What About Your Client’s Self-Image and Perception?
How much power does self-perception hold over our actions, and what role does it play in a courtroom scenario? How critical is the reconciliation of dual identities, especially when it comes to legal proceedings? If these questions intrigue you, then this episode is perfect for you. Join me as I discuss the profound impact of client self-image on case testimony, how a client’s perception of themselves can significantly alter their behavior, and how jurors’ immediate judgments can adversely affect a case. I’m also offering gentle strategies that attorneys can adopt to tackle these issues.
Moving on to the realm of dual identities, we unravel how they can emerge in legal cases and their implications, including a case study about a client who had to grapple with two contrasting identities, and the eventual resolution that led to positive outcomes. We break down the confusion between identity and reputation, and why self-awareness is important. Join me for this illuminating discussion that unlocks the psychological dimensions of trial preparation.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Client self-image and testimony impact
- Navigating dual identities and perceptions in a legal case
- How self-awareness and reputation can become twisted up in our minds
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Supporting Resources:
“You Are a Badass” by Jen Sincero: https://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Badass%C2%AE-Doubting-Greatness/dp/0762447699
Winning Case Preparation: Understanding Jury Bias: https://www.amazon.com/Winning-Case-Preparation-Understanding-Jury/dp/B07L1X7XST
Episode Credits:
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know I sent you.
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast, Trial Lawyer Prep, a podcast dedicated to trial lawyers getting ready for mediations, trials, and just trying to prepare cases a little bit better than last time.
I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick, and [00:01:00] today’s episode, we are going to piggyback off of some information, some things that we heard about an episode that I had with Joseph Rosenfeld. That was episode 90, where we talked about lawyers and self image and ways that we can think about our image and basically use it to advocate.
But what I want to talk about today is more about our clients self image and perception. How they’re perceiving themselves, how they believe others are perceiving them, and how sometimes this change between their own identity and what they think other people are perceiving and expecting them cause them to change.
So why would we talk about this? I am sure that we have probably all encountered some folks with some flip flopping going on in our lives, but specifically when we talk about this in a case, [00:02:00] we’re talking about how we have folks who will do things that can impact their testimony. And specifically, we’re talking also about how we have jurors, and they are going to instantly judge Our clients based on what they see and then what they hear, and they’re trying to spot the phony, spot the lie.
And we know this to be true. There’s lots of focus group research. I’ve obviously had this confirmed in my research with focus groups. But also there are many other top trial lawyers. Who’ve done research and written books. The book that comes to mind right off the bat is Winning Case Preparation, Understanding Jury Bias, where they talk about, yeah, jurors, focus groupers, they’re trying to find anything possibly wrong or anything where they can say, oh, but you know, There it is.
That’s the thing I would have done differently, right? That person should have gone and gotten a second [00:03:00] opinion because I would definitely have done or that person Should have honked their horn. They should have been slowing down, right? That’s what I would have done. That person They really should report that behavior to HRE medium.
This goes on and on and basically it’s called many different things defensive attribution Negative attribution. Basically, there’s no way that I would have gotten caught in this situation or this crash or this Doctors, crosshairs, because I’d have done things differently. Your person should try to find that negative thing, that, that defensive thing that your client has done wrong.
And I will say, obviously I hear a lot of lawyers that worry about the way our clients look and dress because again, before even people testify, jurors are really scrutinizing what people look like and with the help of our social media. Really turning and emphasizing how people look automatically almost dictates how you are, right, [00:04:00] what that expectation is, so amplified in our regular normal lives.
So today we’re going to take a different look at this topic by really looking at it from our client’s point of view, and then also how we as lawyers can address this issue, this flip flopping. In testimony preparation, whether that testimony be for deposition or for trial, and in a very gentle way. So, we could spend many episodes about what a client should wear or not wear, and we are not doing that today.
Instead, we’re really going to be focusing on what’s going on in our client’s mind, those changes that clients are making in that testimony, in some of that behavior, based on perceptions that they believe others are having. Now, I will say from the outside, this is not every single client. There are many people walking around in this world who declare who they are, they act exactly [00:05:00] like they say, and they’re unafraid of what others think or say about them.
And you know what you’re going to get every time with this person? And I celebrate them, right? Like, I think we all can appreciate whether those people are positive or negative. We know what we’re gonna get. That’s great. That our little minds don’t have to work too hard. But the rest of the world doesn’t do this, right?
These are folks walking around every day who struggle with and conform to be what, who do what others think or want them to be. And there are tons, like as a sidebar, there are tons of research and books about self awareness and think about personal development books on this whole thing of self awareness and identity and reputation and conforming and how that can kind of get a little twisted up in our minds.
