FHTH Ep #206 - Stop Talking So Damn Much

Today’s podcast is about why I want y’all to do less talking if you want to win cases.

So. I have nothing more to say. 🤐

You’ll hear everything when you tune in.

-Sari

"It's not about you. It's about the jurors and it's about the information. Take yourself out of the equation and let those two things shine because when you do that, that's when you win cases."
sari de la motte

EPISODE 206 TRANSCRIPTION

All right, welcome everybody to another episode, and today we're talking about Stop Talking So Damn Much. All right. Now before we do that, I'm going to give... well, not a review actually. You guys are emailing me like the most beautiful things and I love it. Please put it in a review though, that would be much more helpful.

But I still love these emails and I just got this one saying, "Hi, Sari. I am an avid reader of trial guide books and attended several TLC and reptile seminars. I saw your name in one of Nick Rowley's books and I looked you up and listened to some of your podcasts. Your method makes sense to me and feels like I can learn it and make it my own. I was so convinced that your ways were the best fit for me, that I enrolled in the H2H method. 95% of the voir dire that I have seen or done meandered without any real focus of what we wanted to get out of it. I'm getting ready to join a large plaintiff firm. H2H is the horse that I have decided to ride on in my legal journey."

Yeah, that's awesome. I'm so glad for that. And you know who you are if you're listening to the podcast, so take that and put it in review. Thank you very much.

All right, so why are we talking so much in trial and I mean you, not me. Why are you talking so much? Well, here's what I think it is. Silence freaks us the fuck out. We think that it's awkward because it means that they don't like me if they're silent. It means that they think I don't know what I'm doing, if I'm silent. It means that I'm not prepared, so on and so forth. So in order to never feel those things, you talk all the damn time. I'm here to tell you that silence is your best friend.

Jurors are talked at to death, this steady stream of information, they tune it out, especially if that information does not pertain to them. If I give you 100 hours worth of information and you tell me, or I tell you that every minute is important, I'm creating a situation where you cannot be successful. Same with yours, and that's what we tell them. Everything's important and then we just give them hours upon hours upon hours of information and they just lose track and lose focus. Let's be honest, the system is set up for you to fail.

First off, your job is to motivate jurors to act. The easiest thing to do for human beings is to leave things as they are. So right there we have a problem which makes your job harder than the defense.

Second, you aren't given any training in terms of the things that actually matter, in my opinion, how to ask powerful questions, how to motivate, as we just said, how to present or teach.

Third issue of why the system is set up for you to fail. You are delivering primarily verbal information. Verbal information is the most difficult information, look it up, this is research-based, for people to understand and incorporate and act on. We know that if you're just lecturing to someone, that people will pick up maybe 3% of it. If you have some visuals, we're now 10 to 20% still not great, and in fact, some jurisdictions don't allow jurors to even take notes making this much worse.

Fourth reason why you are up against it and this system is set up for you to fail. You have an unwilling audience. They do not want to be there.

Fifth reason, they are under duress. Not only do they not want to be there, they have to be there and they often have to be there and sacrifice something that they need or want to be doing instead, work, time with family caretaking, whatever it may be.

I've lost count, but the next thing that makes this system unfair is your reputation in the media, to reform. So jurors are coming in with all of this, what they think is accurate information about who you are by just being a plaintiff attorney and additionally, and there could be hundred other things, there are restrictions on what you can say or can't say or present or not present. In actuality, I am surprised we win trial at all as it's one huge clusterfuck. The fact that we ever win is more evidence that jurors are trying to get it right. So lay off of them my people. I mean, the fact we ever win means they're trying to get it right. Now, I say all of this so that you understand that jurors are tired, confused, and annoyed, and that talking makes it worse, way worse. Here's what we want to attempt to achieve.

We want voir dire to be a place where jurors do the majority of talking and we want opening to be as efficient and economical as possible. In fact, I believe that most openings, there's always something... What's that? Doesn't fit in a rule, exception to the rule. I know you're going to be thinking, "That's me." I doubt it, but they should be under 30 minutes. Opening is a preview of the evidence. It is not a time for you to wax poetic for two and a half hours. No, no, too much talking.

