Articles / Reviews

Joshua Karton,
Trial Consultant,
Communication Arts for the Professional.
Regular faculty at the Gerry Spence Trial Lawyer College
and Consultant to the U.S. Navy JAG Corps

Oh, The Places You'll Go!
I kept thinking of Dr. Seuss's book Oh, the Places You'll Go while reading Eric Oliver's book, (and achievement) Facts Can't Speak for Themselves. All the places each and every listener goes, as we tell our story to the, places unknown to us, unless we ask, and even when we do ask, we first get only titles for their home movies of the self, tab markers, at best captions. It takes awhile and skill to invite people to want to open these archives, because the filing system is so idiosyncratic, and the table of contents in non- linear, non verbal.

Oh, The Places You'll Go!
Here are some of the places I went while reading this book: Years back, a law student, baseball hat on backwards, wearing flip-flops, face set in a mask of seriousness he believed appropriate to being a lawyer, intoning an open statement as if he were reading a list of war dead. He agreed it sounded terrible, but when asked why he was speaking in this odd manner, he stumbled and stammered, "I don't want to come off cheesy. I want.....want the...want the facts to speak for themselves...." I offered. Yeah! He exclaimed in relief that someone, maybe understood.

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That Yeah! snapped him back into human life. I looked at him, and suddenly saw Eric's Stack of Facts; they broke fee and went roaming all across the screen of my vision, roving, chomping Pacmen. But silent and flat. The Fact Pacmen were surrounding this poor guy, who in the name of honoring credibility was behaving appropriate to a funeral. The facts, I tried to explain, the facts, quite literally, can't speak for themselves. They need a human. You.

Growing up, every time I would hear someone use the expression, I'm the kind of person who... or I'm the type of person who... it always made me uneasy. I just instinctively understood it wasn't quite true. Not because the speaker is trying to mislead, but because no one is a type or a kind, especially to themselves. Is it my training and experience as an actor telling me I cannot stop at any general category, because that fails the task: discovering the specific pictures and stories inside each of us that make us the contradictory human bundles we actually are? These self-announcements are often misleading labels, since they are often only titles for the coping mechanisms stoppering the vessels of roiling, flammable broth bottled inside. Facts Can't Speak for Themselves counsels us not merely against placing too much value on what is too easily attained - such as how someone initially identifies himself - be it focus group participants or jurors, but teaches how to get beyond, behind, and beneath, to the places from which the listeners will write their versions of the story you want them to hear; to the places from which decisions are made.

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Oh, The Places You'll Go!
I kept hearing in my own mind the phrase, rush to judgement. Eric does not use these words until Chapter Four, but I kept hearing them through the first hundred plus pages. Don't rush to judgment about who those jurors are.

And the reason isn't just because you'll be wrong. It's because it's not fair. (They'll know you're not being fair to them, which will only make it harder for them to reveal themselves to you.) One of the teachings of Gerry Spence that I hold so dear, because it feels so fundamental, so moral, is that the advocate cannot ask or expect the jurors to do anything he himself is not willing to do. That's not lawyer-cagey, it's just plain old-fashioned, decent fair. (And, of course, brilliantly strategic.) If the trial professional, as Eric calls him/her, is going to be needing the jurors to not rush to judgement, then how can he expect them to do something he himself is unwilling to do?

So the first three chapters of this book may cause the advocate to champ at the bit. The sensation of being reined back, the sound of skidding, or braking, is not pleasant. Most of us do not enjoy hearing, slow down! But when you get to Chapter 4, the first time you hear the exquisitely calibrated language that comes rising up from Eric's painstaking methodology, it is just beautiful. And I hesitate to say this, because the anxious amongst us will then plan to skim through the foundation material till we get to what we believe we're ready to use. But we're not if we skip to the why. If all we do is try to copy his language, we will be reciting the script of some already canceled show. The language we are eventually ready to meet is the distillation of his method, and grows out of this case and these people and their stories. (And we continue to see how perfectly it can work, particularly again in Chapter 7 and Chapter 9.)

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