IT’S WAR OUT THERE—plain and simple war. In times past the species battled for their territory with axes and spears. The same genes are at work today. The trial lawyer in the courtroom is a warrior. The executive battling in the trenches of business is at war. The sales-man approaching the reluctant customer must conquer. The teacher, the worker, the administrator, the citizen before the city counsel, all seeking something, perhaps wanting change, perhaps simply seeking recognition, are engaged in a war.
It’s a war over ideas. Ideas are the territory possessed by the power person—the decision maker. Ideas have power. In the courtroom the idea of the prosecutor is to put the accused behind bars—even to execute him. The civil trial lawyer has the idea that money and justice are equivalents, and to compensate his client’s injury he wants money. Jurors are the power persons—the decision makers. The executive has an idea that will forward the profit of his company. The power person may be a governmental regulatory agency, a board of directors, or the stockholders at large. The teacher or worker or citizen may seek change, but the power person—the school principal, the boss, or the city council—always stands in the way. Their position, their viewpoint, their possession of whatever is sought from them is their territory. And this war is over that turf, the turf the power person possesses. This book is about how to win that war.
The history of man is the history of war. In the first trials, trial by duel, the winner supposedly occupied the side of right since the winner was said to have been chosen by divine powers. Such trials by physical combat were a means to settle disputes between the king’s subjects short of war. And the place where these domestic conflicts were settled was a room set aside by the king in the king’s court called a courtroom.
In the courtroom of old the contestants fought to submission or death. Each side engaged a champion to fight for them. The king or his lords were able to field the most fearsome mercenaries of all, and those who contested these power persons rarely prevailed. As civilization advanced, the warriors in the king’s court were replaced by advocates for each side. Today they are known as trial lawyers. But the same historical paradigm is still in place. Trial lawyers fight to submission with words, not swords. And in and out of business lay persons fight a never-ending battle for the territory of ideas, for whether it’s a sale one seeks to close or a promotion one longs for, whether it’s a contest at the school board or a fight before a board of directors, all are wars in which the territory to be conquered is one of ideas—ideas that win.
Trial lawyers and lay persons have much in common. The methods of trial work are so similar to the best and most successful out-of-court presentations that I ask you to read and take in the whole of this book as if you were a trial lawyer yourself. If you can begin to master what I am teaching here for trial lawyers you will have absorbed the necessary stuff for winning, not only in your out-of-court endeavors, but perhaps in life itself.
For more than fifty years I’ve fought these many wars for both the powerful and the poor in the courtrooms of this country. Although there are many skillful advocates at work in the law, I am convinced that most lawyers don’t know how to try a case. They were never taught in law school. They were never taught because their teachers, for the most part, have been those academic drones who’ve never experienced a client clinging to him like a drowning person in deep water whose life depends upon the lawyer’s skill to convince a jury.
For over ten years I’ve conducted the nonprofit, pro bono Trial Lawyer’s College that I established at my ranch near Dubois, Wyoming, a school devoted to the training of lawyers for the people. We’ve conducted many sessions and seminars throughout the nation. We count thousands of graduates across the land who’ve learned our methods, methods which have magically transformed ordinary, yeoman, struggling trial lawyers, men and women who were afraid of the courtroom and who lost more than they won, into powerful advocates with skills they never dreamed they could possess.
At Trial Lawyer’s College we teach a presentation that begins with the self, with a knowledge of who we are and an understanding that we are unique, incomparable, and therefore, in that way, perfect. The humble, frightened, shy men and women, young and old, accepting themselves and understanding their uniqueness, learn the power of being genuine, including the power of their fear, their inexperience, their less-than-fashion-magazine appearance, and their ordinary, nontheatrical voices. They learn to imitate no one. We find ourselves at the cutting edge of trial technique. We’ve broken free of the standard approach to the trial of cases, which is most often stultifying, false, unmoving, bereft of honest human emotion, too full of tricks and technique, and too often a waste of the court’s and litigants’ time and resources.
The approach we teach is so simple it is sometimes difficult for lawyers, locked in their left brain lobes, to understand. Our method begins with the self. It demands that we tell the truth, even when it is painful. The method is based on the story and the storyteller. It shuns the deadly intellectual, artificial and pretentious. It focuses instead on the spontaneous, and on crawling inside the hide of our adversaries so that we understand them as well as we understand ourselves. It emphasizes the inimitable power of caring and deemphasizes the use of force and intimidation as a means of persuasion.
Almost without exception, our students, trial lawyers of all ages, with varying abilities and experience, have discovered a magical new power that has brought them unimagined victories in the courtroom. It is this new approach to winning in the courtroom that I explain and teach in this book, not only to trial lawyers, but to the out-of-court presenters who will discover that they can make their case and win every time—in the courtroom, the boardroom, the marketplace, and the workplace, indeed, every place.
Gerry Spence
Jackson Hole, Wyoming