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The opening statement is, in most trials, the most important part of the case. Here, biases are formed and overcome, attention levels will be at their highest, and up to 80% of jurors will make up their minds about who will win. Over three decades, A2L Consulting has supported the development of thousands of opening statements. It's where our trial-lawyer clients and we invest the most time and energy. Our work has typically included: the creation of persuasive PowerPoint presentations to accompany well-developed opening statements to; practicing and refining an opening statement 100+ times until it is perfectly delivered; testing versions of opening statements in a mock trial setting to help best plan the trial strategy. Our team is made up of trial lawyers, psychologists, litigation graphics artists, and hot-seaters. We see many of the world's best trial lawyers practice their craft on a regular basis. As I have always said and written about, Great Trial Lawyers Behave Differently. I often write about how their preparation is altogether different from an average litigator. When I do write about this topic, my goal is to cross-pollinate great techniques and ideas. This article is no different. I want to share some of what A2L has learned along the way both by watching great trial lawyers prepare for trial and by helping them do so. These best practices expressed in these top 10 articles/books/webinars about opening statements are unique. I hope you can put this information to use as you prepare for your next trial. How to Structure Your Next Speech, Opening Statement or Presentation 6 Reasons The Opening Statement is The Most Important Part of a Case 5 Things TED Talks Can Teach Us About Opening Statements

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Our team has planned and conducted more than 500 mock trials over the past thirty years. In that time, we have noticed striking similarities in the way jurors behave. We have noticed that a trial team can radically increase the amount of valuable information they mine from a mock trial just by following a few best practices. We have seen over and over that a well-executed mock trial is the most valuable form of pre-trial preparation a trial team can do. In these ten articles listed below (our top ten all-time articles on the subject), we reveal many of A2L's best practices and insider observations. Whether you are planning a mock trial or just preparing for trial, the lessons from these articles are valuable and actionable. A mock trial is designed to mimic many aspects of an upcoming trial. The overall goal is to learn what motivates jurors, especially those similar to the likely jury, to view our side of the case in the best possible light. Many people mistakenly believe that a mock trial is designed to simulate an upcoming trial in order to predict the outcome. While there is certainly a predictive element, one cannot reliably simulate a two-month or even a two-week trial in two days. Instead, the highest value takeaways from a mock trial come from watching jurors deliberate, looking at the data behind the their decision making revealed by polling, preparing one's trial presentation earlier than one might naturally do so, getting into the mind of opposing counsel by arguing their case, and just getting some excellent practice in the run-up to trial. In a typical mock trial, 100 or more jurors may be recruited. Often a voir dire-like exercise is built into the mock and 36-48 jurors may be selected and broken into three or four juries who will deliberate separately. When a mock trial is deemed premature or the costs of conducting one do not match the dollars at stake in a case, we are often asked to conduct a smaller-scale exercise called a focus group (see How Early-Stage Focus Groups Can Help Your Trial Preparation) where a fewer jurors are used, and the format is more dialog oriented. I hope you enjoy these articles. Taken together, they offer an excellent primer on how and why to conduct a mock trial for the best possible result. 10 Things Every Mock Jury Ever Has Said 12 Astute Tips for Meaningful Mock Trials

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At A2L, we publish so many articles valuable to trial lawyers and litigation professionals that we like to share our very best periodically. Below are the top three articles (based on readership) published in the second quarter of 2019. Each has links that allow you to easily share the article on Twitter or LinkedIn. Top 3 A2L Litigation Articles Published in Q2 2019 1. 5 Valuable Lessons From Some Horrible Infographics 2. 10 Timely Tips For Trial Preparation 3. A Useful Directory of Federal Courtroom Technology

