We’ve been reading Mark Bennett’s Simple Rules for Jury Selection and wishing we’d thought of that! So we are ‘liberating’ his idea with some simple rules of our own. Once you have your jury (perhaps using Mark’s ‘simple rules’) how do you persuade them?

We spend a lot of time reading the research on persuasion and have determined that we’re not sure we believe in persuasion per se.  If it exists, it isn’t in the form most people think of as ‘persuasion’.  We have all been working on our world view our entire lifetimes, and by the time jurors are sworn in, they aren’t subject to being swayed by your soaring oratory.  The bad part is, “Wouldn’t that be nice!”  The good part is, “What a relief—I’m off the hook!”  Jurors want to do their own assessment of the case, and they will use their own yardstick to measure. Therefore, rather then trying to persuade them to adopt a new view, spend your time crafting a trial story that connects the case facts with their already-held values and beliefs.

There is no such thing as “Persuasion”

• What the most gifted and skilled advocates do is not “persuade”, but rather they craft a story that connects with the strongly held beliefs of jurors.
• They don’t create arguments or conflicts. They make the points of connection more compelling than the points of division.  Egregious behavior isn’t bad because it offends you, it offends because of its impact on the values of jurors.
• So tell the jury’s story while you tell your client’s story.  Help the jury to see that what is most important to them is manifest in a verdict for your client.

Over the next year (or so) as we see new research that reminds us of the persuasion strategies we recommend using—we’ll write blog posts about them and categorize them all under “Simple Jury Persuasion Rules”. We hope you enjoy them. We know we’ve enjoyed Mark’s excursions into jury selection!

Update: October 4th, 2009. As we’ve begun to identify our ‘simple jury persuasion’ strategies–we have realized there are too many to be categorized as ‘rules’. So we’ve modified old posts and changed the category to ‘Simple Jury Persuasion’.

Related posts:

1. Simple Jury Persuasion: It feels good to get along
2. Simple Jury Persuasion: Don’t confuse argument with persuasion
3. Simple Jury Persuasion: “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”
4. Simple Jury Persuasion: When it comes to litigation persuasion–hard sell, soft sell, or no sell?
5. Simple Jury Persuasion: Be credible

1. BostonDUIAttorney says:

   October 5, 2009 at 4:48 AM

   RT @BlawgTweets: New @keenetrial: Simple Jury Persuasion: There is no such thing as “Persuasion”. http://bit.ly/1zdDX
2. Jason Chan says:

   October 5, 2009 at 4:48 AM

   RT @BlawgTweets: New @keenetrial: Simple Jury Persuasion: There is no such thing as “Persuasion”. http://bit.ly/1zdDX