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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, it’s Scott Benton here. I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom Podcast. How are you? We are a podcast dedicated to law students and recent law school graduates. Those who are taking the bar, those who have passed the bar, even didn’t pass the bar and are trying to figure out how to practice as an Attorney.
A subject that is not taught in school, but it is luckily taught here on this podcast and what we’re here to talk about.
Scott Benton: Now, today’s question that we’re going to address is How Do You Provide Clarity On A Case That Isn’t Clear?
Now, sometimes you get a case and it’s convoluted. You’re not sure really what all the components are of the case. You’re not really sure how to explain it to somebody, there’s a lot of pieces over here, over there. There are new pieces coming in, it [00:01:00] can often be very convoluted and so convoluted that your client can’t really even explain the story too well.
A lot of times clients are wrapped up in the pressures that they’re under with the case that they’ve hired you for. A lot of times they’re in that emotional mind space because there’s family or friends or people that they care about or that we’re supposed to care about them.
In this case, that has gone afoul and so people are oftentimes they’re upset. This is why they hire an attorney, they hire an Attorney for their expertise and also because you are detached.
You’re not in that same sort of emotional brain space that they’re in and you can think more clearly as you may or may not know when you’re feeling like all of this emotion, it’s really difficult to provide clarity for yourself or to others because those emotions can really influence your ability to think clearly and a lot of times cases or sometimes cases I should say will come to you with [00:02:00] that ambiguity or they’ll be less than clear and it’s your job to figure out that clarity for your client.
And the reason is because if you’re not clear on a case, if you can’t articulate it well, then you’re going to lose confidence in the case, or at least that’s going to show in your behavior and your demeanor and your words and your voice.
And if you lose that sense of confidence in the case, then chances are that’s going to erode in the confidence that the client who’s hired you has in you as their attorney, and they’re not going to feel quite as good about having you in their corner and paying for your legal services as time goes on.
If they see your confidence waning, they are likely to just stop paying you, which is called quiet firing. They’ll quietly fire you, they’ll quietly go away, they’ll quietly stop paying for your legal services, and they won’t replenish their trust account with you.
So it’s [00:03:00] important that when you have a case and you recognize that you’re struggling with the clarity of that case, that you need to find a way to provide that clarity for yourself because that’s going to boost your confidence. That’s going to boost the confidence of the client who has hired you. It’s just going to be a necessary component to moving this case forward.
But first, you’re going to have to figure out a way to wrap your mind around this case. So that’s what we’re going to talk about in this podcast episode.
Now we have on other episodes, frequently talked about Attorney notes and Attorney notes are simply they’re going to come up all the time. They’re going to come up in this podcast in just a second and in future podcasts. And we’ve probably talked about them in a handful of others already, but Attorney notes are what you use for each and every case you get, and it’s a document that you open up that is specific to that case. And it’s where you dump everything in your head onto the notes in order to get it out of your mind, so you can free up your own mind for clear [00:04:00] thinking, which you’re going to need.
But also because when you see all that information on a page and as a new information comes in and you date and timestamp those new entries in your attorney notes, it allows you to see the big picture. It allows you to see what all the puzzle pieces are and really kind of how they fit together.
But there’s another component that you’re really going to have to work on, and that is you need to, if you don’t already have this skill, and even if you have the skill, you need to learn all about storytelling. You need to learn how to tell a compelling story.
So you need to make sure that you’re spending some time in this space learning what all of those kind of elements are about story. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to become a novelist or a screenwriter or anything like that. You’re not going to become a professional writer, but there are a lot of ways for you to learn [00:05:00] about storytelling.
There are simply books about storytelling, there’s tons of those that you can pick up the art of storytelling. That’s not a specific title, but just that’s kind of a category and you can read those.
Those are going to give you all of the sort of beats of what’s in a story, and it’s going to give you a lot of tools that you can use in just your natural storytelling abilities, so you want to be able to develop those a little bit. Reading novels obviously helps, but really kind of getting a little more under the hood when it comes to storytelling and learning what all those components are.