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Working at A2L, I have the distinct pleasure of watching many of the world's best trial lawyers prepare for trial. Most start months or years in advance. Those lawyers engage A2L early to do theme testing with a focus group or to organize and run a mock trial. Each of these events requires the creation of litigation graphics and usually assistance in developing an opening statement. Having watched so many great trial lawyers prepare for 25 years, I have been able to observe patterns in how they prepare. Below I share ten chronologically ordered tips (plus accompanying resources) based on these observations. If you're less than one year from trial, I hope these tips are still helpful, and I hope you will get in touch with me. More than one year from trial: There is no better time to do theme testing then when discovery is still open. Read more in How Early-Stage Focus Groups Can Help Your Trial Preparation and as you start this journey, always remember that Great Trial Lawyers Behave Differently. One year before trial: Plan your first of two mock trials. There are dozens of good reasons to conduct a mock trial, but forcing yourself to prepare early may be the very best one. Read my one-year trial planning guide and read A2L's Opening Statement Toolkit. Also, it is a good time to read A2L's Jury Consulting and Mock Trial Handbook. Nine months before trial: Begin or continue development of your litigation graphics. If you conducted a mock trial, you already have a good start. Read How Long Before Trial Should I Begin Preparing My Trial Graphics?, 10 Reasons The Litigation Graphics You DO NOT Use Are Important and The 13 Biggest Reasons to Avoid Last-Minute Trial Preparation. Six months before trial: Refine your opening statement story and the visuals that will support it. Make sure your experts have their visuals being worked on by your litigation graphics team - not the in-house people at the expert's firm. Watch Persuasive Storytelling for Trial Lawyers and read Storytelling for Litigators. To help develop your experts, have them read this three-part series on How to Be a Great Expert Witness. Three months before trial: Conduct opening statement practice sessions with your trial team, litigation consultants, and your client. Read The First Version of Your Story Is NOT Your Best, 3 Ways to Force Yourself to Practice Your Trial Presentation, and Practice, Say Jury Consultants, is Why Movie Lawyers Perform So Well.

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Introducing Alan Rudlin

Alan Rudlin is a retired litigation partner from Hunton & Williams [now Hunton Andrews Kurth] in Richmond, Va., and a senior litigation consultant at A2L who has worked with us for about two years. Here is a brief Q and A to introduce Alan to the readers of this blog. Q. What brought you to the world of trial litigation? A. I graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law and spent a couple of years working in Washington, D.C., for a Joint Presidential-Congressional committee in the Watergate era. Then I decided to move back to Richmond, where I grew up, and to undertake a career in civil litigation. Q. What kinds of cases did you try? A. I worked on a wide variety of cases around the nation, including mass torts, First Amendment cases, environmental cases, and business disputes of all sorts. I tried dozens of cases to juries. Q. How did you become interested in trial techniques and the science of persuasion? A. Many years ago, I had a case where we and our client didn’t know if it made sense for our client to apologize for something. We put together a panel of ordinary people and used two-way mirrors to communicate with them. The answer they gave, by the way, was: Don’t apologize. Anyway, at that time I became fascinated with the art and science of jury studies, and used them when it made sense. Just as valuable I found was to seek the post-trial opportunity to learn whatever I could from jury interviews. Q. What is the most important benefit of those interviews? A. It’s very simple. If you won a case, but you don’t know why you won it, you don’t know very much. It’s like what doctors do. When something goes wrong in a surgery, they do a post-surgery review to figure out what went wrong and to do better in the future. Q. What kinds of questions do you like to ask jurors after a trial? A. I would have a detailed set of questions, and my favorite was to ask: Was there a point during the trial that was crucial for your understanding of the facts, when something clicked for you? Another good question is: What was your perception of the lawyers, the witnesses and the litigation graphics? Q. What is your opinion of jurors and their conclusions in a trial? A. I learned that one can trust jurors in complex cases. They may not express their opinions and conclusions in a way that a lawyer might, but they have a great deal of practical wisdom, and learning how to tune in to their ways of reasoning about what was fair or right is a critical skill. Alan Rudlin can be reached at rudlin@A2LC.com. Other free articles about senior A2L leaders, litigation consulting, and jury consulting work include: Litigation Consulting News: Introducing John Moustakas Law360 Interviews A2L Consulting's Founder/CEO Ken Lopez 9 Reasons Litigation Consultant is the Best Job Title in Litigation Who Is, and Who Isn’t, a Litigation Consultant? Free PDF: Why Work with A2L on Your Next Trial 3 Types of Litigation Graphics Consultants Top trial lawyers talk about working with A2L Top trial lawyers explain why storytelling is so critical for persuasion 10 Things Litigation Consultants Do That WOW Litigators Free E-Book: What is the Value of a Litigation Consultant? 21 Reasons a Litigator Is Your Best Litigation Graphics Consultant 3 Types of Litigation Graphics Consultants Free Webinar: Storytelling as a Persuasion Tool Free E-Book: Storytelling for Litigators Your Coach Is Not Better Than You – in the Courtroom or Elsewhere 10 Types of Value Added by Litigation Graphics Consultants Explaining the Value of Litigation Consulting to In-House Counsel 17 Reasons Why Litigation Consultants Are Better at Graphics Than Law Firms $300 Million of Litigation Consulting and Storytelling Validation Top 7 Things I've Observed as a Litigation Consultant 6 Secrets of the Jury Consulting Business You Should Know Who Are The Highest-Rated Jury Consultants?

