There’s only one thing wrong with this picture. Researchers like Albert Mehrabian13, and all those language and communication experts like him are still right. No matter how thoroughly you prepare a case, no matter how cleverly you arrange the packaging of the facts and the law to appeal to all these critical-ly important mental functions that work wholly outside our conscious reach, the darn thing will still not deliver itself. Facts still can’t speak, for themselves or anybody else, no matter how hard you’ve tried and how much you deserve a break. Eventually, you have to artfully deliver the most elegantly developed case story to one or to several real, live, breathing human beings. If you're involved in a business dispute or a breach of contract lawsuit, then hire a business dispute attorney.
Lawyers have a love-hate relation-ship with control. Control is the subject of a major, mental storyline for any serious trial attorney. After studying “anchors, priming, framing, primacy, norming” and such, as expressed by Generation Z, X or Q, from this juror bias or that, we often have the truth of the old goose gander thing sneak up on us. And, that truth is a part of the potentially deadly storyline on control that leads us to frame influence as happening only where we intend it to happen.
Turns out, the real story is a little more involved - literally. Cutting-edge neurological research confirms we are all more involved, at far deeper levels, with people we influence than we might ever want to know - and they with us. No two minds are the same is something we all know. That your mind may not be alone when the best of persuasion occurs is something new, and really spooky.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to understand how decision makers' inner persuading works. It can be important to recognize that the effort to develop a compelling case story, without an equal effort spent on its delivery can lead to a severely unbalanced job of persuasion. The “control” frame can lead you to invest everything in developing a case story, and far too little in its delivery.
What you consciously know does not control what you do. This is true not only as all the research on people who have been persuaded of something shows, but it is equally true for legal professionals who would do that persuading.
• Knowing what should appeal to a bunch of Generation X jurors in your
injury case that has real strong liability; that, as a group, they are prone to bring bigger damage numbers'5 can still fall flat. Not because you didn’t understand the research about bigger numbers, but because of how you acted, trying to convey what you saw as “real strong liability.”
• Or, you could have an intimate understanding of liability, painstakingly built following the excellent Rules of the Road model16 in hours of rules research and depos getting defense witness agreement to every point. But, the damages don’t flow when you win, because the jurors just saw a tangle of 15 broken rules on a chart, not three groups of cleanly clear categories they could really wrap their heads around.
• Unearthing the cultural code underlying the most visceral responses to the issues in your case can't possibly hurt, and may win the day. But, not if you waltz into the courtroom and mercilessly drive the key phrases into jurors' skulls, over and over, in a dentist-drill tonality to be sure you completely eliminate any resistance to your story. If your hard work breaking the code causes you to treat all your decision makers as mere combinations locks, you still may find yourself (and your client) disappointed.