve organized their answers and they’ve passed the test, right? They’ve gone through the battle. They have a really good idea about what’s going to happen. Oh, Hey. Yeah. That discovery response. Okay. So that whole thing, all right, like it’s going to roll off their back. It’s going to be super easy and digestible.

Versus if you try to start with that without any framework of how that is going to come up, why that’s going to come up, and instead of having a lot of confusion, there’s going to [00:16:00] be a lot more like, Oh, I got this. That’s easy. Like, it’s, discovery responses are easy compared to the target that I got on my back about this wreck is my fault, or I picked the wrong doctor, or I didn’t do my job taking care of myself.

This is easy, right? And that’s really what you want them to do. And that’s why sometimes I save some more nuts and bolts stuff until after we finish phase three. Okay. So let’s, uh, recap all three phases. We’ve got phase one, mindset, expectations, phase two, organizing, phase three, testing, and then our nuts and bolts.

If you have anything else that needs to be covered after you finish everything with all three phases. All right, awesome. Well, I hope that this was helpful in helping you kind of craft a better client testimony preparation. Maybe this is a good framework for you to start off with. Maybe you [00:17:00] haven’t been using one.

Please try it out. See if it works. Let me know if you have any questions. But before we go really quickly, I want to talk about why we wouldn’t just start immediately with phase three, right? Phase three. Does wonders for us. It really tells us a lot about how people are going to react in the pressure situation and how they’re going to answer questions and if they’re going to follow your advice because there’s no framework, right?

So it’s just like, sure, you could sit them down and they’re just going to answer a bunch of questions, but that’s not really going to help you understand very much if you haven’t already done some work in phase one and phase two. Also, you could do a lot of real big damage because basically you’re setting them up to fail and they’re going to know that and you do not want to damage that relationship by starting off on the wrong foot and setting them up to fail and then feeling that humiliation or that shame or that embarrassment.

Like we don’t need to do that to people. So. Even though it sounds like [00:18:00] this is all the phase we need to do is just phase three of just doing testing and role playing with somebody, I think that you’re going to be doing them a disservice. And also I think that you could probably create some real bad problems of trust if like this is how you’re going to prepare somebody to basically throw them into the war zone, hope for the best and then tell them, Hey man, you did terrible.

Like, well, yeah, of course I did. I didn’t have any framework and have any organization, right? You’re, I’m supposed to depend on you to help me. And you’re basically It’s sending me out there blindly and then get tore apart. So this is why phase one, phase two, phase three, we’re building trust, taking away that fear.

It’s going to do wonders for the relationship. Try it out. Let me know. Email me if you have any questions or concerns. My email will be in the show notes and thank you again for listening. If you could follow, rate, share, review, On your favorite podcast app and catch us next time. Thank [00:19:00] you.

Client Testimony Preparation Phase 2: Organization

elarrickbrand on February 16, 2022

During the second phase of client testimony preparation, sometimes there’s a big miscommunication between the clients and the lawyers. Lawyers ask differently in deposition than they would in any other kind of conversation. Therefore, it warrants some education so clients can go through it smoothly.

In Phase 1, we talked about getting into the right mindset, which applies to clients and trial lawyers. Today, we look into Phase 2, which also refers to the organizing phase. This phase does not mean crafting, shaping, molding, or woodshedding any testimony. Resist the urge to craft and change your client’s words to make them sound better or to make their answer the question more clearly. Instead, make sure you organize what the client already has in their brain and what they already know so clients can see the bigger picture concerning the questions they get.

There is power in the truth, and it is all you are doing in this phase – to help clients see that and organize it for them.

In this episode, you will hear:

Challenges trial lawyers have in this phase
The 3 main purposes of a deposition
The power of telling stories
Why you shouldn’t be changing the client’s words

Subscribe and Review

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

If you really enjoyed this episode, we’ve created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just fill in your information below to download it.

Supporting Resources:

Larrick Law Firm

If you have a question or comment, please let me know: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com

Episode 014: Phase 1 of Client Testimony Preparation

Episode 011: Focus Groups: What Do You Get?

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 business and impact the world.

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Welcome back. We are in a three part series going through client testimony preparation, specifically looking at depositions, and we are going to look into the phase two, meat and potatoes, the part where we really get in and start looking at questions and looking at answers and really helping our clients with testimony.

We’ve got some fun things to talk about. So stick around. Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants, ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively, then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success? Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries [00:01:00] and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s Elizabeth. Hello and welcome. This is Elizabeth Larrick, and you’re listening to an episode of Trial Lawyer Prep.

This is a podcast designed and created for trial lawyers working with difficult cases, problematic clients, and providing some how to. to fight through some of those problems and come out the other side feeling better and having better cases and better outcomes. Today’s episode is going to focus on our second part of our three part series in client testimony preparation with an emphasis of looking at depositions in We’ll do a trial testimony preparation series a little bit later in this podcast, but today I want to continue our journey with client testimony and look at phase two, what I like to call organizing.

We’ve talked about in phase one, getting our mindset straight, [00:02:00] meaning not just the client’s mindset, but our mindset too, right? So there’s a big old fear monster running around that really can control our brains and can really cause some problems in deposition. So if you want to listen to that full episode, check out episode 14.

But today we are going to march forward with looking at organizing and let me make an emphasis on that because we are not going to be crafting, shaping, molding, or wood shedding any testimony here. Okay. What we’re really looking at is making sure we’re organizing what the client has already in their brain, right?

What do they already know? And this is really facing that issue of, lawyer questions versus client answers. And sometimes there’s just a big miscommunication here. A lot of times what I like to explain to clients is this is kind of the part where we just translate because lawyers talk in a different way.

We ask questions differently in a [00:03:00] deposition than we would in any other kind of conversation. So there’s a little bit of teaching that goes along to have the client see a book. bigger picture when it comes to some of these questions that they get, but also translating the lawyer asks this, but this is what they’re really looking for.

And a lot of people can have that communication breakdown and we want to make sure that it’s really smooth for clients when they get into the deposition. Now, one of the toughest parts of this phase is at times you’re going to have to accept Um, and it’s going to be hard not to want to craft what they’re saying or change a word here and there to make things sound better or, you know, to speak more clearly to liability or damages.

Because at the end of the day, the jury can spot a phony. We know lawyers are taking depositions, they’re asking questions, but ultimately they’re going to be judged by a jury. So we want to make sure that we keep it at that level. There’s no reason [00:04:00] to. Okay. And so this all trikes us back to kind of ultimately the purpose of a deposition and always explain this to clients in our first phase when we’re talking about mindset and expectations is there are three main purposes of a deposition and the first one is to gather information.

You know, it’s not all going to be cross exam and style, but a lot of times they just need information. So it’s not all going to be about doom and gloom. Okay. They want to learn what you’re going to say. They want to know what your story is and ultimately they’re going to want to score points for their case.

So that’s where we use our organizing phase to look at first and foremost, scoring points for their case. And this really kind of goes into that teaching moment where how are they doing that and what questions are they using to do that? And a lot of times I feel like, clients get lost in seeing ultimately what is the target of a question, [00:05:00] meaning like, what are they insinuating?

Sometimes if you’re in the battle, they can’t see what’s being insinuated and that’s the evil part of it. You don’t know. So it’s really backing up a lot of these questions and showing the big picture because clients expect to be asked the same question or try to get the same information, um, 20 different ways they expect that tricky kind of question, but they don’t really know how to handle it, right?

So this is really where we’re looking at. Okay, so we’ve got most time there’s several targets, right? There’s gonna be maybe some targets on liability. Maybe there’s gonna be some targets on damages and we’re gonna go through each of those individually and what we really want to do is Put that target up there, right?

Make it big picture. So let’s just take a car wreck example because sometimes that’s the easiest. It’s a car wreck. They’re gonna try and blame you for something, even if it’s just a regular rear end collision, right? You stopped too soon. You didn’t have your brake lights on. [00:06:00] You know, witness says this. So Even though it may seem so abundantly clear, your client’s not at fault, they may think it’s abundantly clear.