Lots of great books out there. If you are thinking, huh, [00:06:00] maybe I change who I am, like there are lots of great books. I recommend a book I am rereading probably for the 10th time because I’ve had this book for a very long time. You are a badass by Jen Sincero. Great book. She’s got several out. This one’s kind of her first one.
So check it out. It’s a fun one. I love her style of writing. Back to what we’re talking about. So let me say we are not trying to quote unquote fix people here, right? We’re going to leave that stuff to professionals and you may in fact start having this conversation with your client and realize, oh boy, this is we need the help of a professional here because it’s beyond me asking some simple questions.
And just talking to them about where this all came from. And that’s okay. You may, as long as you have the awareness, it’s okay to stop and get that person the professional help that they may need. This has a hundred percent happened to me when I was preparing a client in a [00:07:00] wrongful death case, she had developed some severe behavior changes and lots of misperceptions about herself, and to the point that she was really going to, her testimony was going to endanger her case, and more importantly, she had two minor children and her kids’ case.
Right. So wrongful death, right. These folks needed to recover money to be able to live because her husband had passed away. So, we stopped what we were doing, we got her some help, we also got some other people into the case to help the jury understand where some of this stuff may come from. Because again, changing people’s thoughts and minds and beliefs can be a challenge.
It takes time. Lots of time. I can tell from personal experience. So, getting back to this episode, We’re really talking about bringing awareness to the situation for you, so that [00:08:00] you can understand more, and also for the client. You may have people who, you start to have this conversation and they think, yeah, absolutely, I have done X, Y, Z, and I found that I’ve just pretty much started doing that every time because people will tell me, oh, hey, I thought X about you, I thought Y about you.
And sometimes these changes are positive or negative. And what we want to do again, have a simple conversation with folks, a curious conversation, bring some awareness to it, and then also, again, thinking how it’s going to impact the case and some, some general ways to talk about it so that maybe we can have a little bit of breakthrough when it comes to testimony, right?
So remember, we’re always talking about testimony and how we want our clients, we really want them to be themselves. So. What problem am I talking about here? I am talking about people who will change their testimony by using [00:09:00] different words. Or different language than they normally would, right? These are people who off the top of my head, I’m thinking, they think they have to talk more professionally, right?
They have to have fancy words because if you’re talking to a lawyer and are they going to court, so they got to use better different words. And it’s just like, okay, or they change how they dress. We talked about this, right? How they would normally dress based on people’s perceptions. Sometimes people dress fancier.
Sometimes people want to dress down. I’ve had it go both ways where people want to dress up. So they look like, Oh, people will think that I am wealthy. People say, I don’t want people to know that I have money. So I’m going to dress down. I’m like, okay, we got people who just change their behavior or demeanor.
And so what I’m thinking of here is people who either become total pushovers. Or become completely defensive and stubborn. I also have people who we can probably all think of somebody in our case files or in our history, being a lawyers who’ve definitely [00:10:00] lied to try to make their case look better. and stretch the truth to exaggerate just a little bit to make things look worse.
All right, some changes are positive and some changes are negative. Most of the ones I listed are negative, but as a positive example, and this again may ring true for several of you, obviously it’s from my personal experience, when I became a new lawyer. I, of course, absolutely did not want to look dumb or like I didn’t know what I was doing.
So in that vein, when I had a court hearing, I would just go over and above preparation. And the point of calling the court’s office, talking to staff, making sure what the do’s and the don’ts are, calling other lawyers who’ve been in front of this court to get their experience, studying the things I’ve filed ad nauseum, and showing 30 minutes early.
Mostly [00:11:00] these are positive changes. Oh, these are, sounds like you’d be really prepared. But in the end, some of this stuff is just a giant waste of time, because I should have been using my time, like, crafting on what I would say, and how I would say it, and what the counter arguments may be. Because once I got in there, of course I was early, and I followed all the rules, but then I knew exactly what was in my motions, but not so well at being able to articulate.
What I needed the court to hear. Positive, but again, in the long run, a giant waste of time because I wasn’t working on what I should say. So let’s talk about another example that I have that we’ll use throughout the rest of this episode. I had a client, back in the day, she was a female client in her fifties.
She had raised four kids on her own, single mom, worked several jobs. She gets in a pretty, pretty significant car crash. And as we’re going through the case, Get it from the very front end and [00:12:00] negotiations fail, so we have to file and have litigation and throughout the time she’s starting to treat staff different than she treats me.
