TRANSCRIPT

Scott Glovsky:

The future. Welcome to Trial Lawyer Talking. I’m so happy to be talking with Cliff Atkinson. I’ve had Cliff’s book and I should say books because I’m now on the fourth edition of Cliff’s phenomenal book, Beyond Bullet Points and it has been such a wealth of knowledge and wisdom that I’m super, super happy to have Cliff with us here today to share his wisdom and knowledge with you. Cliff is a leading expert in visual storytelling in trial. And he started out, his first case was with Mark Lanier that became a humongous verdict and really was a game changer for a lot of lawyers around the country in how to approach opening statements and how to visually tell stories. And since working with Mark Lanier, Cliff has been working with hundreds of lawyers throughout the country and really, Cliff, thanks so much for being with us.

Cliff Atkinson:

Thank you Scott. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be with you and to share with your audience some of our expiration of story and storytelling in trial.

Scott Glovsky:

Wonderful. Well, let’s get going. Tell us, what is the story

Cliff Atkinson:

That is just a phenomenal question. I mean, so simple yet very profound at the same time. And I think I would probably start the conversation here. That story has become a big thing. And I think probably in our culture at large, we are just in a time of just such an expansion of knowledge and facts and information. And I think with all the proliferation of knowledge, we’re wanting some way to make sense of it. And that’s what I would say it’s a story. A story is a way to make sense out of information, often disconnected information, seeing patterns, seeing structures, seeing something that has some sort of underlying deeper meaning that can connect with.

Cliff Atkinson:

And so there’s so much today in the business world about story, storytelling, how businesses tell story about brands, how brands tell story. And it’s so wonderful that as I’ve been working with attorneys in the last 16 years, that story has always been and continues to be a really central theme, a topic, a tool that people are wanting to learn and to learn more about because I think it’s just something that humanity is always used to communicate and make sense out of things. And I think that today more than ever, it’s really an important topic for us to explore.

Scott Glovsky:

Lawyers get a case and they’ve got a set of facts and thousands of documents often and witnesses that are saying different things. How do you approach developing a story out of all of the disjointed facts and the legal elements and all of the issues and information that we have floating around in the case?

Cliff Atkinson:

Scott, there’s some really interesting lots of different angles on this. I think one of the most intriguing to me is, I don’t know if you remember back in the ’70s, there was this whole thing about when they first started doing brain research, there was a whole thing about left brain, right brain. Left brain was supposed to be analytical, right brain was supposed to be creative. And those became kind of inconstant popular culture in our understanding of the brain. But those were just the initial findings or understandings of what the brain has done in those hemispheres. We definitely have two hemispheres. And since then, the research has continued and the latest understanding we have about these hemispheres is that the right brain… I’m sorry, the left brain is about all the details. It’s about dissecting, about cutting things into pieces. And we could relate this to the evidence. I mean, it’s about the facts. It’s about these individual pieces and the detail.

And what we know about the right brain now is it’s actually more about this big picture rather than the detail. It’s about having this understanding of the whole thing and being able to connect all those dots. So there’s one angle where you could look at this where you could say that the field of the law is really about… It’s about the law, about the written law, about the concepts, about many abstractions and about these specific details and the pieces of evidence. And really when we start to talk about story and the transformation of that information into story, we’re really now moving into this hemisphere about finding that big picture, about being able to tell this in a captivating, engaging way and making an emotional connection.

So I think it’s really important because I think that obviously in law school, nobody is teaching any of these methods or techniques or skills of transforming the small pieces into a coherent whole, into telling a story. So I think that if we start to look at it that way, that this is actually helping to stretch our capacity of our brains and our communication to now take this core set of information and now make it more compelling and interesting and connecting those dots. It’s really almost a personal development exercise for us because we’re getting better at being able to connect the dots and see the big picture. So it’s a big question. How do you take all that detail and turn it into a story? And we’ll look at that. I think that’s going to be a core theme of what we talk about today, how you practically do that.

But I do have to say if there were a couple of basic criteria that that I work with my lawyer clients often, it’s about distilling. A big question I might ask when I’m working with a client in one of our full day sessions, yeah, I might start out looking for what are the three most important things you want the jurors to remember after they’ve heard your opening statement? So that single question, it’s like oh, wait, wait a minute. I’ve got 6 million documents. What do you mean three? That question in itself helps to know, shift and reshift and make you think about things in a different way. And that helps, what I would say is one of the central techniques or tools or ways to work with this. It’s about distillation.

It’s about taking the 6 million documents and now distilling it down to the three most important things you want somebody to remember. All this is critical thinking work and it’s the really hard work that we have to do up front because I think there’s that saying, I think it was at Mark Twain, who said, “I would’ve written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have enough time.” The gist of it was something like that that it actually is super, super hard work to be able to make something distilled and boil it down to its essence. So that’s really always the upfront and hardest work. When I work with clients, it’s probably 60% of that day that we spent together is a critical thinking process of distilling something to its essence and then laying out the chronological framework for what happened in that story.

Scott Glovsky:

Okay. Well, let’s assume we’ve got the answers to the three most important things that we want the jurors to remember about our case. What’s the next step in the approach to develop a persuasive story?

Cliff Atkinson:

Well, next it’s about finding the chronology, telling the story from beginning to middle and end/ and that then becomes the backbone for the information. Let’s say you’ve got 45 minutes for an opening statement. You’ve got a beginning, the very first few moments that in minutes to capture the jurors, your audience’s attention, to be able to frame what you’re going to talk about, to make them feel connected, to make it easy for them to understand. And then you’ve got the chronology of events. And so ideally as you are working and shaping your ideas and your evidence in this sort of structure from the beginning, middle and end, these classical elements of story need to be there. You’ve got to have a main character. So I most often work with plaintiff’s attorneys. So there’s got to be a bad guy and the bad guy is the defendant.

And so I as I work with clients to tell the story about the bad guy, then every statement that we write, everything that we write has got as the subject of that is the bad guy, the name of the defendant. And then the defendant is a big company that’s hungry for profit and it is under pressure to deliver. And so it cuts corners and then they hurt somebody. Something like that could be an essential structure for a story, but you’ve got to figure out and map your facts to some sort of sensible chronological structure laying out what happened from beginning to middle and end. Where was that point that they knew the rules and they decided to break them so that they could make more money. How did they hurt this person? What did they take from them?

So these are those crucial elements of having a plot, who the main character is, the bad guy in this case, what they did, what happened over the course of time, how they tried to cover up. You’re looking for telling this story in a chronological sequence. And that really is that imprint of the story structure. In order for people to understand and to connect with the story, it’s got to have this story structure. And it’s got to be recognizable and that’s a core thing that I’ve been realizing lately is that when you read a lot of these books about screenwriting in Hollywood, they talk about genre. And what they mean like that by genre is a type of stories. Is it a murder mystery? Is it a comedy? Is it a sci-fi? What’s the genre?

But part of the reason for having genres is that these are types of stories that people recognize and then either jurors or anybody you talk to needs to be able to recognize the type of story that you’re about to tell. So you’re not pulling all this stuff out of nowher