It doesn’t mean that it’s still not going to be a target for the opposing counsel to ask several questions on. And I always like to walk through that first target, somewhat of an easier target for them, because then they understand what we’re doing. So we’re going to teach them, Hey, okay, here’s this target.

Opposing counsel is going to try and say that you are Even just a little bit responsible for this rack and how are they going to do that? And so then I just list out all the questions how they’re gonna do that And then once I do my job of showing them how that question is gonna be asked what that question is going to be Then I hand it over to them and we just go through what are the facts that you have Right.

And let’s just write out the facts. And in this phase, we’re really making sure that we’re organizing truth and facts, avoiding [00:07:00] feelings, because at times people get wrapped up in stuff and emotionally it’s tough and you want to have answers and sometimes you just create answers in your mind. Let me give you an example that happens often or frequently.

The other person was speeding. I know it. How do you know? I just know they were speeding. Okay. The other person was on their phone. Okay. Did you see it? No, I didn’t see it. Did they tell you that? No, they didn’t tell me that. So wait, how do you know? I just know they were distracted. Okay. And that’s really important because if we let them go into the deposition with that response.

Okay. I know they were speeding, even though there’s really no way for anybody driving on the road to, you know, you’ll just see that if it comes from behind them, it opens them up for a litany of extra questions and it’s just a position that they can’t support. They don’t have the facts to support it, even though that’s the way they feel, that’s not really a fact.

And so we really want to be able to [00:08:00] organize it in that way so that when they get in there, they can see, wow, I have, Let’s say they have just four facts, but they’re four really strong facts. Those four strong facts can beat back one target, even if it comes at them 20 different ways. Truth doesn’t change.

And that’s what we really want to organize from and show them, Hey, how strong is this fact? Do I need this other feeling of, I feel like they were speeding. I feel like they were on their phone. I don’t. I got this other strong stuff. It’s way stronger. Great. And you keep doing that organization with them through the different targets.

I always go through liability. I go through damages. Even if I am preparing a client in a wrongful death case. There’s still going to be targets there because ultimately they want to minimize everything, right? Let’s minimize everything. Let’s make everything look small, insignificant. That is still going to be a target [00:09:00] because opposing counts will be doing their job if they didn’t try to score points in deposition.

That’s what we do. That’s what they’re going to do. So let’s prepare them for that. and organize their truth around those targets. When they see it, boom, it’s already organized in their mind and they know exactly where to go. A very key point here, if I haven’t already said it, make this a visual aid, make some lists, right?

Put this stuff up on a board. Let’s get a good visual on it to see all the facts and all the targets so they can see it and know, right? Make sure they memorize it with that visual aid. Another key place for organizing is that other purpose of a deposition, learning your client’s story, right? What are they going to say happened in this wreck?

What are they going to say happened when they went to the doctor? And it’s just, again, organizing their truth and their story when it comes to damages and liability. But we’re really looking at helping them be able to organize and express the [00:10:00] physical and emotional damages they have experienced. For Many a times people come to a deposition, it has been a year, maybe it’s been two years, sometimes unfortunately longer than that.

So you really have to spend some time walking through all that time to make sure you kind of gather up all the things that happened physically and mentally, emotionally during that timeframe to them, whether they’re recovering or they’re having more surgeries, whatever that may be, but also gathering in all the places where there could be a story.

for the jury to learn. So when we walk through this with the clients, I always look at, Hey, again, I’m big on visual aid. So most of the time I’ve heard something, you know, some ideas and that really kind of helps to start the conversation. But again, we have to remember the jury is the one who’s listening.

So let’s get some stories to help them understand and let’s look at work and go through that whole time period. Let’s look at your family. Let’s look at relationships. Is there any stress? Did things [00:11:00] have to change in the household? What about holidays, vacations, kind of that goes in our family block, and then also, you know, social life, outside of work, outside of family, things change, like what did you do before?

What is it after, right? So just kind of walking through to jog their memory through all those things and be able to, again, write out some stories and have some things ready for them when they get those questions, right? How has this affected you? From the top of your head to the bottom of your toe. What hurts?

What permanently can you not do? All these questions that can be a little bit stumping because again, they don’t talk about this way in normal conversation. People don’t ask a question like that. So it’s, can be a little bit jarring, but also in helping them organize their truth, you avoid kind of this large looming answer that most people want to give, which is Everything has changed, and that may be true, but it’s hard to understand from an [00:12:00] outside perspective.

It’s hard for a jury to understand everything, like everything. So very good to have stories to back up that big, broad statement. And what I normally find is once we go through this and we have this visual aid with All these different stories from different times, different pieces of their life. Then generally they can really say, wow, everything really has changed.

And wow, I have all this information, all this stuff that came from me to back it up. Right? And again, it’s just, there’s there’s. Power in the truth, and that’s all you’re doing. It’s just helping them see that and organize it for them. Also in this bucket of phase two organizing, we do some what I call nuts and bolts, which is we’ve got at some point look at just basically a medical timeline.

And I consider it a rough timeline because we’re just going through what they can remember, what they know, you know, ER, ambulance, primary care, orthopedic, surgery. It’s not super important for me [00:13:00] that they remember necessarily dates, but there may be key dates that they do remember, like their surgery, but I always find it’s really helpful for them to kind of refresh their memories again, because there’s going to have been a gap in time since they finished treatment and this deposition.

So we always just kind of like to refresh their memory, go through that. We know that’s going to be something that defense or the opposing counsel will always ask them about. And then other things that they may need help organizing would be if there’s any prior medical history. That’s going to be part of the deposition.

If there’s any large job or lost wage claims, or this is an employment case, like we know job history is going to be very important. So that is key to organize like any job history, maybe make a job timeline just to help. Again, we’re just trying to go through. Known places that they’re gonna get questions, that we just wanna help them refresh their memory, organize, and then hit any other areas that may just be helpful for them to refresh.

And again, we’re going back to that purpose of the deposition of gathering information. Wanna make sure that we refresh [00:14:00] all memory when that question comes. They may not remember, or they may, because again, we’ve worked really hard to refresh memory and and organize responses for questions. A lot of this organizing and making sure you can see what the targets are, looking at what are their damages is part of the lawyer preparation, right?

So we talk about that in episode 11, doing a memo for you to get ready. So you can see these targets, you can start kind of scoping things out, maybe making lists of questions. Also looking at stories just to be able to prompt them when you start to go through that. Damages section of organization and both of these places, right?

So looking at the targets, looking at the damages and kind of the nuts and bolts, the other things they need to know about medically, you got to remember it’s so key. One of the most important places, important things. You’ve got to use the client’s words. [00:15:00] Do not change it, like resist trying to say like, well, this is going to sound just a little bit better.

Like, let me just, let me just like, we need to just move things around or maybe just say it this way. You may need to help them simplify it. Most of the time people want to give like a two sentence long answer when one would be. Just as good, just as powerful. But a lot of times what I hear, a lot of feedback that I get, and even in my own doing the testimony prep, you’ve got to resist the urge to craft it, right?

To change it, to make it sound better, to make it answer the question more clearly. And this goes back to that, Hey, this is that tough point. We’re going to have to accept people as they are because again, it’s the juries, the backstop here, right? Not you. Not the other lawyer. Thank goodness, right? Not lawyers don’t decide.

That’s what I always say. And there’s two main reasons why. One is they’re not gonna remember it. You’re changing what’s already in their mind. They’re not gonna remember [00:16:00] your words, right? If they do remember their words, it’s gonna sound really scripted and that’s not what you want either because an authentic witness is a powerful witness.

And that is what’s going to be more important to sending a message to the people who are making the decisions. Whether it be the decision makers, the defense counsel, the insurance company, or ultimately the jury, right? Because they’re going to be able to smell a rat just like the rest of us can. And that’s not what we want, right?

This is the client’s case. You know, our job is again, organized. That’s why the title of phase two is organizing, right? That’s what we want to do. And as long as you resist the urge to write your own words or put it in your own spin on it, things will go much smoother in the deposition because you aren’t going to be frustrated when they’re not using your words.

You’re not going to be upset with them for not remembering that. It was never in their minds that way to begin with. And you may have a lot of people that come to you and say, Tell me what [00:17:00] to say. Well, a lot of times you just tell me what to say. It’s like, well, yeah, it doesn’t really work that way. And thank goodness , because we all seen those depositions, right?