All right, so I'm going to give you a couple of situations where you... I'll give you the situation, I'll show you what you tend to do, and I'll show you why that's not working for you and what you can do instead.

First situation, you get an awkward silence. All right. So for example, you ask a question and the jury just stares back at you or a juror stares back at you.

What we tend to do is to rush in and fill that silence because again, we're thinking, "This is so awkward. They don't like me. Let me just not have to be with this situation." Now I'm going to suggest couple things. One is have you communicated to jurors, let's see if we can just fix the problem right off the bat, have you communicated to jurors how they should interact with you? I would say in the majority of cases, people who are not trained in H2H, the answer would be no. You simply come into voir dire, you ask a question and then you expect them to answer. Now let's see how much sense that makes. When you get a group of strangers together in a stressful situation, in a middle of a war zone, which is what trial is, they're literally put in the middle of a fight with a scary person in a black robe with their freedom hanging on the line.

You then ask them personal questions most of the time their personal questions and they have no idea what they're supposed to do. Do they shout it out? Do they take turns? Are you going to call on them? I mean, no wonder you get the silence in the first place because you haven't clearly communicated to the jurors how they should interact with you. Now, I say that and I know that you're thinking, "Great, another place to use more words." No. So you're not going to say, "All right, here's how this is going to go. I'm going to say the question and then I'm going to raise my hand, and then if you have something to say to me, I want you to raise your hand, and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to call on you and then when I call on you, you can tell me your answer."

Now, hopefully that's not happening, but I'll tell you I see a lot of that very similar to that. It's really very simple. Raise your hand as you ask the question. Who here has as you start to say, who here, raise your hand. It is the universal symbol. We've all been in the classroom that if you know the answer or if you want to talk to me, you must also raise your hand. Notice how by doing that, by raising my hand, I haven't had to say anything. I haven't added any extraneous verbal words. I guess all words are verbal, any verbiage, none. So that hopefully will solve part of the problem. Now, if you are just starting voir dire and you do that, what will happen is there will be silence at first, particularly at the beginning because we're all new, we're just getting started. This is where, for example, my H2H crew will rush in and fill the silence.

They know to raise their hand, but they still want to fill that silence. Here's what I will tell you. Don't do that, but you say, "But it's awkward." Good. You want it to be awkward. Why? Because someone will then come in because it's awkward and fill the space. You say, "No, they won't." Yes, they will. If you stand there with your hand raised and you are breathing well, because here's the problem, most of you ask the question, and even if you raise your hand, you go and you inhale and you're holding your breath, of course no one's going to say anything, but if you ask the question and as you are waiting for someone to raise their hand, you exhale nearly every single time. On the exhale, a couple of hands will be raised. My definition of how to be a leader, I mean, I have definition, you have to be going somewhere and have followers, but in terms of your person, you cannot be a leader unless you can breathe well under stressful conditions.

That is leadership. It says, "I've got this." Y'all are clamoring to try and become the leader that jurors need, but that right there communicates right off the bat, the very first time that they interact with you that you're a leader because you can breathe well under stressful conditions and you will wait and breathe until someone wants to talk to you. Rushing in shows the jury that you're not comfortable with silence, and that is not leadership. Another situation, several jurors raise their hand at once. This is such a perfect place to talk about how y'all over talk, too much. So here's what I see you do all the time. "All right, I'm going to come to you and then I'm going to call on you, and then I'm going to call on you." And we think we're doing this to be polite. Well, we want to make sure that they know that I've seen them.

Oh my gosh. What happens with this is that it allows people to tune out. If they know, if they weren't one of the you and you and you that they're not going to be called on for the next 15 minutes. They can just tune the fuck out. By the way, calling on jurors should be a last resort. You heard me calling on jurors should be a last resort. That's only if you haven't done the things in this podcast and otherwise where I've taught you and they don't work and they almost always work. So if you're raising your hand and you're breathing, you will get other people to raise their hands and then you just call on them, right? But what I'm suggesting here is that even if you have all these hands come up, you do not want to say that, "Okay, you and you." You just say, "Yes, juror number seven or yes, Mr. Miller."

