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Continued... Page 2 > Expert Witness at Trial

At this point, it is meaningless to get into the chicken or egg problem of whether the news media shortened the public's attention span through generous use of sound bites or whether they merely responded to something that was already there. Either way, the shrinking attention span of the public is a fact of life in the last decade of the twentieth century. Everywhere you look, consumers of information are being catered to by being given abbreviated, concentrated messages that don't require much sifting to get to the point. Graphic images and symbols have also been developed to be instantly understandable, crossing barriers of language and education.

Before any of us get too terribly sanctimonious about the decline of literacy in America as reflected by a short attention span, ask yourself, ìWhen is the last time I heard a long speech that I really liked?î Although we lawyers have conditioned ourselves to put up with boredom as an occupational hazard in such delights as all day depositions, buried underneath we too have the same instant gratification expectations of the sound bite era.

Holding Jurors' Attention Is An Incremental Process

In this era of sound bites and short attention spans, it is essential that you bring rapid pace to your presentation of an expert witness' testimony. Even though a jury is in one sense a captive audience and cannot ìchange the channelî as they sit in the jury box, they can mentally tune out your expert in short order.

The initial attention span of a juror in the 1990s is 30 seconds or less. In this very brief amount of time, the juror will make a first assessment of whether anything said will be of value to them. The beginning of an expert's testimony is critical for this reason. If you are able to pass this first 30 second hurdle and convince the jurors that your expert is worth listening to, they will then ìbuy intoî another time increment of perhaps one to one and a half minutes. In this second period of active listening, they will continue to judge whether or not there is anything of value to them in the presentation. You and each of your experts will have to continue to convince the audience on the jury panel to keep paying close attention to the testimony.

In essence, 45 minutes of an expert's testimony in court may be broken down into as many as 20 or 30 segments of attention in the minds of the jurors. The jurors continually reexamine whether or not they are going to continue to pay attention to an expert. If the structure and pace of the expert's testimony does not hold sufficient promise of a reward to the listener, you will lose all but the most dutiful jurors. Just as your own mind wandered quickly in law school when you had a boring professor, jurors will listen only so long as they get value from what you or your expert have to say. Ask yourself this question, how many of these jurors would stay tuned if this expert appeared on their TV screen at home? If your answer is uncertain, you'd better revamp the expert's presentation.

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