Where it’s like, oh, they just, you totally told ’em what to say the whole time. And you can tell, it doesn’t take a mastermind to figure it out. So keep that in mind as you’re organizing and walking through this step that you wanna use. The client’s words, write down exactly what they say. Don’t try to shape it.

All right. Awesome. So I appreciate your tuning in today to episode 15. And if you’ll catch me next episode in 16, we will close out this series with phase three testing. All right. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode. If you enjoyed it, please follow us on your favorite podcast app, rate, review us, and share us with somebody who thinks they need to hear this episode.

Thank you so [00:18:00] much.

Client Testimony Preparation Phase 1: Mindset

elarrickbrand on February 9, 2022

Getting a client into the right headspace is key before you can jump into questions they will encounter in the deposition or trial. In this episode, let’s learn about why it’s essential to get your clients in the right headspace and the ways you can do that.

This episode is part of a series where I’ll be walking you through the preparation of a client for testimony, either for a deposition or trial, which are two very different places where clients give testimony.

The first phase of client testimony preparation is resetting the client’s mindset so they can overcome the fear, which could cripple them during deposition or trial.

At trial, a lot of people either freeze or just start talking and never stop. They think they need to just dump everything in their brain on the table. A lot of times, they’ll concede the defense question. And some people even lie in the deposition earlier on because they just want to stop the pain and get out of the deposition as quickly as possible.

Therefore, you need to tackle that big fear monster first before you can even look at the questions and organize their truth.

In this episode, you will hear:

Reasons people are afraid of deposition or trial
Fear as a huge defense tactic
Ways to address the client’s fears
Phase 1: Resetting the client’s mindset
Phase 2: Organizing their truth

Subscribe and Review

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

If you really enjoyed this episode, we’ve created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just fill in your information below to download it.

Supporting Resources:

Larrick Law Firm

Practical Intelligence: The Art and Science of Common Sense by Dr. Karl Albrecht

www.karlalbrecht.com

If you have a question or comment, please let me know: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com

Episode 10: How You Can Better Prepare Yourself for Client Depositions https://www.larricklawfirm.com/010

Episode 12: Silence is Golden – Improve Your Active Listening Skills

https://www.larricklawfirm.com/012

Episode Credits:

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

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] Getting a client into the right headspace is key before you can jump into questions they will encounter in the deposition or in a trial. So let’s learn about why it’s essential to get them in the right headspace and the ways that we can do that. Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants?

Ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively. Then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s Elizabeth. Hello and welcome to episode [00:01:00] 14 of Trial Lawyer Prep with me, Elizabeth Larrick.

This is a podcast dedicating to Assisting trial lawyers in connecting better with their clients and better with their juries. Today we are going to start a series to walk through preparation of a client for testimony. And testimony being depositions or trial. And hopefully we can walk through three main parts or phases of the client preparation for testimony.

Now, we will have other episodes that will dig really deep into deposition and dig really deep also into trial because those are two very different places where client give testimony. But for today, episode 14 is going to be focusing on our first phase or our first part of client testimony preparation.

This phase I like to call getting your mindset straight or getting the client’s mindset straight I’m going to talk about [00:02:00] how you can do this and why you can do this, but of course we need to tackle the why. Because we’re A lot of things I talk about on this podcast will add time. They do add time to what we already have in our lives, our busy, fast paced professions.

And so let’s talk about it because I know we want to be able to do things efficiently. And that’s what’s really important is spending time efficiently. And yes, a lot of the things that I talk about on this podcast and really in this episode as well will take more time. But what I have found in my experience and with other lawyers that are using the same kind of setup for preparation with their clients is it’s time well spent because we spend it wisely.

A lot of time now will significantly reduce. It’s the time that you need to spend on these [00:03:00] particular issues down the road. We want to do these steps. with the thought in mind that we’re increasing trust with our clients and we are reducing fear and fear is a huge defense tactic. Um, we’ll talk a little bit more about that in step one, but just as a sidebar, there’s a lot of fear going on.

We have in our line of profession is, you know, plaintiffs, personal injury lawyers is where my background comes from. And it’s a lot of eat, which kill, you know, and you have to do well on a case. And so there’s a lot of fear in you. You’ve got to do things right, and you’ve got to hope your client does things right as well along the way to line up with what needs to be proved in the case and ultimately the bottom line of the case value.

So let’s work our way back to talking about the first phase of client testimony preparation and the why. [00:04:00] So much information about client depositions and a lot about client deposition, not necessarily as much about trial. Trial really comes from TVs and movies, but if you’re out there searching for information about how to get ready for deposition as a client, most information you’re going to find is you’re going to be asked to come to this place and you’re going to answer these questions by a professional.

And what I like to call kind of a self assessment. sit and suffer mindset. Really don’t have any control. It’s a necessary part and good luck. You know, don’t say anything. Only answer the question you’ve been given and don’t share information. That’s a really confusing message for people who are not in the legal profession, and it’s just confusing.

And so when we have confusion, generally that just kind of creates fear. The other place I feel like people gather information about what may happen in deposition or trial is TVs and movies. Those don’t [00:05:00] really paint an accurate picture of what happens in the real world. So as you can imagine, most of those things are not accurate, thus inspiring more confusion and fear.

I also have clients who talk to friends, relatives, spouses about depositions and what they should do and looking for advice. It’s because A lot of people never experienced a deposition or a trial. And so what do we normally do? We ask for advice. We go look for it. I mean, we all carry around a computer in our pockets and we just open up Google and see what’s on there and you can go check out YouTube and find all kinds of depositions.

Justin Bieber, Donald Trump, a lot of depositions are up on YouTube and generally they are thoroughly entertaining to watch. But. It’s terrifying as a client to watch, and some of them are really painful as a lawyer to watch because the activity, the, what everybody’s doing on the deposition is really kind of cringeworthy.

So kind of with that backdrop in mind, like that’s what [00:06:00] people come into our offices to get ready. And there’s just this big fear of the unknown and what that kind of translates into for some people is just resistance. They don’t want to do it. They just resist it. They’d even just rather settle their claim and be done with it, so they don’t have to go through this deposition.

And sometimes you have people who do the opposite, where they over prepare. You know, they want to see every medical record. They want to read every single discovery piece of it. And, uh, That’s a good thing, but also they’re looking at it through a lens of what I just described, right, this sit and suffer lens, like you’re gonna be forced in this room, you need to have all these answers to these questions, questions that you don’t even know they’re gonna ask.

So we want to sit back and we want to really look at how can we use phase one to reduce this fear, because if we don’t remove this uncertainty, like what is this process and how do I fit into it, if we don’t remove this loss of control, how I have to [00:07:00] answer all these questions. They’re going to be questions.

I don’t even know what they are. And also this huge fear of I’m going to be judged. This could be humiliating. I’m going to go in there and a professional is going to ask me questions and probably be judging me all these kinds of fears. Right. And so. This fear of uncertainty or fear of loss of autonomy, loss of status, like all of these kind of things come from this great book by Dr.

Carl Albrecht, Practical Intelligence, the Art of Science and Common Sense. He talks about this fear. layers of fear, and what’s the worst fear, and how we really kind of create fears. Great book. If you want to just learn a little more about the levels of fear, just google Carl Albrecht, and we’ll put all that in the show notes so that you can do that if you’re, if you’re curious about it.

Of course, I was curious and learned about it in a few other books, so that’s why it really helped me. understand more about how to help a client get ready. So I pass that on to you. But all in all, we just know like [00:08:00] there’s a big fear monster that we’ve got to tackle before we can try to help them look at questions and organize their truth.

So if we don’t work through this big fear monster and this, Uncertainty and loss of control people will become overcome by it in their deposition at trial. A lot of people freeze. A lot of people just start talking and they never stop. They think they need to just dump everything in their brain on the table.

A lot of times they’ll concede the defense question. And I’ve even seen people lie to end the depo earlier. Because basically they just want to out, stop the pain, right? Get out of this deposition as quickly as possible. And that’s not what we want! Uh, that’s not what we wanted all as lawyers. I mean, one, they’re our client.