Now when you're done that there was other people who rose raised their hand, all you're going to say is two words. Who else? Who else, what else? Now, here's why that's important. When you continually manage as much as you are with the extra verbiage, what you're doing is not allowing the leaders, the outliers, the bullies to reveal themselves. You want to know who is going to raise their hand. You want to know who has something to say. You want to know who the talkative people are. You want to know who the weirdos are. Let them identify themselves. When you are managing this as much as you are, you're never going to find that out. This is, again, you've heard me say this, but this is why you cannot hire me for jury selection anymore unless you're one of my VIPs because you do this kind of stuff and you come back, you go, "What does this all mean?"

And I just look back and you go, "I don't know. I have no fucking idea," because we're not letting the group reveal itself, which really happens at that beginning and in that beginning stage, it's incredibly awkward. And so for you to be good at group dynamics, guess what? You have to be really good at handling awkwardness and breathe like a motherfucker and let those people reveal themselves instead of managing it so much because you're scared. So who else? Now, the other thing that I want to point out here is that when you do this, many of you will do this. You'll say, "Who else? Also, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," which is your original question that you started with, with the person who just answered it. Here's what you have to understand. Everybody has moved on whatever... a conversation is a fluid thing.

Whatever that juror was just talking about, other people have different ideas now in their head that they may want to share, but what you do every time you say, "Who else wants to answer question X?" I've actually seen it happen. It disorients them and they go, "Oh, that question." Where in their mind something, and again, they may just be answering that question, don't get me wrong, but oftentimes the juror who's just been talking has dislodged something from other jurors brains that they want to share with you that you shut down by repeating the question. When you say, "Who else?" And that's it again, with that raised hand.

Now people self-identify, so you get to see who's talkative, and they also get to choose what it is they're going to share with you because you're not directing and managing so much. There is a activity that we all have to do in our coactive training where it's called Sandbox, and so what it is that we put one person in the middle and there's like 25 people standing in a circle with one person in the middle, and that person is getting coached, and so one person starts coaching, and coaching is primarily questions, and so the instructor in the room at any time during the coaching session points to another person of the 25 in the circle, and they have to take over the coaching right there in that moment.

Now, what most people will do is they start formulating their questions. Here's what I'm going to ask. Here's what I'm going to... After they hear the person's topic, which means the thing the person wants to be coached on, but what ends up happening is by the time the instructor points to them, the conversation has moved way beyond what makes sense for the question they were going to ask. We call this tracking and we're going to talk about it in an upcoming podcast, but when you're not tracking the conversation or you're not allowing the jurors to share with you what's present for them, you're shutting down a lot of great stuff. Another situation, a juror gives a "bad answer," so the wrong way to handle that, the way I see it handled all the time is we either argue with the juror, I don't hopefully don't have to explain why that's wrong.

We try to explain it also wrong or we bury it, which is the one I really want to talk to you about. So here's important to understand about bad answers, and I know I had a whole podcast on this that you can go back and listen to, but here's one thing I want to add to that conversation is jurors... get out your notes.

Jurors cannot fight for you if there's nothing to fight over me. Say it again. Jurors cannot fight for you if there's nothing to fight over. So when you bury because you're scared of the bad answer, instead of allowing the "bad answer" in the air and taking a beat and having some silence around it, in fact, this just happened in a voir dire circle last month in the crew. Someone said a "bad or defense-oriented answer," and the attorney very smartly just hung back for a minute, just a beat or so, and another juror came in and rescued his ass.