She treats staff very bad, like very negative, is very gruff, is very short, is very upset with them, but I never get any of this behavior myself. I get this nice, glowing, responsive, gets things done, wants to give me her time, she’s always available for calls, right? What gives? And I didn’t 100 percent know what, why, I didn’t really know why.
I just knew, I’m wondering which is, which is the real person or identity. Am I just getting somebody who’s super sugarcoating me for some reason? And so we sat down to have a conversation for deposition and she’s gonna give her deposition. And as I ask her this question, Hey, trying to feel out a little bit about who’s going to show up at the [00:13:00] deposition.
And it turns out she is this gruff mama bear bulldozer 90 percent of the time, because she has this perception. That people think she’s weak because she’s a woman, she’s also very petite, and she basically has had to fight and advocate constantly for herself and her kids for years, so that just became who she would be to people on the outside.
And so her plan for this deposition was to basically tear this opposing counsel, this defense lawyer, a new one, you know, she’s ready to go in there and just like throw down. And again, people had underestimated her, some of the jobs she’d worked at, she were very midden, most of her other co workers were men, so she had to basically be tough and rough, and so we talked about that.
We took it apart, okay, so let’s take it down both roads. Let’s be defensive. What does that mean? To you, right? Cause I don’t, it’s different for different people. [00:14:00] I really want to know what’s in her brain and she’s, I want to take jabs, right? I’m going to be short. I’m going to be gruff. I’m not going to give them an inch.
I’m not going to limit my answers basically. And I said, okay, what’s the other side? Articulate about herself and her injuries and the impact, her worries, her frustrations. Right, letting people learn more about her, um, versus being, you know, basically very closed off. And then I turn the conversation to why is this important?
Because at the end of the day, while the defense lawyer’s asking you those questions and there’s a judge involved here, it’s jurors that make the decision. It’s jurors that will be looking and deciding. And they are trying to psychoanalyze who you are, why you’re here, what is real, and what is fake, what is a lie.
And [00:15:00] what does it generally mean if someone’s being defensive, right? You got something to hide. But the cool thing is, here we are, sitting here today, and you get to choose. How you want to show up and who you want to be, who you want the jurors to know, and we, sounds like we spent a ton of time on this. We really didn’t spend a lot of time.
Again, I had very good rapport with her. She treated me very nicely and Having me be curious about it and asking open ended questions and understanding more really helped her then be able to take that turn of, Oh, okay, jurors might, this might damage like what the jurors would see when I limit it. And so she ultimately showed up as herself, her true identity, right?
And she was able to articulate and answer [00:16:00] questions and really lay it all on the table. And very proud of her. And I think that she was proud of herself. And of course, she definitely got defensive here and there. But that happens. We can’t ask for perfection. I think it significantly helped the ability for us to get the case settled without having to do a deposition because she was articulate and she explained things and she had to speak for a lot of other people.
She had like two kids in the car and her sister who was struggling with some other things. She was a very good advocate for herself and other people in the car and I think that significantly helped. Let’s just break this down basically. What happened here, which was, I was seeing two clients. I saw a client who she was to me, smart, funny, thoughtful, caring mom, hardworking, and the client who she was to Steph, right?
Basically this bulldozer who got what she want when she wanted it. She [00:17:00] got stuff done at the cost of the polite, the niceties that you would expect. And of course, what I wanted was the smart, funny, thoughtful, caring person, not this bulldozer. But I had to ask the question to really determine which one was her true identity.
Because she could have been people pleasing and sugarcoating me for some reason, right? I, who knows? But I had to ask that question. And Because it turned out she had created this reputation of being a bulldozer based on perceptions of weakness and experiences of being treated weak and getting pushed around so that, like I said, she created this reputation, like she took action, she changed who she was, right, to get shit done.
So. In my example, I had questions that I asked, which were framed around events that I saw and [00:18:00] experienced directly. Right? Hey, you’re treating Rebecca, the receptionist, rough a couple of times around here, but hand off to me and it’s great. So I had very specific events and experiences that I could draw on.
And then she had to basically answer. I know other people can hide it better. They can hide their flip flop better or. just hide themselves from you altogether, which is also what I hear a lot from lawyers. Hey, I’ve got this client, I can’t get them to open up. And I, there’s a lot of times we get people who they just want to show us their professional self, what they think you, lawyer, expect them in a client.
So you may have to ask a general question, right? Hey, I’m going to talk, I’m going to ask you a couple of random questions. When you walk into a room of strangers, or you walk into a new situation, a mall, a grocery store, we’re keeping it super general, but we’re walking into a new situation for them. You ever feel like you [00:19:00] have to do something different or change what you do because what others are expecting of you?