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At A2L, we publish so many articles about litigation and trial preparation that I like to share the best of the best periodically.

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Please join me in wishing all the authors of A2L's Litigation Consulting Report blog a Happy 8 Year Blogging Anniversary!

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No matter where you stand on the border wall dispute that has captivated the nation, you have to admit that it is an important debate. After all, $5 billion is a lot of money and who knows if the wall will really make a difference. But allowing between 200,000 and 2,000,000 people to easily enter the United States every year via the border with Mexico is probably not a good thing either. You probably just automatically identified yourself with one of those two previous sentences and took it as your position, right? The other sentence may have even made you angry or at least started you thinking about counter-arguments. In other words, like most political discussions, minds are rarely changed by more facts. It's kind of like a jury trial, right? You hear one side. You attach to it emotionally and then proceed to ignore evidence that is contrary to your new belief. In jury consulting-speak, this phenomenon is called confirmation bias. As a jury consulting firm, we've written about confirmation bias many times. See, for example: I’m Right, Right? 5 Ways to Manage Juror Bias Jurors Will Believe Anything (That They Already Believe) When Smart Ain’t So Smart - Cognitive Bias, Experts and Jurors Font Matters - A Trial Graphics Consultant's Trick to Overcome Bias Could Surprise Be One of Your Best Visual Persuasion Tools? 7 Ways to Overcome Cognitive Bias and Persuade However, A2L is not just a jury consulting firm. We’re also a top-ranked litigation graphics firm (and litigation consulting and trial technology consulting firm). So I'm always baffled by big disputes where the participants fail to use pictures effectively. In this day and age, there is no excuse. The science of visual persuasion is well established. See, What is Visual Persuasion and What Do You Need to Know About It?

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It's my eighth year writing an end-of-year top-10 style article. That feels pretty great because in that time, we have published more than 600 articles and A2L's Litigation Consulting Report blog has been visited one million times. Wow, right?

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There are so many legal industry "best of" surveys that I have a hard time keeping track of them. Just about every month in one of them A2L is voted the top firm in either jury consulting, litigation graphics consulting, litigation consulting, or for our trial tech/hot seat services. I am grateful for our clients and blog readers who take the time to help and vote for us. It is a very big deal for me to see the company I helped build these past 24 years be recognized. While I know our people are the best at what they do, it is still it's nice to hear other people say it too. In a sea of surveys, one rises above the rest — The annual Best of the National Law Journal. A2L has been named #1 in this NLJ survey before. Today, I'm asking a favor of our readers. Would you help us be voted #1 in the nation again? It takes 2 minutes to help us be (publicly) recognized as the nation's top litigation consulting firm. We are nominated in four categories. Here's how you vote: Go to https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/BestofNLJ2019 before November 1, 2018 Answer at least questions 11, 55, 58 & 59 Click through the next buttons until you click DONE.