Like, they’ve hired us. They trust us to hire us and get us to this point. Really cringeworthy as far as like human to human, but [00:09:00] also as far as the case goes, like really can be detrimental to the case if they’re conceding points or just lying to get out of the deposition. And lying, of course, to get out of the deposition really is a very extreme example.

Most of the time they’re just going to concede defense points or defense questions just to get things over with earlier. And we talked about a little earlier how like fear is a huge defense tactic because it’s an emotion that can be manipulated and they know it’s there. So fear is one of the biggest places that they go when it’s a client deposition or even trial and twist it and use it against them.

There’s a big factional lawyers that don’t spend a significant amount of time preparing their clients for depositions. So this is the best place for the defense to get in there, do their job, you know, hit their targets, prove their case through your client, and manipulate that fear. If we allow them to do that, that deposition then will put a hamper [00:10:00] on ability to settle early, ability to settle at full value, and sometimes even the ability to get Fair value at trial because that deposition will get drug back into that courtroom and the client has to face it all over again.

So this is something really I try to stress that we tackle, we talk about early, frequently, and often with our clients just to make sure that we are staying ahead of this. Let’s see. mental, you know, emotional warfare that’s going to go on that they’re really not ready for. So we don’t want to skip this kind of phase one of addressing this uncertainty, loss of control, humiliation.

Nothing we say will stick if we don’t, because fear is just so powerful, right? It’s at our core. So let’s talk about, hopefully I’ve convinced you, this is going to be something that you want to do. Otherwise, you know, you’re on your own. But we live in a What I feel like a different place now from where the original [00:11:00] advice of, don’t say anything.

Don’t share it’s yes or no. We just live in a different place. Juries expect things differently. And let’s flip the script. I’m always encouraged to get clients into a different mindset and really empower them. So let’s talk about ways to address that and getting them into that right mindset. So I always frame this as, this is my first meeting, just out of the gate, getting them ready either for deposition or for trial.

And you can do this in as short as 30 minutes over Zoom. Like, it’s all dependent on kind of the nature of the case and complication, but I always make this first, right out of the gate. And before we jump into talking about what we’re going to do, or, hey, this is the problem in the case, I sit down just to find out What they do expect.

What do they know? Like how much information do they have? And you just do that by asking open ended questions. What do you think is going to happen at the deposition? Who do you think will be there? [00:12:00] How long do you think will be there? What’s my job as your lawyer? What’s the job of the other lawyer, the defense lawyer?

And why do they want to take your deposition? The key to this particular open ended question series is just to listen. Don’t interrupt, don’t try to correct them, but just listen. And if they come back at you with things like, Well, I don’t really know. I’ve never experienced this. Okay, well, you know, what have you heard?

Because we know there’s something back there. We know that they’re just not completely blind. They’ve experienced something through TV or movies or even online. So I always like to dig really deep and just listen. Tell me more about that. I’m practicing my silence and my active listening that we talked about in episode 12.

So you can go back and listen to that episode to help you kind of brush up on your active listening and your silent skills. But this is a step we really want to gather.[00:13:00]

And, most of the time we hear things like it’s gonna be horrible, they’re gonna twist my words, I don’t remember everything, a lot of the anchors of some of these uncertainty, loss of control, kind of fears that we talked a little bit earlier, just obviously related to the deposition. Once you gather all that information up, right, drain that well to find out.

What all the things they expect where that all comes from. Tell me more about that Then you can provide answers, right? And what I always say is start with giving them certainty, which would be Laying out, even down to a diagram if you need to, and where people will sit in the room as far as the deposition.

What time is it? How long is it? Who is there? What room will it be in? What’s the job of the court reporter? Who’s not there? Is there a judge there? Or is the other driver going to be there? Or is there going to be somebody from the company there listening? [00:14:00] All those things you can find out, right, if they will or if they’re not going to be there.

Everybody has different procedural roles. I’m here in Texas. They were supposed to tell you if someone else is going to be in the room. And so we can find that out here in Texas, but you may have to ask some questions to make sure you have the answer to that question about who will be in the room. One of the other fun ones I like to talk about is what my job is at the deposition.

And so I explain it to them that my job, I’m a lawyer. So my job is to listen to the lawyer. And my job is to object to questions that don’t meet the legal rule. Now, I only, I know that rule. I’m a lawyer. That’s why I listen to what the lawyer says. We’re going to prepare so well, and you’re going to be so ready to go.

I don’t need to listen to your answers. My job is listening to the lawyer. And saying objections so it gets on the record. And I always clear up occasionally, I’ve heard this a couple times recently, with people I think [00:15:00] doing some of their own research that when the lawyer objects, that’s a cue, right, to not say anything until they tell you you can answer the question, right?

They’re trying to give you some kind of secret signal. People do train witnesses to do that. That’s not what we’re going to do here today because that’s not necessarily preparing somebody. That’s. training and coaching them, right? That’s like, when I say objection, you know that I want you to say, I don’t know.

That’s basically woodshedding somebody. We’re not going to do that. But I really, I lay that out because I want them to know my job is the lawyer. I’m listening to the lawyer. I’m tracking where they’re going. I’m listening to those questions, because when it becomes my turn to ask questions, maybe there’s something I need to ask you, right?

So I’m that safety net at the end, but I, the only way I can do that is I’m listening to those questions and making those objections doing my job. We also talk about, in detail, why. Why are they taking your deposition? Learn information. [00:16:00] figure out what you’re going to say, right? What’s your side of the, of the truth, your side of the story, and then also, right, to prove their defense points, right?

What are their targets? It may be to minimize damages, maybe it’s to score points on liability, but I want the clients to know it’s not all about, Scoring points for their side because a lot of that times that inspires anger and we really want to, again, anger, fear, we want to move that out of the way because we want them to be able to supply information and talk about their truth without that fear and anger coming up and popping up.

So once we kind of give them that certainty about what they can expect in the room, what they can expect for questions, why we’re doing this, then we can really talk about, okay, so if my job is questions, your job is answers. And if this is a deposition, you have a right to speak without [00:17:00] interruption.

Without being cut off, and that court report is going to take down everything you say, right? And there is power in that transcript because people will read it, it’s your official testimony. So we’re going to try and give them back some control, right? And then ultimately talking about how to give them power, that there’s any humiliation going on or any kind of concerns about being judged, right?

We talk about how, because you have control of your answers, and they have to listen to you, we really want to work on in our next phase, organizing your truth. Looking at those defense targets, organizing your truth, getting your facts ready to go, and then organizing. and testing out. So give them a real live look at what it looks like.

And so now I’ve just given them a lot of certainty, but I’ve also given them the roadmap and why. And most of the time, I also talk about how we want to flip the script. We hear a lot about how this is a sit and suffer, but really, we [00:18:00] want this to be about this is your turn. This is the best place for you to come in and tell your truth, tell your story in your voice.

And that this is the place. This is that one chance, if we’re talking about deposition, right? If we’re at trial, they’ve already gone through a depo, but this is their place to tell their story, to do their job here. That’s their job. I always talk about what my job is as a lawyer, and what their job is. And then ultimately, who’s listening?

They’re going to be facing off with a lawyer, but ultimately a jury is the one who’s going to be listening and making decisions. And thank goodness, thank goodness it’s not lawyers and judges, right? So there’s a, there’s a good thing to be, to embrace that in the sense that other people just like you are going to be making decisions, not the person across the table trying to drill you with questions.

And then, ultimately, like I talked about, the power of the transcript, right, it cannot be ignored. So, they’re going to ask questions, that court board is going to [00:19:00] make, book your testimony, and a copy of that goes to decision makers, right? That goes to the insurance company or the company that makes decisions, and people will read it.

So, this is the place. We’ve got to lay it out there. To put it out there so that we know that they can’t ignore it. So, like I mentioned earlier, I suggest this doing as a very first meeting. And, even if, You’re getting ready to schedule the deposition and you’ve got somebody who is extremely fearful, just extremely fearful.