So, for instance, a lot of times in storytelling, there are archetypes, there are characters, certain types of characters, and you want to learn about all of the archetypes. A lot of times in storytelling, you’re borrowing those archetypes to kind of plug those into the narrative of the case that you’re working on, which helps to clarify the different personalities and clarify the different people.
And you might even use the names of some of these archetypes, which like, [00:06:00] you know, I mean, this is between you and your client generally, or maybe other Attorneys in your firm or paralegals or whatever, but it’s like the evil stepmother or the kindly grandmother or the geographically you know, not available brother and sister or the forgetful dad or something.
These are types of characters that you’re going to employ in your storytelling as you’re learning how to become a better storyteller so that when you’re putting your attorney notes together and you see all of those disparate pieces that are laying about and it’s like a puzzle and you’re going to pick up the pieces and move them around and figure out how they fit best together. You ultimately to provide clarity in the narrative of your case, you want to develop a strong sense of storytelling.
Now, when you can go back to your client, after you’ve looked at all of these disparate pieces and written out your attorney notes, you are going to be able to tell that story [00:07:00] to your client. And it’s gonna be a version of their case that they probably have never heard before. Again, remember, they’re under a lot of pressure, they’re under a lot of stress. They’re not really thinking about crafting that narrative. Okay?
And so you’re going to come back to them and you’re going to have that story all laid out for them and you’re going to have, they often say in story, you want to tell a story as if you’re speaking to a five year old kid, you want to make it really clean and really clear.
And you want to provide that sense of clarity in the narrative of this case to your client as well, such that they can then turn around and go tell their trusted family members or friends or whoever, they can tell the story that you told them immediately and have their own clarity.
Now watch what happens when you have that narrative, when you have that story piece all formed and all put together tightly. Watch what happens to your own confidence, your ability to narrate the story, your ability to provide that overview of the case, and to provide it clearly so it’s understandable is [00:08:00] going to be reflected in everything from your body language to your voice to the word choice that you use.
It’s going to be in everything that you do, your emails, your phone calls, your text, whatever. That confidence is going to be reflected because you have now provided clarity in a case that previously had no clarity. Because you sat down and you put together that narrative because you have storytelling skills, because you spent some time reading books about storytelling, you know, maybe you took a class on short stories.
There are all kinds of online seminars, there are YouTube videos about storytelling that you want to get in touch with, screenwriting is always great, because screenwriting is like, take a novel, it’s a sort of poetry version of a novel, it’s very clipped and it’s very sort of like in screenwriting.
They talk about everything that you can take out of the story and still make the story as clean and clear as possible. And that’s what they’re doing in movies all the time. But you also want to make sure that you’re not getting too overly [00:09:00] dramatic. In other words, you don’t want the emotion that storytelling is a very powerful medium, which you’ll get in touch with the more that you study.
And I’m sure you probably already know, just with your experience of watching movies, reading books, seeing plays, you know, whatever theatrical narrative that you have watched or paid attention to, you’re probably very aware of the emotional impact that storytelling can provide. And you want to be careful because this is a narrative like, where you’re using all of those emotional punches and those beats and because the storytelling wants to be more invisible.
You want to use that as a framework in your in the work that you’re doing on these cases in order to articulate and explain the nature of the case without letting the emotion of storytelling or the structure of storytelling overwhelm the effectiveness of the narrative that you’re building for that case. So you do want to be sort of aware of that.
Now, in certain cases, it’s okay to use [00:10:00] all of that heightened emotion because it’s not really going to matter, but it is when you get into a hearing or you’re going to do a trial or something. You want to be very careful about modulating those elements. There will be as you learn storytelling, there will be a tendency as you get good at it to want to use all of those elements, but you’re going to need to pull yourself back because you’re telling an effective story, not just an emotional story, or a melodramatic story, or a story for effect.
