Lauren Kirkwood, The Daily Record Newswire
When seemingly open-and-shut cases go wrong at trial, attorneys want to understand what happened - they go back over their notes, scrutinize their argument for holes, mentally replay their presentation of the facts.
But focusing on those elements of a case is often fruitless, say trial lawyers Michael Paul Smith and Christopher Stombaugh. The facts may be on their side, but attorneys who bore their audiences won't prevail in a time when most jurors are used to receiving information at lightning speed.
"We're having more and more millennials coming into jury pools, so we have to give them information in the way they're used to receiving it," Stombaugh said. "It's not about intelligence - they are really conditioned to have to process information very quickly, and when it's moving slowly, they have little patience."
That's why Smith, of Towson law firm Smith, Gildea & Schmidt LLC, and Stombaugh, a faculty member at the Gerry Spence Trial Lawyers College in Wyoming, have teamed up to launch a new Towson-based firm - Stombaugh, Smith & Co. LLC - geared toward helping attorneys tell their clients' stories in a way that resonates with juries by applying principles gleaned from social science research.
"Lawyers spend a lot of time talking to lawyers about their cases, and the longer you're practicing law and the longer you're doing it, the less you know about how ordinary people - nonlawyers - think," Smith said.
This realm of research is nothing new, he said, but by using focus groups and other methods to test jurors' attention span and analyze the impact of different storytelling strategies, the firm will also be able to educate and train attorneys to make their cases more compelling to the average audience.
"We'll take the cognitive science research that's been done for years in educational settings and applied in marketing, politics and lots of other fields, and we'll be testing the legal application of those theories," Smith said.
The firm will be part of a "research-based legal consortium" that will include a research arm dedicated to developing and testing new trial techniques, called Next Research LLC, as well as an entity that will focus on training and educating trial lawyers through seminars and other workshops, called Next Trial Innovation LLC.
The lawyers at Stombaugh, Smith & Co. will consult with law firms and attorneys on specific cases, Stombaugh said. Although the firm will be based in Towson, Smith and Stombaugh said they plan to work lawyers across the country.
"What we're trying to do is take a lot of complex stuff and help lawyers communicate it in a way that is accessible and actionable," Stombaugh said. "We're trying to basically do something that is really a fusion of a lot of stuff that's out there that has not really been fused together on a wide basis."
A captive audience
Because they're required by law to be show up to court, jurors might not be the most passionate listeners - but there are ways to combat apathy, particularly by emphasizing a case's broader impact, Smith said.
"Jurors care about that," he said. "It's not just about the person who's in the courtroom that day. It's about their family members; it's about community safety."
In a medical malpractice case, for example, a lawyer who can succinctly demonstrate how a hospital's failure could affect not just the plaintiff, but scores of future patients, will find himself facing a rapt audience, Smith said.
Dispelling the notion that a courtroom loss was due to a "bad jury" that simply couldn't understand the case is also a cornerstone of the firm's goal, Stombaugh said.
"That's like a television show blaming the audience for its bad rating," he said. "You want to figure out, 'What am I missing in trying to help people understand?'"
The answer often lies in the tools an attorney uses to present his or her argument, Stombaugh said. Incorporating more visual elements and making use of technology can make it easier for a jury to relate to the plaintiff's story.
"It used to be in this country that people would go to trials as a major form of entertainment," he said. "The lawyers in eras of the past did a better job of keeping people's interest."
If trial lawyers learned to break down complex cases into compelling 20-minute stories, they could exponentially increase their chances of winning, the attorneys said.
"Lawyers spend a lot of time working on proving the elements of their cases rather than reaching the people they're talking with," Smith said, "and those people are the jurors that are going to be deciding their cases."
Published: Wed, Mar 04, 2015