But we don't do that. Do we? We rush in? We try to fix it, we try to bury it. Oftentimes, the jurors will fix it for you. Here at H2H, we're all about letting the jury solve our problems. This is a very important point. Sometimes it's just letting it hang for a minute and seeing who comes in. That's good information. Is it not? To see who swoops in and saves you? That's very good information, and you can also, if nobody does, you can say, "Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. What should happen in X, Y, Z situation?" And use it to get some more conversation going. Here's what I want you to think about. In general, you want to talk less as you go down the funnel, and if you're not sure what the funnel is, you can go to our website, sariswears.com/training.

It's also there just up at the top free training, and I go through the very popular funnel method. The point being is we start with bigger open-ended questions and we narrow down until we get the jurors to give us the principle, but that funnel narrows down for another reason. It should be an indicator in your brain. I talk less and less and less and less and less as I go down the funnel. So we start with maybe a context statement. Who here has ever been in a hospital? And then we start narrowing down, narrowing down by the point at the end we're saying things like, "What else? Who else? Who wants to add?" Right? That's what we're after.

Now, let's move to my opening for a minute and where you're talking too much there. Opening is for context for what is about to come. So that 30 minutes or less, if I told you you had all the time in the world for opening, which most of the time you do, then you're going to shove in everything that you think may or may not help or hurt you just in case. If instead I said, you have 30 minutes, if I said you had five minutes, I often do this with my VIP clients. You have two minutes, give me a two-minute opening. What's important becomes clear very fast, not to mention that a 30-minute opening is easier to remember on two points for the jury, which is what you want them to do. Remember, that's the first and last time that you get to clearly and coherently weave the narrative for jurors. Now, they're going to hear the story from different people throughout trial out of order, so this is your one chance to kind of hum the tune that they should be humming in their brains until the end of trial.

If that tune is a Wagner opera, they ain't going to remember that shit. But if it's The Small World from Disneyland tune, that's easy because it's catchy and it's short, so it's easy for the jurors to remember. That's why we want it short too, but also it's easy for you to remember so you can get away from your notes. None of my clients use notes in opening. None of my clients. They may have it over there to just make sure they're on track like an outline, but they don't use notes. They're out there teaching performance storytelling. Can't do that with a two and a hour opening. I mean, you can, it takes a lot of work. Most people cannot pull it off. Other places that you talk. So in opening, for example, you do a lot of announcing. Now, I'd like to talk to you about, now I'd like to show you. Stop.

Just show and tell. Now I'd like to show and now I'd like to tell. Just show it and tell it. You can also use questions. So what are doctors supposed to do in this case instead of, now, let me show you what a doctor is supposed to do when this blah, blah, blah, blah. You can ask questions. You can just pause. You can just pause and start a sentence without what we call announcing. Listen, in these few examples, I hope that I have shown you that we want you to stop talking so much. You think it looks bad and you don't know your shit when there's silence. I'm going to suggest it's the opposite. When you talk, when you repeat questions, when you do too much management, you look like you don't know what you're talking about. You look like you're afraid and you lose out.

This is the really important part on learning the makeup of your jury. Silence is confidence. Being comfortable in that silence, I should say, is confidence. That's where we want you. You need to stand so firmly. This is why we do so much mindset training in H2H, in the fact that you stand on the side of the right, that your job is to highlight the truth, not convince anybody of anything, and when you believe those things and you trust yourself and the jurors and the process, you are going to be a lot more comfortable with giving the jury time and space and pause and silence to work some out without you getting in there. It's not about you, it's about the jurors, and it's about the information. Take yourself out of it and let those two things shine because when you do that, that's when we win cases. Don't overburden your cases with all of the extra verbiage. Stop talking so much. I love you. Talk next week.

While you wait for next week's episode, how would you like instant access to exclusive trial skills training on my H2H funnel method for voir dire? Grab a pen and paper so you can jot down the website address for a 16-minute video that will help you win more cases. The free training is called Let the Jury Solve Your Problems in Three Easy Steps, and I'm even going to send you a workbook to go with it now. Are you ready for the address? Visit sariswears.com/training. You'll see me there. Enjoy.

If you liked this episode topic, check out these others: