Episode #252 – The Power of Contrast

Contrast is the fucking star of the show today ⭐

Picture this: we're painting a badass masterpiece.

Each stroke of contrast SHARPENS the narrative, adding depth and impact.

Think about how you can leverage contrast to ELEVATE your narrative to motivate the jury to take ACTION. 

Trust me, it's a game-changer. Tune into the episode now to dive in deeper.

Xo,
Sari

➡️Listen on Spotify

➡️Listen on Apple

➡️Listen on YouTube

➡️Listen on the website

P.S. Shoutout to Monny for the AHmazing podcast review:

“Listening to Sari is fun. It's not school, but I'm learning. It's also challenging in a great way. A challenge to consider mindset, a challenge to have fun, a challenge to the idea that lawyer work is boring. Highly recommend it. Unless you're my opposing counsel, in which case this podcast is terrible.”

(LOL’d pretty hard at the last line, thanks Monny!)

“But the point is that the contrast is clarifying. It isn't messy. When you have contrast, it strengthens your argument. There's black and there's white, that's why the DVAQ, the Devil's Advocate. Don't do it in your regular voice, it has to be a contrast. There's another place, it has to be a contrast between your regular voice and your, "Yeah, but can you just say you're sorry" voice. It has to be different.”

Sari de la motte

EPISODE #252 TRANSCRIPTION

Well, welcome, welcome. As promised, I'm going to read another review because I know that's why you come here, is to hear me read the reviews. Well, you may come here because if you know that you left one, you want to hear me say it.

I love this one. It's from Monny44. "Fresh and helpful content. Five stars. Here's the thing about this podcast." I love the start. "I'm not great at listening to them regularly, but when I listen to it, it always, ALWAYS," all caps, "applies to something I'm dealing with that very day." Well, I plan it that way. "This is how relevant this content is. Without fail, it applies. For example, I was struggling to encourage a colleague and Sari's podcast to the rescue with How to Overcome Not Good Enough Syndrome. Perfect timing and great content." See episode 244, people. "Not only is it relevant always, it's fresh and entertaining. Listening to Sari is fun. It's not school, but I'm learning. It's also challenging in a great way. A challenge to consider mindset, a challenge to have fun, a challenge to the idea lawyer work is boring. Highly recommend. Unless you're my opposing counsel, in which case this podcast is terrible."

Love it, love it, love it. Thank you, thank you for reviewing. If you have not reviewed the podcast yet, you can do so wherever you listen to your podcast.

Today, we are talking about the power of contrast. We are doing this call in the H2H Playground. If you, again, don't know what the H2H Playground is, it's where we go and we play with all of these things and we're having such a fucking good time doing it, I just have to say. We have three calls a week, people. None of them are mandatory so if you're like, "Oh my God, I could never do that," no one can ever do that, although there are people in there that try. No one will show up to all the calls. But most calls are just an hour, and we have three a week. Every Tuesday, we have a case roundtable, we have Trial in 30 Days every month so people can get ready for trial, we have My Presentation Skills, we have voir dire skills, we have practice management, all the things.

But one of the calls that we have is called Expanding the Method. It's for our legacy members, people who have been in for a year or more. What we're looking at is how to expand the method. For example, I don't have a method on how to do a cause challenge, for example because it's not the thing that I'm really all about but I know that they're necessary. We're taking it to the streets. No. We're taking to our legacy members and saying, "How do you do it? What's the H2H way to do it?"

Can you imagine ... By the way, I'm just going to give myself a shout-out, as I take of this because menopause. I'm so warm. Any other group out there going, "Hey, I want to work with y'all on expanding my method." See, hrs the thing that bugs me, because I say this all the time. Any person out there who particularly is not a trial lawyer and is telling you all the things, and how they know everything, and how you're stupid and they're smart, just fuck that. They will never to stand in front of a jury, I will never have to stand in front of a jury. Fuck that shit. I'm smart enough to go to y'all because you're the experts and say, "How are you handling this?"

