Sari Swears Podcast: Are You Repeating Yourself? Maybe You Should

Do you ever catch yourself repeating things in trial and worry it’s too much?

Let me stop you right there: it’s NOT too much.

In fact, you probably need to repeat yourself MORE.

This week’s podcast episode is all about how intentional repetition helps your jurors:

✔️ Understand your case
✔️ Remember your core messages
✔️ Trust YOU

Too many attorneys are afraid of sounding redundant. But repetition, when done right, is one of the most powerful teaching tools you have.

In the episode, I break down:

🗣️Why repetition builds neural pathways and increases recall
🗣️How to use repetition throughout voir dire, opening, and closing
🗣️The difference between GOOD repetition (strategic) and BAD repetition (nervous rambling)

And I walk you through exactly where in trial you should be repeating key phrases, hooks, gestures, and more.

Because when jurors hear it again and again it STICKS.

And if it sticks, they carry it into the verdict room.

Tune in NOW! 🎧

Love,
Sari

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“If you want the jury to remember something, you have to be willing to say it over and over and over again. Not just in voir dire, not just in opening, not just in closing—but throughout the entire trial. Because repetition creates neural pathways. That’s how the brain works. Repetition is how we learn, how we connect, how we remember. And if you're not repeating your most important points? You're leaving the jury with nothing to hold onto.”
sari de la motte

Transcription

Well, welcome everybody to another episode of Sari Swears. Sari is here swearing with you today and we are talking about are you repeating yourself? Maybe you should. Yeah, we tend to think that repeating ourselves is bad and it is in some cases, but not in the way that I'm going to talk about today. Before we get there, I don't see any reviews of the new podcast. So can you go and do that, please? Because I want to hear from you. And also I want to remind you, you can go to sariswears.com/h2h.

The two are like the number two. Shit, I'm not going to spell that for you because you should know how to spell that. If you want to sign up for any of the things that we're putting out into the world, you don't have to get all the things. You can decide which things you like by going there. All right. So trial is an overabundance of information. And this is like an onslaught to any juror. It's just way too much. And the problem with that for you is that the jurors need to understand what it is that you are talking about and why it's important. And when there is so much information coming at them at one time, over several days, if not weeks, this is a problem. This is why at H2H, we are advocating for shorter trials in general. This is why at H2H, we advocate that your opening should be 30 minutes or less.

This is why I'm consistently, when I'm working with you in presentation skills and whatnot, telling you to pare down the language, to simplify, to say less, to not introduce things, to just say the things so that we can pare down all of the information that is coming at jurors. I mean, not only is it incredibly confusing for jurors to have all that information, that onslaught of information, but when we have long openings or long trials or long anything, that communicates to the jury that this is really complicated and confusing and complex. And as we know, those are tools of the defense. So we want it to appear as though this is simple. This is clear. This is common sense. That's how we want our trials to appear to the jurors. Now, because there is so much information coming at the jury, one bias that you have coming into this is that you yourself have lived with the case for two, three, four, sometimes five plus years.

And so to you, it doesn't seem as confusing or complex because you've lived with it for all of this time. And you assume that the jurors are just going to get it because you get it, even though sometimes, I don't think even you get it. So we want to make sure that you understand that the jurors don't just get it. And in fact, when the jurors feel stupid, like they don't understand what's happening, you risk having them tune out completely. And then once we get to the verdict stage, make a guess and get the hell out of there. And that is rarely good for you. If we want to make sure that our jurors really get and retain the information that we are giving them, there's really two main ingredients. The first ingredient, which we're not going to talk about today, at least not in depth, is that you have very simple information.

Less is more and simple words, simple in terms of short, simple, all the things, that's going to help. And I will do a podcast on that. But the second piece to really help jurors retain the information is repetition. Repetition is so important in terms of learning, which is what jurors are doing, are they not? At least I hope that's what they're doing. And what I also know about jurors is that they love to learn. That's a big part of why so many of them exit the other end of jury selection or a trial and say that they enjoyed the experience because they learned so much. They also have a lot of power, and that comes back down to empowering them and closing. But in terms of learning, repetition is huge. First, repetition is, as you've heard me say, how we build neuro pathways. An experience alone, especially one experience, is insufficient for the brain to form and sustain a neuro pathway, meaning people will have to hear it, see it, so on, to actually have it stick in the brain.

