Client Testimony Preparation Phase 3: Role Play
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.
We’d love it even more if you could drop a review or 5-star rating over on Apple Podcasts. Simply select “Ratings and Reviews” and “Write a Review” then a quick line with your favorite part of the episode. It only takes a second and it helps spread the word about the podcast.
Supporting Resources:
If you have a question or comment, please let me know: elizabeth@larricklawfirm.com
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.