Now I'm very, very lucky because I have Coach Jody, who is one of the most brilliant lawyers that ever lived, one of the most brilliant people that ever lived, that is my spirit animal. If I could grow up and be Jody Moore, that is who I would be. Her and I do this call, and we're just exploring a bunch of these different things. In fact, you're going to hear from one of our legacy members, they're going to join me on a podcast, I believe next week or if it's not next week, it'll be the following, because they've been doing their own research and came up with all this cool stuff. Basically what this call's about is just, "Let's just play with stuff."

But what's come up many, many times, both in conversations with Jody and I, or conversations with this Expanding the Method group, is this idea of contrast and how it is central to the H2H philosophy. Now if you're like me and you're scrolling Facebook, and you see an ad for rug cleaning ... It's not even an ad, sometimes they're just showing it. Who knew, before the internet was invented? If somebody had come up and said, "You know what, I'm going to clean this rug and I'm going to videotape it, and it's going to have 30,000 people watch it." People are like, "You're fucking crazy." So I'm watching this video of this person cleaning this rug and why? Because it's like I'm loving the before and after. I'm like, "There's no way they're going to make this." It's a rug that's completely brown and then the after, it's totally white. You're like, "Oh, that's not going to happen." And guess what? It does happen.

I'm watching it, and it's stupid, and why am I watching this? But the point is, we love before and afters. You see the, "Here's this kitchen before," and it's got the gross oak cabinets. Sorry, if you have oak cabinets, but they are gross. Now they've totally done a difference. They could just show us the new thing. They could be like, "Look at this cool kitchen," but it's even more cool because we saw the before. They even do it with people. Have you seen those ones where, "Here's this homeless man, he came in from the street," and his hair's all matted and whatever. They shave him, and cut his hair, and put new clothes on and he looks like a model. Have you seen that one?

We love contrast, before and after. I was googling contrast. I was like, "Why is contrast important?" Because these are the silly things that I Google, but I get cool stuff. Of course, art stuff came up or graphic design. One of the things that it said, "Color contrast is important because text and background colors can determine how people interact with the content that is written in those colors." I thought, "Wow, it can determine how people interact with blank." I love that, that's exactly what contrast does in the H2H world, which I'm going to explain in a minute.

Another one said, "Contrast is important because contrast is perspective." This is talking about music now.

"That's not just for music, that's for everything. It's even why we have two eyes and ears, so we can have better perspectives for the contrast of slightly different sensory input." Ah, I just thought that was incredible.

"My mother," this person said, "Had a small leaded glass that sat on the bathroom windowsill when I was a kid. It had a poem about a rainbow on it. If all were rain and never sun, no bow could span the hill. But if all were sun and never rain, there'd be no rainbow still." It's so true when people say, "How can you live in the Pacific Northwest? It's so beautiful, you should faint from the beauty." No, that's not what they say. They say, "It rains so much!" It does rain here a lot. I say, "Yeah, but when the sun comes out, it's magical," because we don't see it every day. It's just the most beautiful thing that ever happened. Not to mention that I love being inside when it's really raining outside. It's cozy, and coffee, and all the things.

How does this apply to the H2H method? Well, it all started with, when I really thought about it and was outlining this podcast, the trial dialogue.

That was the first big contrast that came to mind, which I talk about in the book and we still talk about it quite a bit in the Crew, where voir dire and opening are two halves of a conversation.

In that in voir dire, we're asking questions and in opening, we're answering them. Now, we're actually giving the jurors' answers back to them, but in any case, we're saying, "You were right, you had the right answer." In voir dire, we are listening, at least hopefully, and in opening, we're talking. In voir dire, we are forming the group, and then we are leading the group in opening and beyond. And often times, even in voir dire, once the group forms.

It's this idea of contrast. Here's what we do in voir dire, so that we can do this thing in opening. If you're not doing this thing in voir dire, then you're missing out on this thing you can do in opening, which is great.

As you've heard me talk about, it's really important where you get the jurors to say in voir dire what it is that you are going to say in your opening.

It's not get, like manipulate, because again y'all stand on the side of the right, so you're basically just having them tell you the principles that 99% of humans believe in. Then when the defense gets up and says, "No, no, no, no, that is not true," or, "That's not how this works," or whatever, now they're arguing not with you but with the jury themselves. We love putting them in that position, quite frankly.

