Wyzga On Words

Murphy's Laws Of Songwriting Can Apply To Lawyers.

Clearly at the top of the Hit Parade of Programs at the recent American Society of Trial Consultants' Annual Conference in New Orleans was the presentation delivered by trial lawyer and songwriter, E. Thomas McCarthy: What Lawyers Can Learn From Songwriters.

Among many points McCarthy made in his jam-packed 60 minute program, this one remains with me: if a songwriter can tell a story from start to finish - with a repeating chorus or refrain - in three minutes, how can a trial attorney do the same with her case story?  Perhaps three minutes is a bit truncated for an opening statement, but the appeal of brevity is a practical and formidable tip lawyers can use to ratchet down their case story to its clear, concise and cogently memorable points.

TIP:    One storytelling exercise I use with my clients is to practice telling their case as a 45-30-15 second story.  Believe it or not, you can tell your story in seconds.  The exercise proves when you know the true case story well.

TIP:    McCarthy suggested we pick up a copy of Murphy’s Laws of Songwriting by Ralph Murphy.  "In easy to grasp terms, Ralph talks about helping arm the songwriter for success by demystifying the process and opening the door to serious professional songwriting." You can listen to the entire Nashville Public Televisions program with Murphy as the featured guest by clicking here: http://wnpt.org/productions/wow/podcast/4006_RalphMurphy.mp3

TIP:     Click here to read Murphy's Law of Songwriting to learn from the master how to take the music of your spoken word from drab to dynamite.  If you can do that, then as McCarthy would say, "You hooked it!" 

 

 

 

Who Here Has Given Jury Service?

Would it surprise you to learn that it's not nearly so many as we might think or have been led to believe:

"Twenty-nine percent of the adult American population has served as a juror. The remaining 71% of Americans live with, live next to, work with, or otherwise hear about the experiences, good and bad, of those 29% who have lived it first hand."

- Tom Munsterman
Director Emeritus, Center for Jury Studies
http://www.ncsconline.org/D_Research/cjs/

The media is replete with hair-raising jury and juror stories derived from jurors on high-profile cases, Twittering jurors, pathological liar jurors responsible for causing a mistrial, blogging jurors, texting jurors, flirting jurors, sleeping jurors, Facebook-ing jurors and those who truly want to do a good job.

What's a lawyer to do?  Look no further than the National Center for State Courts Center for Jury Studies.  Following is the Mission Statement:

"Most Americans are more likely to experience the American jury justice system as a juror than as any other type of participant in the legal system. The Center for Jury Studies is dedicated to facilitating the ability of these citizens to fulfill their role within the justice system and enhancing their confidence and satisfaction with jury service by helping judges and court staff improve jury management. To do so, the Center engages in cutting-edge research to identify practices that

- promote broad participation by the community in the jury system
- respect jurors' contributions to the justice system
- utilize jurors' time effectively and make reasonable accommodations for their comfort and privacy, and
- provide jurors with the decision-making tools necessary to make informed and fair judgments in the cases submitted to them."

The Center for Jury Studies disseminates this information through technical assistance contracts, educational programs, and public outreach.

You might wish to check out the publications on such topics as jury size, jury nullification and effective voir dire to learn how to expand the process of justice through your community and courtroom leadership.

Does Depression Have A Function?

It's no secret, there is depression among us.

Asking the question, "How many Americans suffer from depression?" pulls up a plethora of information, articles, research and studies.

It appears that many of us experience a wide range of responses from the blues to severe clinical depression.

A University of Virginia psychiatrist who has been treating patients with depressive disorders for over thirty years believes that depression is an evolutionary paradox.  Sierra Bellows reporting in "The Evolution of Depression" tells us more about Dr. Andy Thomson and his unorthodox ideas.  Excerpt.

"Since the dawn of the species about 200,000 years ago, humans have evolved in response to the environments in which they’ve found themselves. In Northern Europe, lighter skin helped early inhabitants get enough vitamin D during the dark winters. In places in Africa plagued by malaria, many people have a genetic mutation that makes them immune. Like all living things since the first protozoa, the human body has been shaped by natural selection. And evolutionary psychology suggests that the mind has as well. Evolutionary psychologists look for the advantages of different behaviors and mental traits that might cause them to spread through the population.

For more than 30 years, U.Va. psychiatrist Dr. Andy Thomson (Med ’74) has been treating patients, and most often he treats them for depression. Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental disorders in the United States, and each year clinical depression affects more than 17 million Americans.

Thomson and his collaborator Paul Andrews, now at McMaster University in Canada, believe that depression is an evolutionary paradox. If it didn’t confer any advantages, it should have been selected against and occur only rarely in the population. What kind of evolutionary advantage might depression have?

