Persuasion

I grew up with a lot of anger. Of course, anger is rooted in fear. When I did not feel anger, I often felt a lot of tension. It took decades for me to come to sufficient grips with the bigotry that so many people directed...

When I started practicing at my first law firm in 1989, I received a gift of two high-priced framed antique magazine caricatures of dead white British lawyers wearing powdered horse hair wigs. They have remained in their original box ever since. Gone must be the days...

Recently — I think in one of Ram Dass’s two recent books — I was re-reminded how important it is not to take others’ seeming trespasses personally. For instance, if person A is yelling at person B, that may be more of a manifestation of...

As I became ten years old and beyond, I noticed more often the premium that was paid for children to act more mature as they got older. Why? To have a disconnect with the power of our children within? To become easily tamed humanoids, so...

Somehow my September 15, 2008, blog entry about our law firm’s symbol became elusive online, so I reprint it here: At the Trial Lawyers College, the inevitable day comes when everyone is handed a paintbrush, and is told to tell an important personal story through painting,...

I love my work. I serve my clients and justice, I practice the art of persuasion, and I stand up against injustice. Plenty of my work, also, involves solitary moments preparing, thinking, researching, and writing. I wake for exercise and then work when most people are sleeping, and...

In what looks like a promotional interview, masterful trial lawyer and persuader Gerry Spence — pictured here with me near the end of the 1995 Trial Lawyers College, when my grey hairs were few — underlines that caring for one’s client is an essential element...

Do jurors — and judges when sitting as factfinders — want to be talked at monotonously like all the adults in Peanuts? Do they want to be whined to like George Zimmerman’s prosecutor did in closing argument? Or, do jurors and judges as factfinders want...

Will Rogers would have been a great trial lawyer. He never met a person he did not like, and had a very optimistic disposition. By contrast, when I entered law school, I saw a significant chunk of the world’s population as ready in a heartbeat...

Recently, I have had to re-examine my stereotyping of prosecutors, judges and police, with the following events: A week ago, a Fairfax prosecutor with whom I get along with fine — we are able to disagree agreeably, at that — invited me to be his...