That contrast really started there. But as we started playing with this and looking at it, we started realizing this is everywhere. There's two sides to everything. Kevin can back me up on this because he'll say, "You only think in black-and-white," because I'm such a black-and-white thinker. He's always like, "Gray, there's gray right here." I'm like, "No, this or this." He's like, "No, gray. Look at the gray." Okay.

First place. There's many places, but I'm going to talk about four today. I know, four, I'm sorry. I couldn't do three, I'm doing four. The first one is good before bad. This is such a huge concept. In fact, we're really, really playing with it now in that Expanding the Call Method, so of course I'm going to share it with you before it's fully formed. But we're realizing that nearly everything we do in the Crew and in the Method is good before bad.

Think about the funnel. If you don't know what a funnel is, it's our voir dire process of getting the jury to tell us what the principle is versus telling them what it is and asking if they agree.

The funnel has three main parts. It rarely ever goes exactly this way, but this is the structure. The first question is an experiential question. Who here has ever shared the road with a semi-truck? Who here has ever been hospitalized or knows someone who has? Who here is a parent or has ever had parents? That's a good one, we love that one. It's an experiential question. Then the second question is what are your expectations about said experience? If it was been hospitalized, we don't go and ask everybody about, "Well, what was that like, why were you there," because that's intrusive, and we don't really care, and that wastes a lot of our time. We say, "What were your expectations around being monitored?"

Now I'm finding, especially in car cases, this has nothing to do with what we're talking about today, I just want to share this with you, that we have some cynical jurors out there. We'll say, "How many of you got here in a car today?" Everybody's raised their hand. We say, "What do you expect of other drivers on the road?" They'll be like, "That they're idiots. That they're going to crash into me." What you might have to do in that case is change your wording to, "What do you hope from other drivers on the road? How do you hope they will behave or conduct themselves?"

Hope, you can change the word to hope. But that's the second question.

The third question is, "Well, what can happen if?" If they say, "Well, I hope that they would obey the rules of the road, they would stop at stop signs, they wouldn't run red lights." You might say, "Well, what can happen if they did run a red light?" They will say, "People could get hurt or killed." That was probably the principle that we were going for, which is if someone runs a red light, people can be injured or killed. That's really a nice way to think about principles, if then. It's not always if then, but if this, then that.

If you go back to Rules of the Road, Rick Friedman, he talks about the difference between principles and rules.

Principles are fundamental truth, where rules prescribe action. Notice how that doesn't prescribe action. It doesn't say what someone should or shouldn't do, it just says a truth. If this happens, then that probably will happen.

Notice how, even there, we do good before bad. Instead of saying, "Who here has ever shared the road with a semi-truck?" And then saying, "There's lots of accidents, aren't there? Aren't you afraid of crash? Who here is afraid of a crash?" We go right to the bad. We say, "What are your expectations, in terms of training?" We get the jury to say, "Here's the way to avoid this." I did a podcast last month or the month before about defensive attribution and how we cannot get around it.

Our brains are wired to keep us safe. If we can't get around it, why not use it? Why not let jurors tell us how this thing could be avoided?

By the way, that is one of the questions that you must answer, as you've heard me say before, to win any plaintiff case. This could have been avoided and money can't help, those are the two questions.

Right here, you have an opportunity to have the jurors tell you that this could have been avoided. Well, what's important about training? "Because if they know how to handle driving in snow, then less crashes occur." Well, what could happen if they don't know how to drive in snow? "People get hurt and killed." We have the good, "Here's how to avoid said danger," it's just right there, hidden in our funnel, and then we have the bad, "But what could happen if that doesn't happen?" There's a great example of contrast.

Now we also use that in the ideal juror profile. Which, remember, is you take all your fears, defense arguments, things you're worried about, and you list them all out. Then you go, "Okay what would my juror have to believe in order for this not to be true?" Now notice how that is backwards, and I think that's why I did a podcast a couple, again last month probably, on some of issues with the ideal juror profile. I think the reason why we're getting in trouble there, even though you're supposed to go to the good, is because we're starting with the bad. Notice, we're like, "Here's the fear. How do we fix the fear?"

Somehow, because we start with the fear, it just gets all entangled and it taints it. Then it gets into our funnels, and then we have these defense orientated funnels.