And that's what we want. And this is why I think when we get to closing, for example, so many of you are repeating yourselves there in terms of review and it's boring as fuck, because nobody wants to have a big review session when you've missed the opportunities to reinforce that neuro pathway throughout trial, which I'm going to show you various places you can do that today. Repetition also improves memory retention. So because you're creating those new neural pathways and you are enforcing these ideas over and over again from jury selection all the way through closing, that's going to help with them retaining what it is that they've learned throughout trial. Repetition also, and this is really huge, increases familiarity. So we know the more times we hear something, the more familiar it becomes. And the more familiar something becomes, the more we trust it. This is an old sales technique.

Now, thankfully, you guys don't need techniques or gimmicks because you stand on the side of the right, but we can certainly use this to underscore the truth and make sure that that is at the forefront of our jurors' minds, that when something is repeated, it is familiar. And familiar is A+ for the brain. The brain likes things that are familiar because things that are unfamiliar are potentially dangerous and the brain tends to reject them. So repetition helps us get over that unfamiliarity piece, especially if you're talking about something that isn't necessarily familiar to the jurors. Now, in the simple piece, that's where you will hopefully make it familiar to jurors by using normal language and so on and so much. What is the saying there that I'm not remembering? But anyways, repetition creates familiarity. It also creates a sense of truth. When a statement is heard over and over and over again, it is more likely that people will believe it.

Now, again, this isn't something I'm suggesting you do to pull one over on jurors. You stand on the side of the right. It is something that will help you underscore the truth. And so it will be something that is reinforced for them by repeating it. It's also something, repetition, I should say, that helps reduce stress. The trial is incredibly stressful for everybody concerned, but particularly for the jurors. First, when they come in with jury selection, they're under stress because they don't understand how this goes. We've talked about the brain attack that jurors are under. Their status is under attack because they're being told where to go and what to do and whether to stay and all of the things. Their certainty is under attack because they don't know how the whole thing works. Their autonomy is under attack because they can't say no. Relatedness is under attack because they don't know anyone else and the whole thing feels unfair.

So there's our scarf brain model. So that's incredibly stressful, but it's also stressful as we're talking about today to have all of this information being thrown at them and knowing that they're going to have to recall it at the end. So when something is being repeated throughout trial from jury selection all the way to the end, that reduces their stress because it makes the brain feel good when we remember something. And so when they hear it the second, third, fourth, fifth time, it's familiar and they remember and that feels good. Now, one of the things in my research on repetition was something that came up quite a bit. And if you go and you look at this yourself, you'll hear about spread out learning. What a lot of the research is showing is that repetition particularly works, I should say, effective, there's the word. It's particularly effective when the repetition is spread out, meaning that you're looking or learning at the material at increasing levels of time.

It's not just all in one burst that you repeat the thing. Well, think about the trial. That's exactly how the trial is set up so that you will have this learning or these things you're repeating over the course of the trial. So it's perfectly set up for spaced out learning. So now all we need to do is get really consistent with repeating ourselves, which sounds weird. And so let me just talk for a minute before we talk about all the various places that you can do this. "The bad way" to repeat yourself over and over again is when you don't know exactly what it is you're supposed to be saying. So you just continue to come back to what's familiar and you're repeating yourself and it's because you don't really know what you're supposed to say next. And so here I am repeating myself again with the thing because that's all my brain is giving me right now and so on and so forth.