Maybe you do this when you’re going to start setting the deposition, right? Get on zoom with them, see them eye to eye, get them in person to have this conversation about, Hey, it’s scary and it’s unexpected and there’s a lot of uncertainty, but we’re in this together. Let’s learn all this, right? So let me take that moment to be silent with you, to be a good listener, to know I am really listening to you.

I’m really going to address all those things, but let me make sure I really understand what’s happening. But normally I do it [00:20:00] once we have the deposition set, then we kind of look at it. Schedule our preparation. But this will give you so much more cooperation. They’re going to be so much more encouraged and so much more involved in their case if we solve this big fear monster right out the gate.

They’re gonna be much more motivated to come back to look at their answers and organize their truths and role play to have as much certainty as possible. So Just to recap, we’ve talked about phase one of our client testimony prep, which is resetting the client mindset. And I say resetting because they have, they have a worldly view.

They have some worldly expectations that are sometimes backwards to what is the truth about the power that they have in their case and the power of their testimony. So we want to reset that. We want to tackle that fear monster that we know will be manipulated and tackle that first, because otherwise that fear is just going to jump right up.

They’re going to freeze or concede points. And how we do that with those big open ended [00:21:00] questions, just really learning about what they think, a lot about how they think using that active listening skill to pull it all out, patiently listen, tell me more, and then addressing it one piece at a time with our first piece being the certainty, right?

The logistics that they’re going to face in the deposition or logistics of trial. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me on this episode. I would suggest if you want to learn a little bit more about what you can do before even getting to step one to go back and revisit episode 10, where we talk about how you get ready, how the lawyer gets ready and creating a memo to look at the information and anticipate those defense targets, those opposing counsel targets for the deposition and for trial as well.

Thanks again for joining us. If you enjoyed this podcast, then I ask that you follow, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and share this episode. If you thought [00:22:00] it was helpful, if you have any questions or have a topic that you would love to be addressed, please send me an email. I’m going to put my email in the show notes along with the information about Dr. Carl Albrecht and his layers, five levels of fear. So awesome. Have a great one.

Challenges in Preparing Clients in Wrongful Death Cases with Danny Ellis

elarrickbrand on February 2, 2022

In today’s episode, we’re joined by Danny Ellis who was named Tennessee Trial Lawyer of the Year for 2021. We discuss the different challenges that trial lawyers face when preparing clients in a wrongful death case. Danny also walks us through some of the things he did to help prepare a recent combative client in her specific case as well as some tips on how we can be better in particular cases like this.

Based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Danny practices with Truck Wreck Justice, with offices in Chattanooga, Seattle, and LA. They specialize in all commercial motor vehicles that are 10,001 pounds or more.

Not every client is going to fit into a perfect formula for preparing them. And sometimes, you just have to be flexible. One of the best ways we can help people in these lawsuits is by giving them the ability to do the best they can do and helping them get the closure they need, which is better than any pile of money.

In this episode, you will hear:

The difficulties jurors face in wrongful death cases
The difficulties clients face in wrongful death cases
How Danny helped a difficult client in a wrongful death case
Tips in dealing with difficult clients and helping in witness prep
The power of silence
The importance of getting into the mindset of the opponent

Subscribe and Review

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

If you really enjoyed this episode, we’ve created a PDF that has all of the key information for you from the episode. Just fill in your information below to download it.

Supporting Resources:

Danny Ellis

Truck Wreck Justice PLLC

danny@truckwreckjustice.com

1419 Market Street

Chattanooga, TN 37402

(v) 423-265-2020

Larrick Law Firm

Do you have a question or comment? A topic you want to be addressed? Please email elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com.

Episode Credits:

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

Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com

Episode Transcript:

Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] In this episode, we have a great interview with one of my dear friends, Danny Ellis, where we’re going to discuss the challenges that you face when you’re preparing your client in a wrongful death case and also talk about a specific case that Danny had recently. We had some challenges with a particular client and some tips on how we can be better in particular cases like this.

So join us. Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants? Ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively, then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.

Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas. Her goal is to help you connect with juries and [00:01:00] clients in order to improve your abilities in the courtroom. Now, here’s Elizabeth. Hello and welcome. I am super excited for this episode of trial lawyer prep.

We have a wonderful guest with us. Danny Ellis. Danny is a really good friend of mine. I’ve known him for several years. We met probably four or five, six, seven years ago at a seminar. Danny was a speaker talking about car wrecks. And I was a speaker talking about Probably witness prep. So anyhow, I’m excited to have him on this episode.

We are going to talk about preparing clients in a wrongful death case. And we’re going to use specifically one of the cases Danny has had with a challenging client to walk through some of the things that he did to help prepare the client in her specific case. So awesome. But Danny, let’s jump back for a second and introduce yourself.

Just let us know where you practice and any specialties that you have. Well, thank you, Elizabeth, and thank you for letting me. Be a part of your podcast. I have really enjoyed listening to your podcast so far [00:02:00] enjoyed listening to silence It was awesome. A lot of good reminders there on on what to do and we’ll probably Hint and touch on those today as well.

Now, you know, I live in chattanooga, tennessee I practice with the law firm truck wreck justice We have offices in Chattanooga, Seattle, and LA, and that is our specialty. We do all commercial motor vehicles. If it’s 10, 001 pounds or more, that’s what we do, be it a truck or trailer, a bus, box truck, anything with a gross motor vehicle weight of over 10, 000 pounds, we will take a look at it.

My boss is a former president and chair of the TBI section of the AAJ, and so we look at a lot of those kind of cases as well. Awesome. Well, I think you’re kind of missing a really big part of your what I’ll call your resume, which is you got a pretty big award last year. So why don’t you tell everybody what was that big award that you got?

Well, I’m very humbled. I was named the Tennessee Tribal [00:03:00] Lawyer of the Year for 2021. I have to tell you, I feel like Barry Bonds, there should be an asterisk by my award because it was in the COVID years and there wasn’t very many trials going on, but however, I was very blessed and very fortunate to help a very deserving family in a wrongful death case in Tennessee, in which we did some pretty good and ingenious ways to get a case into a venue that helped us tremendously and, and helped our client change their life and, and to hold a wrongdoer accountable.

to the full extent, not just what the Tennessee legislature said was the value of a life, but what truly was the value of a life. Well, awesome. Well, don’t man, that’s a huge deal. I mean, lawyers vote on that and talk about it. So that’s a huge deal. And I mean, you got to celebrate the wins, but sometimes we’re really hard on ourselves and you work really hard.

I know that you do. And so I’m really proud of you for that award. And sometimes you just got to toot your own horn. So thanks for talking about that. Well, you’re very kind and you and I both have a [00:04:00] mentor that would say The sorry dog that doesn’t wag his own tail from time to time. I just have a hard time doing it It just doesn’t feel right for me.

So That’s all right. Well, I’ll do it for you then we’ll do it for you. So, okay So let’s jump in appreciate the introduction. Let’s jump in and kind of talk a little bit about the difficulties When we approach wrongful death cases from a juror perspective, what is it that we hear? What is it you hear when it comes to these wrongful death cases?

It’s funny you should say that because I just got done Yesterday mediating a case in a wrongful death setting over here in Tennessee Involving parents and the very first thing and I think it goes across the board in the focus groups that we’ve run Is people will say number one the money doesn’t bring the person back.

What good does this do? You That’s always an underlying sentiment. And then in the situation with a spouse or with a parent and a child, people become offended. You’re trying to make money off of [00:05:00] the death of your kid. You weren’t gonna stay with that person. You would have adores them 10 years down the road.

You’re just trying to get rich off of an unfortunate situation. So that’s always something that we have to be leery of. And then, you know, especially in a marriage situation, people are going to start looking at that relationship with under a microscope, trying to find all the flaws. So that, that, those are the biggest ones that I’ve seen.

What, what have you found? Yeah. I mean, I think you’re kind of hitting the main ones that I had, you know, money won’t replace the person, some of a caught blood money. And I think sometimes jurors face, It’s an unimaginable situation. They just don’t want to put themselves in those shoes. And so it’s hard for them to put their arms around something.

And when you have that kind of difficulty generally just shuts them down. Right. So they just default to the no position. This was just fluke accident. This would never happen to me kind of a situation. So, I mean, I think those are really some of the main difficulties. that jurors [00:06:00] have when it comes to, you know, making decisions on wrongful death cases.

It is, and as difficult as it is from trying to overcome those obstacles with a juror, I think one of the biggest things that we as counselors In the law, and we don’t use that word much anymore, but with the victims of these heinous acts, these negligent acts, the family is left feeling very conflicted.

I know, having concluded that case yesterday with a family with a very young man that died at 21, way too early in life. You know, we we had to walk through getting ready for that and the emotions attached with that. And then with it being done, what do we do here? And very pointedly emphasizing this is not blood money.

This is, you know, we can do good things with this money and that person’s name. And I think [00:07:00] that as as attorneys, we need to look at that aspect of it as well, not just because it will help you in your witness prep. If you start thinking about those things down the road. Absolutely. And that was, I mean, that was kind of my next, like, you know, we have the difficulties with jurors, but our clients, right?

I mean, one, this is a heavily, heavily emotional burden that our clients are going through and transmitting that into testifying, but also working in this system that basically the system we have provides money. That’s the way system that we’re in and still doesn’t feel we still feels like blood money.

So let’s You know, you really hit the hammer on the nail with preparing clients for that inevitable, there will be money at the end of the day and there will be good things that come out of it. And so let’s talk about what are some of the things resistance, I guess, or difficulties that clients have in wrongful death cases, either giving testimony or just working through the process of the civil justice system.

Well, number one, I think people don’t [00:08:00] like kind of like me don’t want to talk about themselves. And that’s from the word go. People don’t want to talk about themselves, but they really don’t want to talk about the private things behind the door, the very personal things. And I’m not talking, I’m not talking the sex and I’m talking about the meaningful things that make the relationship that’s private to them.

There’s a public persona. There’s things that people are together. And then there’s also what happens behind closed doors that make that relationship even more special. It’s just your time. And people, when we’re talking to clients and trying to get into that, there’s a resistance because they feel In one sense, hey, this is mine.

I don’t want to share that. And then two, they feel like it’s a betrayal of the partner that that was their special moment, special bond. People will love to tell you, Oh yeah, Elizabeth, she was great. She was my best friend. We would do X, Y, Z. You being a [00:09:00] newlywed, I’m sure you and your husband have things that are just for y’all.

And you don’t want to say, Hey, he would rub my feet every night. And when he would do it, he would sing to me, you know, some BG song or so I don’t know. These are really good ideas. Keep putting them into this audio podcast. I’ll make him listen to it. But, but, but those are the intimate things that we don’t want to share.

They’re ours. They’re my own special. remembrance that it’s not for anybody else. You know, that’s an iconic scene in Avengers, and I am a nerd, you know that, and in Avengers the Endgame, where Captain America is sitting on the bench. He’s 70 years old. You see the ring on his finger, you know, he’s gone back in time and he’s married agent carter.

And I believe it’s the falcon says, hey, you want to tell me about that girl? And he’s like, no, these are mine. This is just for me. And so that’s the key. That’s the lock box [00:10:00] that you have to, I don’t want to say pick, but you’ve got to massage it and work it and allow them to open it up to share with you because it makes the story so much more fuller and richer as to what that relationship was.

Absolutely. I mean, there’s definitely big trust, big, big, big trust issue. You know, they really have to trust you and know that because it’s precious to them. like this is, you know, this is all they have left. It’s precious cargo that they want to keep to themselves. Absolutely. And I think a lot of it in this happens in other cases, too, is just that fear of judgment.

You know, there’s a lot of fear of judgment. If I tell you about this, you’re going to judge me and talking to a lawyer and a deposition who doesn’t know, you can really feel like they’re judging you. So judging this person, this person that you loved, and now all of a sudden their relationship is going to be judged and this person and what they did will be judged.

And we’re told a lot in movies, TVs, books, things we read and experience like that [00:11:00] last memory is like what you’re going to be stuck with. And. Sometimes that’s the terrifying phone call people get. And it’s like, we have to help them get past that. Like that is what society may say, but that doesn’t have to be what’s true for you, you know, and let’s make this lasting legacy be what you tell the jury.

That is the legacy you get to create for them. And I think helping that empowerment, that trust, there’s a purpose for this. This is not just to, make you experience grief all over again. Totally agree with that. You know, when we were talking earlier, that’s just getting them to open up to you. The last thing that they want to do is to take those precious memories and give them to the black cats, the defense, the people that are going to take those memories and try to sully them.

They’re worried that they’re going to take what, something that’s sacred and special to them and make it crass and make it a joke or a meme or, or whatever. And so, you know, you’ve got two hurdles when you handle cases like this. [00:12:00] One, getting the trust for them to open up with you. And then two, giving them the confidence to know that you’re not going to misuse it.

And by golly, you’re sure as heck not going to let the Blackhats of the world misuse it. That there’s a purpose and a mission behind putting it out there. Absolutely. And I also feel like as far as one of the other difficulties clients face with testimony like this is it’s hard to find the words.

feelings sometimes are really hard to identify. I mean, they’re sad. What more, you know what I mean? Like, what more can I say to you other than I am sad? It’s like, well, let’s, you know, we got, you know, help, ever help everybody explain that. So I think it’s one, most people who are in this experience, it’s brand new to them.

They’ve not lost somebody this close to them before. And so that grief experience is just, it’s someplace they’ve never been. And so identifying feelings and thoughts and that, like what’s going on is [00:13:00] difficult. And sometimes it’s almost a little bit like we got to help them understand their grief in order for them to be able to talk about it.

So I think that also kind of goes back to, we just think it’s going to be like what we see in movies and TVs, if we’ve never experienced a loss of somebody that close to us. So definitely a lot of extra hurdles. Uh, I would say other than cases where and, you know, I don’t want to compare atrocity to atrocity, you know, but just a few extra hurdles here, I think, mainly because we just have this.

unimaginable event that they exchanged in this money, you know, it’s wrongful death. Yeah. So well, let’s turn and talk a little bit about that specific case that I kind of had in mind. You and I actually touched base and we talked about your specific client, Victoria. You gave me a call, I guess it’s been a couple months ago, like, you know, oh gosh, I’ve got this, what I would call difficult preparation situation.

So tell us a little bit about you in mind, just give a little fact [00:14:00] backup. So we kind of understand the case and then, a little bit about Victoria. Sure. So Victoria was middle aged lady from the Midwest, lived in the Midwest. I won’t say where was married to a gentleman. We’ll call him Larry and Larry was a tough guy.

But Larry was Larry. When you say when you hear people say he was her world. That’s an understatement here. Larry was this lady’s tether and lifeline and bridge to the real world. I know your husband as well as you, Rod. I know that. Larry took it to the uptenth degree. He would drive, he would, it just, it’s amazing.

He did everything. Housework, clean, cook, get her out in public. how to intermingle with friends, but more importantly, he protected her because Victoria was a really broken individual [00:15:00] when they got married. And he was, he was the salve. He was the plaster that put her back together so that she could once again, just function in society.

And then when he died, every bad thing that ever happened before came crashing back down again and she was, she was a broken and shattered person. So I called you because you know, I’ve done this for a while. You know, I, not that you’ve asked me to do this again, folks, if you ever need somebody to witness prep, this is the woman, right?

So what you didn’t, what you didn’t tell everybody is when we first met, you’re up there looking brilliant about witness prep. And I’m up there talking about my latest loss because I screwed up an opening and didn’t focus group a case and thought I knew everything. So, you know, let’s just put everything into perspective, but I knew I needed to call you because I had a very difficult task ahead because my client who [00:16:00] was Had all these these issues.

I mean, we’re talking about getting a room in a deposition. She didn’t want to get a room with me And I know that sounds crazy because I said she’s my client But I was you know, I worked for truck wreck justice and I did not originally start with this case I got brought in because i’ve been fortunate to know you as a friend and under your tutelage with witness prep And I was asked to come in to prepare this lady For her deposition and it was all we could do to just get her in the room with me.

What kind of resistance? I mean, I think one of the things you said that when we were on our phone call originally was she was kind of combative. Tell us a little bit about kind of what that meant. What were some of the things she was doing? So this lady is about five foot one and maybe soaking wet weighed a hundred pounds.

That is not an exaggeration. That is for real. But let me tell you, I think this woman could whip my butt. She was that mean and that tough. And that was something that was extremely [00:17:00] important for down the road. We’ll put a pin in that to come back to it. But you know, when I say combative, I would say something like, Hey, let’s talk about, and she’d be like, F you.

I’m not talking to you about Jack’s butt. Or we would approach the issue with, with her about doing the prep. And it was a fight. And then once we got into the room, then I was worried about, you know, she’s going to cold cock defense counsel. I mean, I was really worried about that, but let me say this. I was also worried about a string of profanities that would make a sailor blush during questioning.

And I realized, you know, that’s who she is. If that’s what comes out and that’s her expression, she can hurt feelings. About her husband. Why am I trying to make her into something that she’s not and you helped me see that But you also gave me great tips on how to just get her to talk to me Okay. Well, let’s walk through this because I don’t remember.

I’m not [00:18:00] So one of the things that you and I talked about was don’t make your first meeting about witness prep So we went out to the home and city of Victoria and also met with her and her daughter, who was also part of the case, but we had a couple of conversations with him just sitting down. And so what I did is I sat down and said, Hey, look, you don’t know me from Adam.

You know, I’ve not been I’ve not been here. Your co counsel brought us on I know he’s talked to you about me. I don’t know why you trust him either So let’s just you and I sit down and let’s start talking and I just we’re just trying to have a conversation Just a normal everyday conversation But one of the things that I I started trying to put in there was lady.

If I don’t live up to what I’m telling you or if I’m telling you something and I’m not, my actions are speaking something different called me on. But I want you to judge me not just by my words [00:19:00] and what you’re hearing, but by me. And so, you know, I made the comment early on. I was very interested in her and what was going on.

And towards the end of the case, she’s like, I just want you to know you were that you cared about us. You cared about me. And it’s not just this case, Elizabeth, you know this. Every one of our clients, they become a part of our lives. You know, they become family. And that’s, that’s critical to do what we do in these hard, excruciating situations where we take on the problems of everybody else.

The word is empathy. You’ve got to be empathetic. And, you know, I think that’s one of those things that you can learn, but there’s just some people that it’s a natural talent. Like you, you’re like the most empathetic person I know. You know, I think I always try to back people up. It’s a skill. Thank you.

Being empathetic is a skill, just like listening well, just like [00:20:00] making good deposition questions, just like making somebody comfortable. I mean, it’s a, it’s a skill, but I mean, I will say, you know, I remember having this conversation and just knowing, like, you have a real natural gift. of making people super comfortable.

Like you put people off very quickly. And so, you know, when I remember when I was having this conversation thinking, gosh, like use your skill. I mean, you’ve got this amazing skill of putting people really at ease and not going too far because sometimes what ends up happening is we go in to have a conversation with our client, it’s not a conversation.

It’s me talking the whole time and the client maybe says yes or no, or gives a small explanation. And that’s another one of those things where it’s like, you really have to have a conversation, ask a question, get an answer. It’s really kind of, you know, really has to be a true conversation instead of what most people experience, which is I’m going to come in and tell you how bad I feel for you.

We’re [00:21:00] going to go to this deposition. You’re going to be fine. So, you know, that’s why it’s like, We got to build that trust from the very beginning. And this Victoria just didn’t trust anybody. It didn’t matter if you were Mother Teresa walking in there trying to help her get ready. She, you know, so it wouldn’t have mattered.

But that’s why I think we talk about sometimes it’s just. meeting somebody where they are and accepting them for where they are. And I think you went in there one with that attitude inside, like I’m not here to change you. I just, let’s have a conversation. I think that significantly helps people who, who are in that state of mind.

Well, it was crazy. We were out there like, I think an entire week and the deposition didn’t happen to like the very end of the week. Right. So if I remember correctly, I had the first day’s conversation with you. And I called you up and said, Okay, I think I know how this person takes a little bit more.

This is what I’m getting. This is what I heard. Tell me. [00:22:00] And you were very gracious to say, Yeah, you’re either on or you I mean, you you gave me great direction. And so I think one of the keys to helping in witness prep. Is you’ve got to step into the shoes of your client and try to get into their headspace To kind of figure out where things are going and how they are viewing things And how they’re viewing the legal process and how they’re viewing their own feelings in the legal process And how their feelings are about you so you can help them along that journey.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that’s part of the one of the things that I always like to do when i’m getting ready to prepare anybody is I just take a good long look at just What they look like on paper? How old are they? What’s their education? How long are they married? Do they have kids? Like, what job have they been in?

Like, have they been in the military? Like, just to get an idea, like, okay, where’s their experience so far? And what have we experienced with them? Do they do everything we ask? Do we have to ask a couple times? Are they having to jog? Do they struggle to make, you know what I mean? Like, just so we can go [00:23:00] in there and understand a little bit more and then have that good conversation with them to listen and be like, okay, half that battle is just listening to what they give back to you and really taking a good long look at it to know like, aha, okay, That’s what’s important to them.

Giving good testimony is not important to the client. That sounds like a lawyer thing, right? So what’s most important to them? So tell us a little bit more about what did you find to help, help Victoria in her prep that, that unlocked the box. Let me say this. It was another great piece of advice that you gave me was you need to sit down and have a long conversation with those closest to her.

So I did. I had long conversations before we started witness prep with the daughter, with her sister. I want to say there was one other person like I spent a ton of time on the phone with trying to just get this picture before I sat down with her. [00:24:00] And once I did that, and then I had my initial conversation, I had all the pieces now.

I didn’t have all the pieces. I had pieces of a puzzle that gave me a good image of who she was and where she was headed. So after that, after I felt like we had established a good rapport, day one of prep. And, you know, normally I follow a formula, you know, day one, we’re going to do this day two, we’re going to do this day three, and then we’re off and running.

No, it was day one, eight hours, just on a couple of issues. It wasn’t my normal day one. And it was fears, misconceptions, Guilt and self awareness and that actually bled over into a day too, but it was really interesting for her to I think she had this picture of herself that I thought was [00:25:00] inaccurate and we Explored it together and she realized hey, look, I’m actually acting the way people expect me to act I really am Pretty tough old bird, you know, and that way I told you earlier, I was like, I’m scared.

She’d whip my butt. She was, she, she, she was, you know, we, we went through all of their past traumas, all of her life experiences. We talked about how she overcame those and how she would use those to overcome this latest. And she just got empowered and moved forward. It was really, really awesome. One of the really cool things that you said that I think a lot of people don’t appreciate is like, not every client is going to fit into this perfect formula that we have to prepare them.

And sometimes you just have to really have that flexibility to know like, okay, I know what my goals are in getting this person prepared. It’s not going to fit this normal framework, but I’m going to be flexible with it because one, it’s working like [00:26:00] listening and it’s working. And also she’s getting empowered.

So that was, Very keen on making sure, hey, what is my end goal instead of feeling like if I don’t hit these targets, if we’re not following this framework, it’s just not going to happen. Well, you know, and you’re absolutely right. And I think one of the biggest things that we as confidants, as counselors, have to keep in mind, if our client is not 100 percent prepared, We have an obligation and a duty to protect them from walking into a situation where they’re going to get slaughtered And whether you get a motion to compel and you got to pay the fees and the thing That’s part of doing business But your sole commitment has got to be to that client to make sure they’re 100 percent prepared To go in and do battle and part of that is you can’t just say okay We’ve done this and we’ve done this and just because you follow formula doesn’t mean if you’re not if you’re not doing it Right, Doesn’t matter.

Right. True. Yeah. So, and I think one of the things that spending that time on the front end with her, [00:27:00] right, spending that one whole day, that eight hours just walking through like her fears and that, like, did that translate into making things go much easier down the road when you guys were actually working on organizing testimony and doing things like that?

So, it was a hundred percent well worth the foundation. Because once we got through that and we got her to see that, hey, this is this misconception is a misconception. There is no fear here. Hey, this issue here is a solidified. This is how I deal with this fear. Hey, myself. Not that I’m wondering, but I’m a rock.

I can handle this. You know, it’s okay for me to break down a little bit and show my feelings and it’s okay for me to have a little righteous in the nation because dad, now that you killed my, he killed my husband, he killed my life. And that made the next part where we started going into the, the truths and how to deflect the attacks and to, And to defend herself and to be empowered to say, I am, you know, it became a crusade for her.[00:28:00]

It wasn’t, um, it wasn’t a crusade of, I’m defending myself. It was, I’m giving you a crusade of how awesome my husband was. I’m giving you a crusade to tell you how crappy you people are by taking him because you didn’t care about safety. It was so just empowering. And when I first met this, nice lady, she would shrink.

She was like five foot one and when we talk, I think I told you she’d shrink down like four eleven. It was amazing to see a six foot one man, midwestern man, male attorney, go from six one to five six by this little lady just beating him down. It was phenomenal. Phenomenal. And he walked out, he was, he was shaken from the deposition.

That’s my question, what was the impact of her testimony on this case? So one of the big issues that we had, I mean, it was a horrible case. Her husband burned to death. Okay. Lived afterwards, but they really thought that they [00:29:00] were going to make a lot of hay on her because of her background. And they thought that they could solely him with some of the Elizabeth, I know you have find this hard to believe, but if anybody opened the closet door into my life, they would find skeletons that I would be ashamed of.

And they thought that they were going to really do a number on her and her husband by opening up that closet door and dragging those things out. And let me tell you, that was a huge mistake because she was ready for it. Uh, she had her major truth in, in connection with that. And she would take that question that was meant to the little.

denigrate her husband or belittle and denigrate her and she would show how they overcame that or how they Learned from that and how that made them who they are my favorite episode of the whole thing People get really nervous when they go into a deposition and they can’t remember things that are really critical.

And so she and I spent a long time together writing down [00:30:00] the things that made him special to her. I mean, we had, I’m telling you, we had three sheets of notebook paper and we told her, Hey, look, this is, you know, her truth was he was special to me because, and then she had all these bricks. And this guy’s been trying to, you know, go into drug use of her husband and stuff.

And she’s like, look, man, he, he, yeah, she’s like, she owned it. She’s like, yeah, he either smoking pot and that’s why he lost his CDL license, but he got better. He, he, he threw it aside because driving meant so much to him. He didn’t touch it again. And he had a CDL and in fact, he became so good at what he was doing.

He was teaching other people how to be safe drivers. Why couldn’t you people do that? Why couldn’t you teach this guy how to be a safe driver? It was anyway, she was great. She like turned it on him, but this guy thinks he’s going to be cute. And, and, and, you know, you see it all the time. Well, is that all is it?

And so he’s like, well, what made him so special? And I’ll never forget it. Co counsel was like, well, I have something prepared for her and he throws [00:31:00] it, he gives it to her and she just looks at co counsel like I don’t need this. And she takes the piece of paper, I kid you not, she crumples it up and she says, let me tell you, I miss the man and this is what I miss.

And she just went off. And when she crumpled up that piece of paper and look that guy in the eye and said, I missed the man. And this is what, this is about the man that I miss and just started rapid fire. She got done. He went, I am done. He stopped right there. I am done. And that was maybe 40 minutes into her deposition.

And he had a huge thick list of questions. He was like, I missed the man. Boom. And I think he realized if I stay in this too much longer, I may lose a client because she’s kicking my rear end all over this room. So, I mean, as far [00:32:00] as her basically flipping the script on, right, being the complete opposite of what they expected, did that help the case get settled quicker?

Do you feel like it helped the value of the case? It did. We went into mediation. And this is where it helps we had this attorney until this deposition happened and then Lo and behold after this deposition they went and got an expert to come in and try to Clean up the other guy’s mess. And even then, you know, that was the white flag when they brought in the other guy to help this one guy who was a local guy.

And it was because of her, it was because of her, they knew what had happened. So they, they brought in a closer to close the deal at mediation. What they did. Awesome. I think one of the biggest things that we can help people in this situation, in these lawsuits is giving them the ability to do the best they can do.

It’s a terrible situation, but they have a job. And did you feel like she felt like this is the best I I did the best I could for Larry and, and I left it all on the [00:33:00] table? She, she did. And what’s more, I, this is, this was the. Best part for me, this is very selfish, but we got done and she said, I feel like, you know, Larry, now it’s probably best compliment you could get and I was, and I did, I was, I mean, it was all I can do not to break down and cry now we cried a lot together.

Don’t get me wrong. But when she said that, that was huge. That’s, that’s, I mean, You gave her closure, which is better than any pile of money, you know, and the ability to, to stand up for herself. So that’s awesome. Any other kind of side notes or thoughts or, you know, what I was thinking, like looking at this particular prep and this particular person, what were the top three things you’d recommend for people who were kind of in the same situation where you’ve got, maybe you’ve got a combative person and it’s wrongful death case.

So number one, call Elizabeth Larrick. Um, number two, I, I really, and you, and [00:34:00] again, you helped me with this, Death, Dying, and Grief by Larry Platt. I read that, reread it, read it again, just over, over, over, over. And I think the last one I would say is Silence. Silence was extremely powerful in this prep because the client wanted to run and hide and I would just sit there.

And she would look at me, she’d be like, she would say things like, what the F are you not going to say anything? And I would just, I just look at her and I would wait and I would wait. And then the. the motion would come out and we would move on. And so there’s a lot of times that I would just use silence to make her process to make her think about what was on the table.

And she would use that after a while it became a prod for her to know that she needed to go deeper. You know, there’s a lot of cut. There was a lot of cussing at me on the front end, but I just had to endure. I had to endure [00:35:00] in silence, you know, our, our natural tendency is to rush in and fill that gap.

And I knew, you know, you and I talked about this, you know, I knew that that was going to be critical because she of who she was and where she was emotionally, that that was going to be critical. critical for her to break through to get to the feelings and to get to the truth to tell us really about her husband.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s such a hard thing to do to give someone space, silence, but it’s also one of the most powerful tools that we have with people. I mean, just in general, you know, but I think sometimes we forget as lawyers, like, oh yeah, There is so much power in being comfortable with silence, because again, one of the things that you gave her was you, even in that silence, you are giving her your attention.

And you’re saying like, I’m here, I’m here for you, there’s, I’m not going to give you any verbal pressure here, we’re just gonna, just whenever you’re ready. I’m here. So the, the last thing I would say is, you know, I spent a lot of time trying to get into the head of the other [00:36:00] side where they’re gonna come at or how they’re gonna do it.

I just got done, you know what? I’m the dean of the, the deposition college at KTI, and, and we just got done having a course yesterday, and I jumped on and I, you know, I, I want to give these students the idea, you cannot underestimate. The importance of trying to get into this the mindset of your opponent And so I spent a lot of time going into the prep of this looking at their answer looking at their discovery Sitting in my office role playing it back and forth with myself.

I set up two chairs I would ask myself a question. I would move i’d get up move to the other side of the chair answer it out loud and and ruminate on and switch sides and ruminate on that answer to see if that was true or if I felt like it was true and if that was true how do we approach that and so you know and then you put it into a memo format because you don’t want to miss it you don’t want to forget it because yeah I’m getting older I’m getting older and I forget things so there you go [00:37:00] no you can’t I mean that that’s such a helpful exercise for getting ready for depositions and for client depositions trying to be able to anticipate.

where they’re coming at. So absolutely. Well, awesome. Well, Danny, thank you so much for joining us in this episode. You have given us lots of wonderful things to think about, and I appreciate jumping on having this conversation about wrongful death cases and how to help clients do better in their testimony.

Well, thank you for letting me have this platform and just for your friendship. If people don’t know you, they need to get to know you because you are truly one of the gems out there. And you will transform their practice just getting to work with you. Very nice of you to say and I always 100 percent appreciate our friendship and I always call Danny when I’m like, I’ve got this depo.

How do I do this? So awesome, especially on my trucking cases for sure. So well, thank you again, Danny. I appreciate it. We will put your contact information in the show notes. If you have any questions for Danny, I know he’s always able and willing and wants to help people. So, all right. [00:38:00] Thanks. Until next time.