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At A2L, we are either conducting or actively planning a mock trial 365 days a year. As you probably know, mock trials are a tool that is very often used by serious trial teams involved in large trials to help uncover the ideal strategy to win a case. In a typical mock trial that we conduct, over 40 jurors will be recruited in the trial venue through a rigorous screening process. We even incorporate expected voir dire questions into the process. Based on individual verdicts and backgrounds, mock jurors are carefully evaluated to create three or four panels of 10 to 12 mock jurors. “Clopenings,” combined argumentative opening/closing statements, are presented for both sides of the case, litigation graphics are used to support these statements, and videotaped witness testimony may be included as part of the presentation. Typically, real-time data collection methods using an Audience Response System (“ARS”) will be used, similar to the approve vs. disapprove line graphs shown on the news during election seasons. Deliberations are conducted. A focus discussion following deliberations is facilitated by our jury consulting and litigation consulting team members. All proceedings are typically observed through one-way mirrors or via closed-circuit TV, as shown in the included image. Watching the deliberations is shocking for most trial lawyers. Without the constraints of the law or internal consistency, jurors’ responses can seem inconsistent, irrational, inexplicable and thus, frightening and random. They are not. Jurors rarely understand the cases as much as hoped, and they follow predictable behavior patterns (see 10 Things Every Mock Jury Ever Has Said). While their rationale may not match the lawyers’, there is a rationale to those willing to understand it from the jurors’ perspective. Finally, data are collected from the jurors, the results from the deliberations are tallied, and an oral and written report is presented to the trial team. This report includes specific tactics, both rhetorical and visual, that should be used at trial. We have written and taught about best practices for mock trials extensively. Some of those articles and webinars include: The 5 Very Best Reasons to Conduct a Mock Trial 6 Good Reasons to Conduct a Mock Trial 6 Ways to Use a Mock Trial to Develop Your Opening Statement 5 Ways That a Mock Trial Informs and Shapes Voir Dire Questions 12 Astute Tips for Meaningful Mock Trials 11 Problems with Mock Trials and How to Avoid Them 7 Questions You Must Ask Your Mock Jury About Litigation Graphics 10 Things Every Mock Jury Ever Has Said How Early-Stage Focus Groups Can Help Your Trial Preparation Webinar: 12 Things Every Mock Juror Ever Has Said - Watch Anytime Together, these resources provide an excellent manual for conducting a mock trial for an upcoming case. However, they don’t deeply address a trial team behavior I’ve seen show up in just about every mock trial our firm has conducted: The lawyers try to win – and I don’t mean fairly.

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If you're one of the nearly 10,000 long-time readers of this litigation consulting blog, you know that periodically, we list the recent articles that have proved the most popular. We measure popularity based on the number of times an article has been read, so these really are reader rankings. In today's article, I want to do something a little different. This time I'm listing not only the top three articles of the last quarter but also the current top three articles of all time (since 2011 when we started writing this blog). In a particular quarter, the top article may see a few thousands of individual readers reading it. However, an article on our blog for five or more years may see tens or hundreds of thousands of readers. Consistently, topics related to jury selection rank higher than those related to litigation graphics. I think this is because litigation graphics tend to be used primarily in large civil cases, whereas jury selection occurs in large and small cases and in both criminal and civil cases. These top articles should be interesting to many different types of readers. If you are interested in presenting at trial most effectively, the Netanyahu article should be studied carefully. If you participate in jury selection or hire people who do this kind of work, the voir dire article is a foundational piece. Top 3 Articles of Q2 2018: Netanyahu Persuades and Presents Better Than Most Trial Lawyers What Steve Jobs Can Teach Trial Lawyers About Trial Preparation How Much do Jury Consultants, Litigation Graphics, and Hot-Seaters Cost -- Honestly? Top 3 Articles Since 2011 (the life of our blog, The Litigation Consulting Report): 5 Questions to Ask in Voir Dire . . . Always The Top 14 Testimony Tips for Litigators and Expert Witnesses 10 Ways to Spot Your Jury Foreman