Go back to my podcast episode on practicing and you will get rid of that problem because the more you practice, the more you'll train your brain to download the information that you need in the moment and you won't be repeating yourself in that way. So that's what I don't mean when I'm talking about repetition of just repeating yourself because you don't know what else to say and you're in this awkward silence. I mean, where you are specifically repeating yourself for a purpose, and that is so that jurors can retain the information, have it feel truthful and familiar. It is truthful. Again, I cannot say that enough, that when we're talking about this, we're not talking about gimmicks. So let me just point out a few places in the H2H world, excuse me, where we naturally repeat things. So one of the things that we do, our whole jury selection process is based on my H2H voir dire method, which is where we find our principles, the things that underpin our particular case, excuse me again. Hopefully that's the last time.

And we take those things and we find these principles and we take them and we put them at the bottom of a funnel. So the funnel method is not something that is in the book. I keep saying it's new, but the book's 2019. So it's not that new. It's in the last three or four years that we came up with the funnel method. And the basic gist of the funnel method is to have the jurors give the principle to us. And the reason why we do that is because everybody believes one person in their world over every other person and that's themselves. We listen to our own self and what we think... We're just so smart and we know everything, at least at our very basic level. So we want the jurors to come up with the principles and that's stronger. So here's the place where we repeat that.

It's the trial dialogue, right? So we had the jurors giving us, for example, in our liability funnels, here's all the ways that this could have been avoided, which is one of the two questions that I say you always must answer in any plaintiff case. So if we have a principle that says if trucking companies do not train their drivers, they could cause a crash. And so if jurors are telling us in jury selection, "Well, how could that be avoided?" And they're saying things like, "Well, training and supervising their drivers and not having them on the road for as long of a time," whatever it may be, we're going to repeat that by saying the very things that they gave us in opening. So part of the trial dialogue is we're asking the juror in voir dire about how things could be avoided or why our non-economic things, our damages are valuable, and then we will repeat that by giving those answers right back to them in the opening.

That's a very important repetition because we're taking something the juror said and giving it back to them. Also in jury selection, we are having a conversation about things that the juror values that don't come with a price tag. We talk about how our economic damages, the things that they'll have to decide, come with a price tag and those things are easy because they can just look at the receipts, add them up on a calculator. But our non-economic damages, those are things that we value in life that don't come with a price tag. And so when jurors are telling us, we ask them, "What's something in your life that you value that doesn't come with a price tag?" And they're telling us these things. When we're in our opening statement, we're going to hearken back to that as well and the how money can help section.

We talk about how money can help fix, help or make up for, thank you, David Ball. We'll talk about the economics that it can fix. We'll talk about the economics in which it can help. And then we'll say, "But there's the things that it can make up for, those very things we just talked about in jury selection." And we'll repeat the things they gave us there. There's another repetition.

One of the other ways that we repeat is in our voir dire, we have what we call the devil's advocate question. So once the jurors give us the principle in our case and we really feel like the group is rallying around that principle, we will throw a defense point into what we call devil's advocate question. So we'll say something like, "Yeah, but tracking companies, they're busy. They got to get drivers in seats and get stuff moved across the country. They don't have time to train and supervise and monitor. Are you kidding me? " And of course jurors are like, "Yes, they do. " But we're going to bring that voice back. And so when we're in our opening statement, we're going to use it again in our challenges section. We're going to say ... Now, one of the things we had to look at is, do they really have to train and monitor and supervise?

I mean, it takes a lot of time. And here's what we found. I'm going to bring it back up in closing. So if somebody back there says, "Tracking companies are busy. They don't have time to train and supervise," you remind them about experts so-and-so, right? So they're going to hear that voice. They're going to hear it in voir dire. They're going to hear it in the opening and they're going to hear it in closing. And every time they hear it, it's going to be in that kind of squeaky, snarky voice that they'll recognize. By the way, I always say, we never talk about the defense case unless we're using that voice. So that's also going to cue them that every time they hear that snarky voice, it's a ridiculous point and it's a defense point. That's one of my best repetition things I've come up with if I may say so myself, which I may, because this is my podcast and I just did.

