News

The following article is adapted from Carl Bettinger’s Twelve Heroes, One Voice: Guiding Jurors to Courageous Verdicts.

All too often, the question “What is your case about?” is met with responses filled with jargon, medical terms, and professional indifference:

      “It’s a med-mal case for failure to diagnose breast cancer.”
      “It’s a birth-injury case with CP.”
      “My client is charged with being a felon in possession.”

We choose this language because it contains familiar shorthand that other attorneys will understand. But our courtroom audience is not a sophisticated legal audience; it’s a mishmash of teachers and tech writers, grandparents and grad students: people for whom common courtroom terms like plaintiff and defendant are often intimidating and ambiguous.

Trial Guides has conducted interviews with several of our authors regarding ways their trial methods impact settlement. This interview with authors...

Book Review: Trial in Action presents a unique twist on the trial lawyer’s art. The authors strongly believe that, as a trial lawyer, "your goal is to help your juries hear, see, and feel your client’s stories." As a means to this end, they present the technique of legal "psychodrama," in which the lawyer prepares for trial through dramatic role playing.

Book Review: Every now and then, a book comes along with new and revolutionary ideas that break the monotony of the traditional way of preparing and trying a case. Trial in Action: The Persuasive Power of Psychodrama is such a book. You’ve read Rick Friedman; you’ve read David Ball; you’ve read Gerry Spence. If you want to take the next step in your development as a trial lawyer, you owe it to yourself to read Trial in Action.

Book Review: Trial in Action: The Persuasive Power of Psychodrama is not a book that be­longs on your bookshelf where it can be ignored. It is not meant to collect dust while the trial lawyer tries his or her cases in the “ordinary” way. It is a book that should be read immediately and often be­ cause the better you know and under­ stand the principles, the more effective you will be as you try your next case. As an added bonus, the more you will enjoy trying cases.