Okay, tell me about that. Ask for more information. And then again, once we find out more, how does that feel? Then you can take the turn and say, okay, let me tell you why we’re talking about this term. And you can start with why we’re talking about this from the very beginning. Okay? So you don’t have to hide the purpose of the conversation.
It may help. It may not help. Again, when I’m preparing folks, sometimes. I don’t explain things well. It’s all about communication and sometimes you got to explain things twice. It’s okay. I’m sure people had to explain things that they, you don’t know about twice. So don’t worry about having to explain things with a purpose twice as long as you’re getting where you’re going.
Let’s just back up a little bit and take it from the top, which would be first things first is to identify if you have a client with a self awareness, self image issue. We’re talking about folks that are That are flip [00:20:00] flopping, who they are, behavior based on perceptions, expectations, they’ve held them.
Right, some of this will be very obvious, as my example was. Or people who lie and stretch the truth because they think that’s what’s going to get me more money. Now, some people hide it way better. Either way, it’s that flip flop. Right, that’s where, just look for some kind of flip flop going on with that person.
Once you figure out, oh, yep, that person, it may or may not be there, but hey, We’re going to take 10 minutes and have this conversation and simple conversation, but you do need to move to the next step, which is mold and craft your questions that you’re gonna step you can either use a direct experience that you have with the client or You can do the general question like we talked about Hey, when you go to the grocery store, or you got to go to happy hour, you know, it’s a general question Strangers, you don’t know any of these people, you know, you ever do anything or feel yourself doing something different because you expect others, right?
I think you have that [00:21:00] expectation. If you’ve got to give an example, come up with a simple personal example. Third step is always ask for information. Just follow up, learn a little more, dig a little more into what’s in there. And then the last part, which is, hey, at the end of the day, jurors are going to be watching and listening and judging.
They’re going to spot a phony. They’re going to try and spot lies, they’re going to try and spot people who are pandering to them. And any level of funny business will cause them to shut it down. So we want you to be yourself, to be your true self. And you may find folks who 100 percent know they changed their behavior.
Totally. And it may not be a problem for them. Some people may struggle with that they do that and they may not like it. Okay, so there’s all kinds of gamut you could run here. We know what our purpose is, which is to talk about jurors judging, watching, spotting, the pandering. And the goal is just to open that self awareness door just wide enough to gain [00:22:00] some insight into the jurors and the purpose of the jurors and the impact on their case.
We want that true person, their true identity to show up, to be who they are, right? Because that’s what jurors do. They want to be able to see who you are and respect that they’re getting the truth from you. Even if it means your client may not be the shining bright star, they may truly be a bulldozer.
But if they’re being a bulldozer and the juror knows it, they’re going to say, That person, that person’s being themselves and I trust that they are and I respect that they’re being themselves. Because I will hear many times. People will say, your client must be nice, your client must be likable. Jurors don’t give money to people who are not likable.
Listen, you can teach [00:23:00] any person to be nice and to be likable. A lot of serial killers were nice and likable people. But they couldn’t be trusted. I think what people, what jurors really want is a person that they can trust they’re getting the truth from and then respect. Because that’s the person the jurors will allow money for and punish the lying deceitful defendants.
A little bit of a soapbox moment here. Because Again, you can teach people to be nice, but having somebody be vulnerable and trust those jurors, it’s a two way street here, right? And that’s half the battle. Sometimes we have to build people’s confidence up to be themselves, right? And sometimes we got to tear down that confidence so that they’ll be vulnerable to be themselves.
But that’s who you want to show up because [00:24:00] that’s what the truth is. And again, jurors, we trust and respect that. Because we know the other side is not showing up. Being truthful, there’s a lie somewhere in there. Jumping off the soap. Okay, I hope that this episode helps you tackle this issue. Again, we’re looking at folks who are doing that flip flop, who are doing some kind of change or machination.
And again, we just want them They’re having a struggle here to be themselves, or they’re outright trying to be someone else. So they will be likable. You can spot it. Also, you can spot it if you got it as well. Think about this as well. Sometimes we do this ourselves, I will tell you. I 100 percent do this, right?
Gave that first example. I still find myself doing this. Sometimes it’s hard to be truthful because I’m a recovering people peacemaker, so there you go. Alright, thank you all so much. I hope this episode was helpful. And if you have questions or something just did not make sense, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
My email will be in the show notes. And until next time, thank [00:25:00] you.