All right. So another thing, our hooks. In the opening alone, we repeat it three times. We say our hook, which is the number one thing that comes out of our mouth. The first thing we open our mouth in our opening, we say it there. We repeat it when we get to step four in our opening template, with why we're here, but now we're going to take that hook and we're going to personalize it to the defendant. And then we say it again at the conclusion, which is part nine of our template, where we say it yet a third time and we're having it be spoken to the jury in terms of responsibility, but we're going to bring it back in closing. We start our closing with the same hook again, but we call it the shoulder hook and we add a specific piece to it. So that hook, they're going to hear at least four times, probably more over trial in a very specific way that they're hearing it.

So there's repetition. We have the challenges, as I said, in that DVAQ voice. We're going to say it in the opening, but we're going to bring that back in closing. And when we teach the jury how to fight for us. When we're talking about teaching in the teaching section, here are the three ways the defense could have avoided this happening or can't avoid this happening. When we come back to part four, which is why we're here after we repeat the hook, we're going to say, "And here's how they did not do those three things." Then those three things from teaching are going to come back in closing again. Had they simply chosen to do these three things, we wouldn't be here at all. So teaching gets repeated. Those three things are five, mostly three. Most of the time I teach it, it's three. We're going to be opening twice in opening and at least once in closing.

We're going to tell the defendant's story. This is one of my favorite things. Oftentimes when we're telling a story in the defendant's story, which is part three of our template, maybe you have a contrecoup injury in your case and you're going to show, and this is one of the cases that I had, he had a brain and he actually showed this shearing motion with his hands, with the brain. And I said, "When you're telling the story of the two cars, I want you to use this in this..." If you're watching the podcast, you can see what I'm doing. "This motion, even as you act it out." And so we did that and he even brought it into teaching. When he was talking about how contrecoup shearing injuries happen, he used this motion. Then when he was talking about the cars and the way that they hit each other, he used this motion.

And when he came into closing, he used that motion again... I'm sorry, and when he came into causation, he used that again. And of course in closing, we would use it yet another time. So even motions, gestures with your hands repeated the same way over and over again, I can guarantee you, they're going to use that back in the verdict room because they want to know what they're talking about. And if you teach them these things throughout the trial, that's only going to help you. More likely than not. In H2H, we don't talk about preponderance until we get to closing and we talk about it there in terms of really that just means more likely than not. More likely true than not true. So we're going to start using that language through trial. We're going to... Every time we've got someone on the stand, experts, would you say it's more likely true than not true?

That is what caused it. Experts on causation, experts on liability. Is it more likely true than not true that this happened and it was negligent? We're going to use that language so that it's not unfamiliar when we actually put it in the context of the preponderance standard in closing. Our money asks. We say that in H2H in voir dire. I know in not all places you can do that, but in a voir dire we say we're going to ask for $100 million if that's what we're asking for. We say it again. In the opening, we're going to ask for $100 million and we say it again in closing. Just repeating that number makes it more legitimate instead of waiting till the end and throwing it on them. I know there's strategy around that I'm not going to argue with, especially Randi fucking McGinn because she's one of the people that doesn't say it in voir dire.

But for me, again, with the repetition piece, that is so helpful that I, especially if it's a big number, I want it to become something that doesn't feel so big by the end of trial because I've repeated it as many times as I possibly can. Look, there's probably tons of other places where you can be repeating yourself on purpose, but I hope what you're getting from this podcast episode is that when you repeat yourself in a purposeful way, you are helping the jury to remember and retain information, make that information familiar so that they can trust it and believe that it's true, which it is true, which will only help you in the end. So don't repeat yourself because you don't know what to say, but definitely look for places where you can repeat yourself so that you're making those things familiar to the jury throughout trial, which will only increase your chances of getting that bigger verdict.

All right. Hope that helps. Talk soon.

And if you haven't already seen our freebie, eight strategies for eight figures, you can go to sariswears.com/8strategies, the number eight strategies. You get the first three for free. You got to pay, but not very much for the whole thing, but go get the first three and see if you like it. Ever wish you had a place to practice your trial skills and connect with other lawyers who get it and connect with me? Grab your seat in the H2H playground. It's where you get a real coaching community and strategies to actually grow your practice. Head to sariswears.com/play and get enrolled. Until next time.