We're like, "Why isn't this working?" Then we're like, "Oh, we're trying to funnel a defense point."

One of the things that we've been talking about in the Expanding the Method call, and this was again brilliance of Coach Jody ... If you want to come work with Coach Jody, get in the fucking Crew. She alone is worth it. I know I'm worth it, but she's amazing, as are all of our other coaches. They're incredible. But today, I'm talking about Jody's brilliance. She said, "Why don't we start with our hopes and thinking about why did we take this case? What did we find worthy in this? And start our ideal juror profile from there." Why did we take this case? Those are the very same things that we want to see in jurors.

I'm not saying we're throwing out the idea juror profile, but I am saying that because of this, really principle or philosophy of H2H, it's not quite aligned, I'm finding. Here I am, saying that one of my things, which I love the ideal juror profile, is not quite aligned with the direction that H2H is going. Keep that in mind.

When you're doing this, you're thinking about good before bad. Instead of going right to bad, which in jurors' minds make them think, "Y'all are here litigating every little thing." When you start with the good, the jurors' think, "The world is a dangerous place but we can be safe if certain rules are followed." It just flips it on its head. It absolutely, utterly changes the conversation.

You could have the same exact facts and if you put them in the wrong order, meaning bad before good, you will have a completely different outcome. This good before bad is huge when it comes to the H2H method.

When you're working with your own cases, before I go on to some other things, I want you to be thinking about what is the good that we are protecting? We are protecting intact families, safe workplaces, safe hospitals, so on and so forth. That is the frame that I want you to be thinking about as you're creating your voir dire and your opening. It's so ingrained that you are always wanting to go in and find out, "Who believes the defense thing?" That you spend hardly any time on, "This is the world I want to create and I'm looking for people who want to create it with me." This is why we say we're changing the world here at H2H.

You're always juxtaposing what you're standing for against what they value, which is often times profit and only profit.

It was great in our Trial Lab last month, where one of the questions was ... It was about a logging truck and it was about the length of the logs. One of the questions was, "Why would a paper mill not limit the length of the logs when that can save lives?" Jurors were right there, "Money." Great question, by the way.

Okay. We just had in the Crew, and I'm going to use this as an example, a new member, this is nothing against them, they were just learning the method, who was like, "Okay, I need to voir dire the panel on LGBTQA+ issues. How do I do that?" I was like, "I don't even know anything about your case and I can tell you that this case probably has nothing to do with LGBTQA. That's probably a factor of it, but the fact that someone in this case is of LGBTQA+ is a defense point. If you go in and your first thing is voir diring on that and people's thoughts on that, that's what you make the case about. I'm not saying we're not going to handle that, but my question to you is what is your case actually about? What are you protecting? What world are you creating? Then, we're going to go handle that shit."

Don't make it about that shit. Just an example of how ingrained that is in you. It's not that you guys are wrong. Somewhere down the line it's like, "This is what we have to do, we have to go in there and we have to cut off all these people." No. No.

Number two. The other place contrast plays in the H2H method is who is willing versus who is not willing.

Again, this is also in voir dire. In voir dire, we have a very specific way in H2H that we talk about money. We start with responsibility and we use a responsibility funnel, it could be anything. But basically, the principle at the bottom of that funnel that we want jurors to tell us is that people should take responsibility when they've hurt someone. You can get there a variety of ways.

Once we have that from the jurors, then we say, "Well, how as a society do we hold people responsible?" They'll say things like, "Well, jail." We'll say, "Yeah. If it's a criminal case, absolutely that's on the table. What if it's not? What if it's not a crime that's been committed?" Someone will, and if they don't, you can say, "Money." Then we'll say, "How does money hold people responsible?" They'll say, "It can pay for medical bills," and now we start creating a list. As soon as I hear medical bills, and they'll always do economics first. Other ways to ask that question is what can money do? They'll say, "Pay for medical bills. Pay for lost wages." They're going to give me all these economics. Someone might say, "Pain and suffering." Or they might say, "Well, it can send a message." Or, "It can say their life meant something." That would go in my non-economics flip chart. Always have two flip charts in trial. Always.

