THE
GOOD
LAWYER
A good story is
built around a theme, of course, and themes
are best advanced using emotional or visual
content that a judge or a jury will remember. Popular
ABA Journal columnist Jim McElhaney says
it’s a “basic principle” that “if the judge
and jury don’t remember the important parts of
your case, they aren’t going to want you to
win.” Word
pictures, or images are so essential to
effective communication that David Ball
contends that a “trial attorney without images
is like an art book without pictures.” Competitors
in memory championships (yes, there is a
circuit of memory competitions around the
globe) know that creating unusual and vivid
visual images is the best technique for
encoding information in their brains. They
frequently employ “memory castles” in which
every room is the site of an activity that
triggers an association with a thing sought to
be remembered.
The point is that images stick in our
brains the way free-floating facts or
contentions don’t.
Justice
Sonia Sotomayor, in her recent memoir, recalls a
lesson she learned while working in the
Manhattan district attorney’s office. She
came to see the state’s case as “the story of
the crime” and saw as her job identifying the
“particulars that make a story real.” Sotomayor
writes, “In examining witnesses, I learned to
ask general questions to elicit details with
powerful sensory associations: the colors, the
sounds, the smells that lodge an image in the
mind and put the listener in the burning house.”
Defense attorney Barry Slotnick,
defending Bernhard Goetz, who seriously
injured four men in a New York City subway
car, compared his client’s actions to that of
“a trapped rat,” not a “Rambo.” Clarence
Darrow, defending two teenage killers, Nathan
Leopold and Richard Loeb, argued against the
penalty of death by taking the judge who would
decide the fate of the two young men right to
their possible execution: “I can picture them,
wakened in the gray light of morning,
furnished a suit of clothes by the state, led
to the scaffold, their feet tied, black caps
drawn over their heads, stood on a trap door,
the hangman pressing a spring, so that it
gives way under them; I can see them fall
through space—and
stopped
by the rope around their necks.” Gerry Spence
once took the unusual approach of filing a
brief with the Court of Claims that consisted
entirely of a few pages of cartoons drawn for
him by his brother. Even
though the brief lacked a single citation to a
reported case, he won the case—probably to the
amazement of his opponent. Spence
argues lawyer’s papers “should be fun to
read.” (We
do not endorse, by the way, reducing every
argument to a series of cartoons, but boring
judges or jurors out of their minds breeds
resentment and cannot be helpful to your
case.)
Seeking Quality in the
Practice of Law
by DOUGLAS O. LINDER and
NANCY LEVIT (Oxford
University Press, 2013?)
The Good Lawyer
About
The Good Lawyer
Preface
Introductory
Note
The
Good Lawyer is Courageous
The
Good Lawyer is Empathetic
The
Good Lawyer Has a Passion for Justice
The
Good Lawyer Values Others in the Legal
Community
The
Good Lawyer Uses Both Intuition and
Deliberative Thinking
The
Good Lawyer Thinks realistically About the
Future
The
Good Lawyer Serves the True Interests of
Clients
The
Good Lawyer Has Ample Willpower
Seeking
Quality
Quotes
Random
Facts
The
Happy Lawyer
Excerpt from Chapter
9:
The Good Lawyer Is Persuasive