“Depression, psychic pain, alerts you to the fact that you have a problem, stops business as usual, focuses your attention,and can provide a signaling function that you need help,” says Thomson. “Basically, it forces you to think. Now with all its stressors and the myriad ways of evading them, modern life doesn’t encourage you to think deeply. But thinking deeply works. It’s doing what the mind was made to do.”

Not everyone agrees with the theory.  Some take issue with the premise that depression helps in problem-solving and other executive functions.  Perhaps, as is suggested, we need to reconsider how we define "depression" and not lump everything from "feeling blue" to suffering from chronic suicidal ideations in the same basket. 

You may wish to read on to gauge the full range of professional disagreements and decide for yourself: What use is depression?

Here's my experience: I have learned when enough is enough and I have to step back from the rigors of the world.  I call it time out in the natural world or sitting on the curb to look and listen while the parade marches by.  I have expanded my capacity for empathy, understanding and compassion in the face of enormous daily global suffering encountered in the work I do.  I have developed resilience born of experience.  My mantra is, "Fall down 7 - get up 8."

Maybe the key is this: how we play the hand we are dealt to find something life-affirming in the grimness of a disease, condition or situation we did not ask for.  Here's an example of one man's return After Disaster Strikes.

Q&A Tuesday: What's The Rush?

Q:    What's the rush?

A:    Fill in the answer yourself.

Last week I was in New Orleans. For the year prior I had been working as co-chair of the American Society of Trial Consulants' Annual Conference. The conference was a huge success: more attendance than seen in the past four years, excellent content, and a whole lotta fun that folks can have only in New Orleans.  But I was busy.

What's the rush? 

There were board matters (I am an active member of the board of directors) to attend to, a long and tedious board meeting, speaking on a panel as a stand-in for a member who could not make it, meeting with trial consultant wannabees, making sure things were running well and smoothly, visiting with vendors, huddling with board members and attendees on other organizational issues, and the work that continues long distance while one is away.

What's the rush?

Coming home I was confronted by an article in the NYTimes reporting on high schoolers inhaling Adderall to get the academic edge that would assure them a college seat: Risky Rise of the Good Grade Pill.  Excerpt.

The drug was not cocaine or heroin, but Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.

“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.

At high schools across the United States, pressure over grades and competition for college admissions are encouraging students to abuse prescription stimulants, according to interviews with students, parents and doctors. Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions."

What's the rush?

What I'm even more concerned about is what happens when these young people get to college.  What will keep them amped up to get good grades then?  And what happens after graduation? 

What's the rush?

A fellow alum from the University of Virginia raised this same question in an article published in the Summer 2012 issue of The University of Virginia magazine, "What's the Rush?"  A mother talking to her 6-month old daughter addresses the personal toll the pressure for success raise when we push the pace of life.  Excerpt.

"Seven years ago, when I was 25, I had a mini breakdown over my lack of accomplishments. I had just completed my master’s program and—gasp—had not written the book I was supposed to write. I had no city to call a home, did not own a house and could not have been more lost or confused. Later I discovered this was so common with my generation, that it was dubbed the “quarterlife crisis.”

The Internet has made it so easy to announce and seemingly measure success that our expectations of how fast we should achieve our goals have become severely skewed.

At the time of my “breakdown” I was living in London working for the U.N. Having this full-fledged panic attack about being a loser in life, I had no idea how many of my peers were having the same doubts.

Our desire for speed has distorted our concept of how fast our life should be moving. If we expect to save the world by the time we are 26, what do we expect of ourselves at 50?

What is even scarier is that many of my peers are actually doing it. Recently I was chatting with my college buddy Bilal Qureshi (Col ’04), who went to U.Va. and Columbia’s school of journalism before becoming a producer at NPR, all by the time he hit 25. We were talking about a friend whose ambitions had caused her to collapse. Her body had literally given up, and she was undergoing tests to find out what was wrong.

It made me think, What is the rush? What are we rushing for? What are we rushing toward?"

At the ASTC Annual Conference I sat in on a program about blogging and social media marketing.  I was reminded AGAIN! to make my content relevant, useful, substantive.  There was no mention of beauty, inspiration, joy, prosperity, life-affirming work, community, and the like.

What's the rush?

As the wise ones say, "Days are long but years are short."

Narrative Medicine And The Cross-Over To Law School And Law Practice.

What do internists, especially ones practicing narrative medicine, have to tell law students and lawyers? Quite a lot.  And all it will take is 39 minutes of your time.

Rita Charon, MD, PhD. a nationally renown physician, writer and educator as well as Executive Director/Founder, Program in Narrative Medicine College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University is at the top of the game of Narrative Medicine.

Click here to attend the Department of Medicine Division of Medical Humanities presentation "Narrative Medicine: Accuracy, Evidence, Allegiance, Joy" as Dr. Charon discusses the importance of the medical narrative as a tool for physicians to better understand their patients and themselves, and it's role in training a new generation of doctors.

What is so fascinating to this former pediatric nurse, life-long storyteller and litigation consultant is the cross-over between Dr. Charon's ideas on the dividends of narrative medicine and those that can be reaped in law schools and law practices.

Highlights with my comments in [brackets]:

*    Medicine must go beyond the bounds of knowledge with differential diagnostic brains.  That kind of fact-based thinking is inadequate to the task.  [Likewise, our reliance on "the facts and only the facts" gives us a distorted view of what happened to our clients and what matters to them.]

*    Illness unfolds in stories.  The thing that is amiss in the body tells the self that there is something the matter and eventually that story comes to the attention of the healthcare provider who will turn around and tell it to a colleague.  The idea being that the telling and retelling should lead one to know what to do.  [How do you see yourself in the internist's shoes?]

*    Medical stories are a matter of ongoingness.  A doctor's duty is to develop a sense of story that takes into account devastation, loss, grief, magnitude of hurt and pain.  [Our clients are in the same boat - and we are there with them.]

*    The big question: Are you available to receive the story, to “co-hear” the narratives of illness, to train yourself to know accurately and fully what the patient expresses to be more effective in care?  [For lawyers, are we available to hold the space for the client so we develop different skills interviewing our clients, determining what the problem is and how to remedy it?]

*    You must learn to heed the story, learn from the story, learn the skills to recognize it, stand in the gathering of the story and work with the patient and family - to experience what the patient and family go through and for the patient to learn what the healthcare people experience.  [Who here has often desired that ability to co-hear with our clients and our clients families?  We are walking parallel roads with these internists.]

*    What are the dividends?  We find this practice helps improve cohesion of healthcare teams, minimize burn-out, increase empathy, encourage taking on the perspective of another person, feeling a growth in affiliation with their colleagues and others, listening attentively and less defensively, recognizing the unique dimensions of colleagues, using parts of the brain that had gone fallow, and recognizing that stories are total storms rather than the typical pattern of beginning, middle and end.  [What would you give for similar practical and human dividends in your practice?]

*    Narrative medicine helps medical students and doctors stop squandering evidence by learning to retrieve it in narrative, grasping the patent's story in words and learning to plumb the meaning of the evidence.  [For lawyers that meaning will carry over to the trier of fact.]

*    When doctors are fortified with the competencies of listening, curiosity, empathy, imagination their practice changes, they make authentic contact with the patient cleared of biases and other fsact-gathering screens.  [All anyone wants is to be heard, even for a moment.  After you have given the client the chance t tell their story you can go back and collect the data you need for the lawsuit.] 

Dr. Charon's makes this introduction to every patient: " As your doctor I face you so you can express to me what you are going through in words - please tell me what you think I should know about your situation."  She sits with her hands in her lap and absorbs what happens.  By inviting the account she can learn without shoe-horning the patient into her own fact list.  [Beginning with law school we can encourage the development of attentive listening. It wil flow over to practice.  Imagine th transformations.]

I invite you to spend 39 minutes and change your practice with practical and human dividends.
                                   
















                          

13 Minutes With Bill Harley - Storyteller - TEDx: Stories Out Loud.

Back in the day I fell in love with the storyteller Bill Harley.  But then so did many many many folks: storytellers and listeners alike.  We knew so many of his stories and song by heart.  Bill made us happy and nostalgic and giddy and wistful at the same time.

Over the decades, articles, blog posts, and presentations to thousands of lawyers, I've said the same things about the importance and power of story:

1. To make your story emotionally meaningful to the listener, you must marry content (facts) to context (circumstance).
2. We are wired to hear narrative, to sort matters out - even legal matters - in narrative.
3. Narrative is how we figure out the ways to carry on despite the problems in our lives.

TIP:    Click here to take 13 minutes to listen to Bill Harley in his recent TEDx talk on the power that stories have which no media, no social network, no list of facs (or factoids), no computer can match.

A few highlights:

TIP:    We are creatures of context.  Context gives order: what happened before and what came after.  Order gives meaning.

TIP:    Stories are how we assign meaning to our lives, and the lives of others.

TIP:    The stories we create are how we answer the riddle of the problem so we can carry it through our life without it dragging us down.

TIP:    We are not built to remember lists of facts - we are wired to recall narrative.

TIP:    Stories work because they are cognitive & emotional: safe to think about because it’s not about us: we take the story & apply it to us & take us & apply to the story.

TIP:    Know when to speed up & slow down.  Know which visual underscores the narrative.