Then once I have my two lists, the attorney says about the economics now, "These things come a price tag. They're the easy damages that you're going to have to determine should you become a juror in this case. You just take out your calculator, check our math, but this is the cost of something. It comes with a price. These things have value but they don't come with a price tag. Now before we talk about your job as jurors here, can I ask what is something in your life that has value but doesn't come with a price tag?" Then we go into what we call a resident conversation. Somebody raises their hand and they'll say, "My family." You don't say, "Thank you. Family, great. Who else?" You say, "Your family. What do you love about your family?" "Well, we have these dinners every Sunday night." You know, "What's your dish?" You just get into this conversation, and it's a great, beautiful thing.

You may be writing these up on your board. Family, thank you. What else? We did this in our Mock Jury and somebody said, "Walking in the woods." Walking in the woods, tell me why walking in the woods is so important to you? Why do you value that so much? "Well, because it just brings me peace."

Then we go back and we say, "Okay, here's the bad news. These things that you guys have all shared with me are the very things that, should you become a juror in this case, you're going to have to put a price tag on. These things that done come with a price tag but have value, you are going to have to put a price tag on these things and that is hard." When I say that, everybody comes out of the woodwork and says, "Don't tell them it's hard, Sari!" You know what? It is hard! So I'm going to tell them it's hard because it is. It's the hardest thing that you have to do in your case when you value it, it's the hardest thing they're going to have to do as jurors. Then I turn to the jury, or the attorney turns to the jury and says, "Who here is willing to try?"

Now I was sharing this with an attorney team once and I said, "Now, people are going to raise their hands and some people are not." Although I will find, in many juries, when you've done this right, everybody raises their hand. I mean everybody. It happened over and over again, when in the Trial Lab this last time. I asked this attorney team, "Who do you think you should call, people who raised their hands or people who didn't raise their hands?" One of the attorneys, who is now in the Crew, I think I totally bullied him into it, but said..

"The people who didn't raise their hands." I'm like, "No! We don't talk to the people who didn't raise their hands. You've had this beautiful conference, you're asking whose willing to do this very hard thing. People who raise their hands to say I'm willing and you're like fuck all y'all, why aren't you raising your hand?"

When I said it, it was funny and he totally got it. But you're saying this is this noble, important thing, so yeah I know there's people who don't want to do it, in your brain.

But what you're communicating to the jury is, "I want to honor those of you who are willing to do this thing," because that shows that you view that as important.

When you are putting together a team for sportsing you're not like, "Let me cut all these people," then you look at all the other people and you're like, "Okay, I guess that's the team." You don't do that. At least, I don't think you do. They have all these TV programs of, "First pick, then over here, first pick, then this is our second pick." They're not like, "Okay, first loser, you're gone! Next loser, we don't want you!" They don't do that. They're like team first and then we deal with people who don't want to be here. That's a huge part of the H2H method, in terms of contrast, whose willing before whose not willing.

Number three. This is the opening now.

What should have happened comes before what did happen. I have tons of podcasts on this so I'm not going to talk about this in detail. But here at H2H, we always start with our teaching section before we tell the jury what happened. Because we say, "Here's what should have happened, here's the right way to do it. Here's what the doctors should do in these scenarios. Here's how property owners should handle snow and nice. Here's how cars should handle being on the road."

Let me tell you what happened here. There's that contrast again.

Again, you've heard me say, jurors cannot properly judge conduct without context. They need to know what's supposed to happen before you show them what did happen.

Again, when you do it in that way, go back and listen to my podcast on the Shit Happens Defense, this show it could have been avoided because you're showing the jury, "Look, here's this way to avoid it." You've probably even done some voir dire stuff so the jury's already told you it can be avoided. You're going, "Look, you guys were so right, here's how you avoid this. Now let me tell you what they did." The juries are, "What the fuck?" Always what should have happened before what did happen. That's a huge place of contrast.

In closing, there's other places, but I'm only going to talk about these four. We always tell, not always because there's never an always in H2H, but in most cases we tell two stories. Two future stories. We tell the jury what is going to happen if they bring back a verdict in favor of our client, and we play that out. This is from Nick Rowley. He's like, "Here is what it looks like, jury, when you bring back a verdict. Here's how it changes this person's life, here's how it changes the world," if we can get that in. Not in those words, but you know what I mean. Then we also show them the story about a jury that chose not to help and how this person had more health problems, and how they couldn't come back and ask for more money, and how the wife had to quit her job.