Because that can seem ridiculous if it starts to become very apparent that this is, that you’re very good at storytelling. You kind of don’t want to let anyone know you’re good at storytelling, you just want to tell an effective story and just kind of let it roll off naturally as if you did no preparation, even though you’ve maybe studied story aggressively and you’ve spent a lot of time crafting this particular narrative for that particular case.
So, but do be careful about that story can from time to time backfire on you and just you just want to have that in your mind, that’s one of the possibilities.
Another thing you can do when it comes to even public speaking, something if you haven’t considered, [00:11:00] and storytelling and just use of words learning what are good words to use and bad words to use.
Typically, you don’t want to use big, bloated $20 words. You want to use simple words, if you have the opportunity to use big, complicated words and simple words, always choose the simple word choice because that’s what people understand and that’s what ultimately tells a more compelling story, simplify that story.
So, a lot of times in writing, is all about rewriting and it’s just going back, and that rewriting process, it’s not about adding more. I mean, sometimes it is, but mostly you’re rewriting by clarifying. So you’re reducing and reducing.
So that becomes a very important component. You want to learn storytelling in Toastmasters if you go to Toastmasters, you’ll learn public speaking. Toastmasters has been around for since 1924. That’s been around a long time, one of their advanced classes actually happens to be a five speech module on storytelling.
So you can do that in Toastmasters if you decide to go that direction, otherwise do yourself a favor and spend a little time [00:12:00] learning story, whether that’s even writing short stories yourself for practice or taking classes or really kind of reading some of the books and learning what some of those components are that’s going to go quite a long ways for you to provide that clarity where a case is lacking clarity or it needs clarity.
You need to pull it together in a narrative that’s going to inspire your client. They’re going to continue to pay you, they’re going to continue to replenish their trust accounts, they’re going to see this case all the way through, and they’re not just going to kind of quiet fire you and suddenly disappear and you don’t know where they are.
And that only leaves you one opportunity to try and track them down. If they answer the phone, they probably won’t. They see you’re calling, and they’re just not going to answer. And even if you get them on the phone, you need to figure out a way to bring them back in and replenish their trust account, which is a pretty tough thing to do if they’ve already lost confidence in you.
So remember, you want to build your ability with storytelling. You want to provide that clarity in cases where clarity is really lacking. You can do that through story craft. So that’s something that you want to take care of in terms of looking at and figuring out what the best way in for you [00:13:00] is to learn this particular discipline and make sure that you have a strong sense of story.
So I hope this is helpful, I hope this is good information for you as you begin your legal career or about to begin your legal career. This information is going to help you transition from the classroom to the courtroom.
Why we named the podcast that we are supplying all of the information that’s not taught in law school so that you can immediately go into your first job as an Attorney and practice as an Attorney without people really teaching you how to do that or at least you’re going to have a much better context.
They’re not going to have to spend too much time with you teaching you the business of law. You’ve come from law school, which is the study of law, but it really is not the business of law.
That’s another piece that you must know, you must know storytelling and many other things, which I’m sure you’re going to become aware of.
So if this is valuable information for you and you’d like to receive an alert every time we put out a new episode, you can go to our website. Our website is Classroom2Courtroom.com, that’s classroom the number 2 courtroom dot com.
You can put in [00:14:00] your contact information and when we publish a new episode, you’ll get an alert and a link that will take you to that new episode that you can hopefully be inspired by and hopefully this is helpful and hopefully this will allow you to make that transition from student to legal professional as easily as possible and you’re gonna realize that the practice of law is actually quite a lot of fun when it’s done this way.
So, if you are enjoying this ep this episode and this material, don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe. We hope you’ll join us on our next episode of the Classroom 2 Courtroom Podcast.
Until then, we hope that you’ll join us in making the world a better place. One client at a time. Thank you so much and take care.
Bye now.
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