Persuasion

If the prosecutor comes to court with a smirking attitude, the defense lawyer does not need to do anything to wipe the smirk off the prosecutor's face other than doing the criminal defense lawyer's job, keeping his eyes on the prize.

Achieving and maintaining equanimity is critical in the courtroom battlefield and all battlefields. The challenges to powerful equanimity abound. When we recognize and remember that sh*t coming from others is coming from their own roller coaster and suffering

Once the persuader fully immerses himself or herself into the circle of the story, and fully engages others from that circle, they will be more likely to want to join the persuader in that persuasive circle.

In the taijiquan martial art that I practice, we have the concepts of sparring inside a circle, disrupting the opponent's circle, and preventing the opponent from disrupting our own circle. Similarly, it is ideal for me to speak and negotiate with prosecutors in a proverbial...

"The duty of the prosecutor is to seek justice, not merely to convict." American Bar Association's standards for prosecutors, Standard 3-1.2(c). Some prosecutors apply that principle so well that when they later switch to private law practice, their criminal defense lawyer colleagues welcome them into the...

Yes, the world is filled with too many people too often acting like heartlessly dangerous people. Part of my job is to defuse, shrink, disintegrate, disinfect, and deflect the unseemly and dangerous actions of others, and to extract the gold that can even be found...

In the abstract, much in the law world is unexciting, mind-numbing and sometimes maddening, but when practiced on the side of the angels and for people in true need, is exciting.

Stagefright interferes tremendously with performers, persuaders and salespeople from benefiting from the gift of an audience. A live audience provides the actor with instant feedback that is not available to a musician in a studio, a politician in front of a camera in his or...

Nobody ever said that trial lawyering would be an easy profession. As I have said time and time again, this work is filled with proverbial projectile vomiting, projectile diarrhea, underhandedness by too many prosecutors and police, unfairness by too many judges, and shoveling sh*t.