It’s really about avoiding ‘lawyerese’. That sort of language makes you sound fancy but fails to make you likeable or helpful to jurors hearing your case. And that’s really what you want.

Sometimes clients will marvel that we are able to extract so much information from focus group participants, and they ask us why we are able to get them to talk so much better than the lawyers feel they could.  I tell them “Mostly it’s that we’re unencumbered by a law school education.”  It’s hard to use plain language when in law school you were most often rewarded for using esoteric terms, foreign phrases, and complex reasoning. But few jurors went to law school. They live in the real world and they want you to teach them about your case without talking down to them (i.e., being condescending) or leaving them in the dust of jargon (aka ‘lawyerese’).  They would like you and your witnesses to assist them in coming to a clear understanding.

PsyBlog recently wrote about a new study on the value of speaking concretely and they cite three reasons the listener hears concrete language as truthful:

• Our minds process concrete statements more quickly, and we automatically associate quick and easy with true.

• We can create mental pictures of concrete statements more easily. When something is easier to picture, it’s easier to recall, so seems more true.

• Also, when something is more easily pictured it seems more plausible, so it’s more readily believed.

In essence, for litigation advocacy, using concrete language means this:

Describe things jurors can see with their eyes or hear with their ears.

Create ‘word pictures’ such as “the computer counts the number of packets” [supplemented by user-friendly graphics] rather than “packets are numbered and pass through the program”.

Remember, you are relating the esoteric to the mundane and everyday experiences of the jurors. It thus makes sense to them and they believe you.

If you read us and find us useful, helpful, entertaining, or in any way enlightening–please consider nominating us for this year’s Blawg 100 listings. You brought us into the Blawg 100 for 2010–how about helping in 2011? Nominate us for the ABA Blawg 100 here.

Hansen J, & Wänke M (2010). Truth from language and truth from fit: the impact of linguistic concreteness and level of construal on subjective truth. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 36 (11), 1576-88 PMID: 20947772

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