Do You Like Me?

 

Likeability shouldn’t matter in the courtroom. A lawyer’s personality should be irrelevant. The facts should be paramount, the only thing jurors attend to, but jurors are persuaded by a combination of factors. Facts are but one of many.

Your likeability matters. Fortunately, this isn’t high school, and your likeability isn’t based on an indecipherable “cool factor.” Likeability is based on traits anyone can easily acquire or express. Among those traits are:

1. Politeness and civility

Jurors appreciate attorneys who are polite and civil with everyone in the courtroom, from the clerk to hostile witness to alternate juror.

2. Appropriate passion

Jurors like attorneys who show zeal for their client’s cause, without stooping to unwarranted bashing of the other side. Arguing inconsistencies, strength of evidence and the like are fine. Pointing out opposing counsel or a witness’s weaknesses is fine. Beating up on opposing counsel or a witness is not.

3. Clarity

Strange as it may seem, the attorney who provides the clearest, most to-the-point roadmap through the trial, the clearest, easiest-to-understand, succinct examination of witnesses, the clearest description of evidence, and the clearest explanation of jury instructions—is the attorney who is most liked, and will, in most cases, carry the day.

Master these three traits, and you’ll soon be the “best-liked” and “most-winning” lawyer in the courthouse.

The Enduring, Maddening CSI Effect

In my ongoing research of what jurors think and how they decide cases, I read umpteen blogs, tweets and more authored by those who have served. Even though the original “CSI” television show and its many offshoots are long past (well, mostly), the “CSI effect” is remarkably enduring. One would do well to pay more attention to it.

Simply put, the “CSI effect” is jurors’ overriding, sometimes obsessive, need to explore for themselves every bit of physical evidence in an attempt to come to a fair and just decision. This is true whether the case at hand is civil or criminal. Contracts are scrutinized, emails pored over, and signatures examined with the same zeal as skid marks and bloodstains.

In one trial, for example, jurors requested photos of a victim’s wounds and examined them minutely. Nothing novel there. However, a mechanic among the jurors categorically pronounced the wounds as from a Torx screwdriver, despite the fact that apparently no such screwdriver had been mentioned during the trial. In the absence of being given any more compelling evidence from defense, the rest of the jurors seized on the “Torx” interpretation, and what had been a stalemated jury rapidly became a unanimous plaintiff’s verdict.

What’s the lesson here? That it’s up to you, the attorney, to look at your evidence every which way and give a forceful, compelling, interpretation to your evidence (preferably with visuals for support) such that it cannot be re-interpreted in some unfavorable way by a jury that examines the evidence with a keener eye than yours. Even when there is no way for you or your experts to say with conviction “Here’s the smoking gun!” offer the jurors the strongest probable interpretation that can be drawn from the evidence. Leaving the interpretation up to the jurors is taking a chance you can ill afford when you want to win.