Description

Legal decision-makers construct their own version of the case story when they judge a case. In fact, they re-author their own version several times before arriving at the one they use to decide the case. These individual stories influence the verdict as much as the decision-maker’s backgrounds and beliefs, or the attorney’s presentation in court. This groundbreaking book offers straightforward steps for trial professionals. Learn to identify and use these stories in order to refine the most compelling presentation for your listeners to judge.

This book teaches you:

• How and why legal decision-makers construct their own case stories and use them to decide a case.
• The importance of crafting and communicating a case to decision-makers as a story, and why it can be the most direct and influential way to address decision-makers.
• Which focus groups best reveal the range of story versions which listeners can build from your case.
• How to run voir dire like focus groups and focus groups like voir dire.
• Why you should never ask focus group members which side in a case they like.
• Why you should think twice before ever again asking a "why" question in voir dire or focus groups.
• How to take full advantage of the only four channels available to deliver any legal case.

Success Stories

Building a story that works for your jurors to transform a nuisance value offer into a $4.6 million verdict is a great feeling. When it is the third of six consecutive cases where the anchors, exhibits, and themes crafted with the tools Eric Oliver shares in Facts Can’t Speak for Themselves produce verdicts more than double, ten, and twenty times the best offers, in "tough venues", it almost seems unfair.

Understanding what frame to begin your story with, what witness order helps focus the frame, and what verbal/non-verbal anchors bring your story the strongest emphasis can dramatically increase your odds of winning the most difficult cases.

The clearest example of the immediately applicable lessons from Eric’s latest book was with what we all feared was an unwinnable case. Like many cases, the facts started out with a straightforward story. Our client was tossed out of the hospital with a serious spinal infection due to a workers’ compensation insurer’s clear bad faith denial of benefits for his back injury. Although he recovered from the infection with donated medicines, he was hounded by bill collectors and worried about the impact on him and his family of the wrongful denial for the eighteen months before the state agency ordered the insurer to pay. Right before trial we learned that the insurer would be able to call him a liar about what they thought was the only important fact: he hadn’t disclosed a prior back injury in his deposition, discovery responses, and sworn testimony before the state agency. With Eric’s help, we found that it was "all about the medicine, not the man". Insurers are supposed to decide medical payment decisions based on medical experts, not what the injured worker says good or bad. The jury understood that story, rejecting the "liar liar liar" defense for the smokescreen that it was, punishing the insurer with over half a million in additional damages for "knowingly" denying the claim.

When a boat crewman banged his head on a beam put too low in the work area, the defense though it was all about an "open and obvious" condition. When the jury assessed more than $2.2 million in actual damages for the persistent migraines from an aggravated cervical disk for the "bang on the head", it became clear that the story was really about an employer again and again deciding not to fix a readily apparent hazard to their workers. Eric’s insights pointed to the verbal and non-verbal anchors to bring the story home, and just as important, the anchors to avoid.

When another insurance claims company described their claims investigation as a "model", the story our jurors grasped first, last, and best was the search for an excuse to refuse to pay a legitimate claim. Not only did they also understand the more than two million dollars in real impacts on the injured worker delayed timely treatment, they also felt the need to assess more than $2.0 million more in additional, non-compensatory damages. Eric’s tools for re-focusing the story from one man wronged one time into a continuing abuse of the system by the defendant made all the difference.

When the helicopter company thought they had gotten rid of all their bad facts by stipulating to liability for a crash that all the passengers survived after several hours in the water offshore, Eric helped pinpoint the facts and underlying story that put the defendant back in the spotlight. The defendant thought it was going to be all about
"jackpot justice" and a "mountain out of a molehill" for a plaintiff who was barely started in offshore work before the crash and had even been released for work by his own doctor more than almost two years before trial. The final verdict of $2.1 million was almost three times the "best ever" pretrial offer, and many times more than any other passenger had settled for their case.

When the offshore supply boat company saw a minor fistfight with a crewman that the boat captain brought on himself, the jury in a small rural county saw the need to assess more than $1.5 million in actual damages, a county record, for the captain’s post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the beating. Why the story was about the employer ignoring problem crewmen, with lasting consequences, rather than a quick exam before heading back to work offshore after "no big deal" speaks to the powerful images that Eric’s book can help trial lawyers plan before they ever walk into the courtroom.

Reviews

1. After thirty-three years in the courtroom and a few hundred jury trials, what’s new and worth studying? The short answer is Eric Oliver’s book Facts Can’t Speak for Themselves. Read this book, and new explanations for your old losses creep into view. Taking advantage of Erik’s insights requires thoughtful reading and some reflective quiet time. It’s nice to be a fifty-seven-year-old-freshman, newer and better…
   —William Barton, author of Recovering for Psychological Injuries

2. Eric Oliver reminds us that the side with the best story wins the case, and carries it one step further: it takes twelve stories to win. The trial lawyer is not presenting the case to an audience of twelve, but rather to twelve audiences.
   —Jim M. Perdue, Perdue and Kidd, LLP, Houston, Texas

3. This book contains powerful tools that will profoundly enhance a lawyer’s most important skills: talking, and really listening, to juries. This may be the most important book a lawyer will ever read.
   —Keith Hebiesen, Clifford Law Offices, Chicago, IL