It's imaginary, both of them, and we say that ahead of time, but we're clearly showing the consequences of both of their choices. Again, the contrast.

Kevin was out of town this week and he's at the beach house doing some repairs, and he brought the Peloton there because I asked him to even though we brought it from there to here. Of course, he didn't says, "Why did we do that?" He just was like, "Sure. You want the Peloton there? Great." Because that's his love language. He was gone so obviously, our child was not going to be fed. But at one point, she was roaming around and looking for crumbs on the ground and I was like, "Okay, I guess I should probably fry her an egg," because I could do that. It turns out, I can't do that. I give her the egg and it's over hard, so there's nothing runny and she's like, "It's runny, I'm not eating it." I'm like, "You are eating it and I'm not making another one." She's like, "It's not how Issy makes it." I'm like, "I know, nothing I do is how Issy makes it but you're eating the egg." She's like, "I'm not eating the egg."

Then I said, "Okay, you don't have to. But if you do not eat the egg, then no other food is coming." Which probably no other food was coming anyway, but she didn't know that. I said I was going to order pizza, because obviously I'm not going to cook and, "If you eat this egg, then we can get pizza. But if you don't, this is it for food today." Because she's been having some stuff with food if it's not perfect, even with Issy, Dad, she's not going to eat it. I'm like, "What's your choice?" She's like, "Can I think for a minute?" Then she was like, "Well, how much do I have to eat?" Then she ate most of the egg. But I clearly outlined the consequences so she knew what they were, and now you can all judge me for being a terrible mother.

But the point is is the contrast is clarifying. It isn't messy. When you have contrast, it strengthens your argument. There's black and there's white, that's why the DVAQ, the Devil's Advocate. Don't do it in your regular voice, it has to be a contrast. There's another place, it has to be a contrast between your regular voice and your, "Yeah, but can you just say you're sorry" voice. It has to be different.

Now before I let you go, because I know this is getting long, two caveats. Be careful. Be careful.

In one of the cases that I was helping with recently, it was a nursing home case and the attorney kept telling me all of these things that the nursing home was doing right. I stopped her and I'm like, "Why are you sharing with me all these things that the nursing home was doing right?" She's like, "Because I want to contrast that with then, once the staff cuts came, that then they did things wrong." I said, "Don't do that." Because again, primacy, recency. Don't inadvertently try to create a contrast.

The contrast really is between what happened in this case which I'm not going to say because it's active, that should never happen. Even when they were doing "some of the right things," obviously they didn't do all the right things because this thing happened, which should never happen. That in itself is contrast enough. Because you guys go first, when you start saying things about all the things that they did right, you prime the juror for going, "Oh, they're a good company, they did all these things right," and it's hard to walk back from that.

Second caveat. Don't make what you're having in your what should happen section, don't create a perfect defendant.

Here's what a perfect doctor would do, and then it's all complicated, because jurors will be like, "Well nobody's perfect, you can't hold them to that high standard." It has to be something that's such a duh, that's simple. "Duh, of course you do these things," these very simple things before you do the other thing, "and then here's what happened here."

I hope this helps when you're playing with the H2H method, or even if you're not in the H2H method and you haven't played with it a lot, this idea of contrast. It really, really does sharpen everything for the jury and it really does create camps instead of it being all muddy. Yes, Kevin, in trial we don't want gray, we do want black and white, so that's what contrast really allows you to do. Create it, make it. Bad before good, whose willing before whose not willing, what should have happened before what did happen, and the two stories of a jury that helped and that didn't help. All right, talk to you next week.

Have you ever wished that you knew what the jury was thinking? Well, grab a pen and paper because I'm about to give you instant access to a free training I created for plaintiff trial attorneys called Three Powerful Strategies to Help You Read a Juror's Mind. It's going to help you to understand what the jury is thinking, so you'll feel confident to trust them and yourself in the courtroom.

Ready for the address? Go to sariswears.com/jury. Enjoy.