TIP:    Rely on this: we are genetically encoded to pay attention to the person in front of us. 

AND, if the one in front of us is you, the storyteller, imagine what you can do with the power of story.

 

 

Q&A Tuesday: How Often Should I Use A Comma? Less Than You Think.

Q:    How often should I use a comma in my writing?

A:    Here are a few tips from The Most Comma Mistakes.  Excerpt:

"Identification Crisis
If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:

I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None are correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.

If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:

I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and before “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.

The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas."

Click here to read more about The Missing Comma and Splice Girls, and Boys.

Draw To Reveal The Story.

Who here doodles?

When we draw we are using a basic visual tool to help make sense of complex concepts, thoughts or ideas.  Drawing can help clarify and articulate our visions to ourselves as well as others in a conversation, presentation, meeting or trial.

I often use Post-It flip charts and Magic Markers when working with clients or audiences.  Drawing provides insight and problem-solving in a myriad of ways that mere conversation or brainstorming simply cannot accomplish as effectively.

Perhaps it's true that seeing is believing.

To see for yourself, visit Legal Sketchpad:

"BUSINESS SKETCHING FOR LEGAL CONFERENCES, STRATEGIC PLANNING MEETINGS AND TRAINING.

Legal Sketchpad promotes the use of basic visual tools in legal communication. As direct as possible, as low tech as possible."

I have no dog in this fight.  I am just pleased to help spread the word that PowerPoint is not the only game in town. 

TIP:    Fall back on what came naturally to you when a box of Crayola 64 helped unleash your imagination and creativity.

What Do I Mean When I Say "Power, Passion & Precision"?

 

Power.

            Passion.

                            Precision.

For decades now I have repeated my "3P Mantra" when speaking and teaching communication skills, story skills, and platform skills.  I use the "3P Mantra" on my office voice mail.

Power means coaching yourself to practice like you play.  The team plays to win.  The team practices to win.  You play to win - so practice like you play - with power.   A coach at my gym was training a member to get ready for her first tri-athlon.  It was the coach who kept reminding the trainee that she was getting ready for a race, a competition, to beat other people - not just taking a bike ride or a swim.  She took the advice and came in 4th in her class.

Passion means having life.  Does your case story come alive?  Or are you putting lipstick on a corpse?  Do you have a sense of affection for your work, for your client, for this case?  When my clients express exhaustion I always ask them, "For what do you have affection?  How do we marshall that for the task at hand?"

Precision means that state of being exact.  To be exact you must consider all the ways to get it right. To get it right you must develop the right story, right facts, right issues, right language, and right mindset. It can't be wrong when it's right.

Power.

            Passion.

                            Precision.

Q&A Tuesday: Moot Court, Written Briefs & Oral Argument.

Q:    If written briefs pull the laboring oar in the judges' decision-making, what's the point of oral argument?

A:     To serve as a sounding board for the judges.

Time out of mind I argued the final rounds of Moot Court Competition in front of then sitting chief justices of state supreme courts.

One by one each member of the panel gave the winner (me) and the runner-up (the other guy) their evaluations and suggestions for our future practice.  This one I took careful note of: "In oral argument, do not evade a judge's questions.  The court is asking you questions so it can learn and understand your position.  Participate.  Give the court your best answer."

Imagine my surprise to read similar advice from the United States Supreme Court.  Adam Liptak writing for the NYTimes, "Are Oral Arguments Worth Arguing About?" informs us that the nature of oral argument is to involve the lawyers in the debate.  Excerpt.

"In an interview with Bryan A. Garner published in 2010 in The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing, Justice Clarence Thomas was asked how often he changed his mind thanks to oral arguments.

“Almost never,” he said, adding that they may make a difference for his colleagues “in 5 or 10 percent of the cases, maybe, and I’m being generous there.”

That is as it should be, said Mr. Estrada, who has argued 20 cases before the Supreme Court.

“Somewhat refreshingly to our citizens,” he said, “the administration of justice has to do with the merits of the case and not entirely to do with the skill of the advocates.”

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who argued 39 cases in the Supreme Court before joining it, told students at Columbia Law School in 2008 that lawyers play a relatively minor role in that highly stylized discourse.

“Quite often the judges are debating among themselves and just using the lawyers as a backboard,” he said. “One of the real challenges for lawyers is to get involved in that debate.”

Oral arguments are in any event far less important than the written briefs.

“Of the two components of the presentation of a case, the brief is ever so much more important,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told Mr. Garner. “It’s what we start with; it’s what we go back to.”"

TIP:    Write your best brief.  Give your best oral argument.  Answer the court's questions with a "clear, concise and cogent" reply.  Participate in the debate.