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The Visual Arguement

By William S. Bailey

Lawyers are detail oriented as a profession, adept at collecting information. The civil rules focus on the ways in which this can be accomplished ñ written interrogatories, requests for admission, subpoenas for records and depositions. In a case of any complexity, as the time of trial appears, most lawyers have accumulated quite a pile of paper. The trouble starts with sorting out and using only what will be most persuasive to a lay jury.

Lawyers lose perspective as their competitive juices draw them ever deeper into the fray. Jurors will not care about much of the information obtained in discovery. The trick is to find the needle of persuasion in the haystack of paper. This is a task that most lawyers are ill equipped to perform, inclined toward quantity over quality. Even in cases where documents are important, not much is done to enhance their visual appeal through timelines and summaries.

The usual lawyer saturation bombing of information is a huge mistake! In his valuable book, You Are The Message , Roger Ailes recounts an anecdote in which he pointed out the folly of too many details in his advice to President Reagan before a televised debate:

If you do that, you'll lose again . . . You didn't get elected on details. You got elected on themes. Every time a question is asked, relate it to one of your themes. You know enough facts . . . You Are The Message at p. 22.

TELEVISION HAS FOREVER CHANGED COMMUNICATION

Nothing in our law school education prepared us to be effective communicators. The Socratic method by which we were taught, is, at best, obtuse and nebulous. The average layperson would have no part of it. While we learned to tolerate the boredom of law school lectures, this is a particularly poor model of communication for engaging jurors. None of the tools necessary to persuade jurors were offered in law school, such as communication skills, behavioral psychology, effective use of images and graphics or theater arts.

The lack of professional training in communication places lawyers at a distinct disadvantage in the television era. As Roger Ailes points out, television:

has set the style of a modern communicator ñ relaxed, informal, crisp, quick and interesting.

You Are The Message at p. 206. The fast pace of television has raised the expectations of the audience, who expect a point to be made quickly and in an interesting manner. For example, the average television news story lasts only about a minute and a half.