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In Hidalgo County, Texas, attorneys Michael Cowen and Malorie Peacock of Cowen Rodriguez and Peacock obtained a just multimillion-dollar verdict for the widow of a man who died during a trench collapse. Read more about how they obtained the verdict.
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.
The following is an interview with trial lawyer Randi McGinn, the first female President of the Inner Circle of Advocates, and author of Trial Guides' book Changing Laws, Saving Lives.
Randi McGinn Recommends Trial Guides Products
Randi: I want to encourage lawyers to read books. I feel like I’ve written my book maybe at the exact moment when people have stopped reading books. But there is so much of value particularly in the Trial Guides books: Twelve Heroes One Voice, Rick Friedman and Pat Malone’s Rules of the Road.
Book Review by Kathleen Nastri in Trial Magazine (July, 2012)
Trial lawyers committed to their craft will be taken to the next level by Twelve Heroes, One Voice: Guiding Jurors to Courageous Verdicts. Carl Bettinger’s book acknowledges some of the best resources on trial practice and then takes another step. He shows us how to use our storytelling skills and passion to make convincing presentations and win jurors’ hearts.
Book Review: Twelve Heroes argues that all humans—including jurors—are "wired" to use stories to make sense of the world around them. But to effectively appeal to jurors’ story sense, attorneys must first understand story structure itself. To that end, Twelve Heroes elucidates the most fundamental components of story such as: heroic story structure and classic story characters and elements like the Hero, the Villain, the Victim, the Mentor, and the Lie.