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At A2L, we work on many disputes and trials of various types and sizes. Before starting work, we routinely provide our customers with estimates of what we think it will cost to engage us to conduct a mock trial, prepare trial presentations, assist in the development of the opening statement, and run the courtroom technology. While it’s never easy to estimate the final costs of fast-moving complex litigation, it's something that firms like ours and large law firms do every day. We've been doing it for 24 years, and we've even pioneered some innovative pricing strategies for litigation graphics and trial tech work. However, I've noticed two schools of thought when it comes to estimating, and one of them seems to lead to better outcomes. In shorthand, I'll call these two methods a top-down method and a bottom-up method. In my experience, the top-down method leads to more successful engagements, more wins, and much better and trusting relationships.

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Here at A2L, we are delighted to introduce John Moustakas, our new Managing Director of Litigation Consulting and General Counsel. John comes to us from the international law firm Goodwin Procter, where he was a partner in the firm’s Securities Litigation and White Collar Defense Practice. John is a highly successful trial lawyer who has tried more than 45 cases to a jury. John spent more than six years as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, before returning to Shea & Gardner, where he had begun his legal career. In addition to trying numerous criminal cases for the United States, John has tried a variety of civil matters in a combined 20 years in private practice at Shea & Gardner and its successor, Goodwin Procter. John laments the fact that, for many reasons, far fewer cases go to trial in the corporate world than even 20 years ago. “My approach to practicing law is pretty old school,” he says. A generalist at heart, John “always loved the variety of litigation and never wanted to be pigeon-holed.” He’s tried a wide variety of matters ranging from homicides and public corruption on the criminal side to civil disputes over contracts, torts, real estate, employment, securities, and civil rights, to name a few. The unique focus of his new position attracted John. “Above all else, I’ve most enjoyed the storytelling aspect of my work -- figuring out how to engage the jury and make them want us to win.” Although he will no longer be a client’s advocate in court, he relishes the trade-off. “Instead of trying my own case every four or five years, if I’m lucky, every matter I’ll be consulting on will be one bound for trial. If I can leverage my experience to help others try their cases more persuasively, I will be one very happy guy,” he says. John says that one key to a trial lawyer’s success is to follow his or her own natural style and temperament. “The jury, as a collective, is uncannily able to sniff out BS,” he says. “Pretend to be something or someone you’re not, and they will see right through you.” Convinced that his authenticity was the greatest contributor to his success as a trial lawyer, John’s mission is to keep A2L’s clients true to their nature. “So, while the goal is to help our clients strengthen their presentations with an emphasis on creating resonant themes and the engaging visuals that support them,” he says, “we help by pruning, not slashing -- by seasoning, not scrapping the recipe. The lawyers it is our privilege to work with need nothing more. While they cover the entire waterfront, sweating every detail, we have the luxury of focusing narrowly and with a bit of detachment. And that is not only a rewarding role, but one that our clients feel makes a meaningful difference.” John looks forward to bringing his insights and experiences to bear in this new chapter of his career in a way that makes that kind of difference. He can be reached at moustakas@A2LC.com or 703.548.1799. Related A2L resources about storytelling, litigation consulting, mock trials, and creating trial presentations that persuade: 9 Reasons Litigation Consultant is the Best Job Title in Litigation Who Is, and Who Isn’t, a Litigation Consultant? Free PDF: Why Work with A2L on Your Next Trial 3 Types of Litigation Graphics Consultants Top trial lawyers talk about working with A2L Top trial lawyers explain why storytelling is so critical for persuasion 10 Things Litigation Consultants Do That WOW Litigators Free E-Book: What is the Value of a Litigation Consultant? 21 Reasons a Litigator Is Your Best Litigation Graphics Consultant 3 Types of Litigation Graphics Consultants Free Webinar: Storytelling as a Persuasion Tool Free E-Book: Storytelling for Litigators Your Coach Is Not Better Than You – in the Courtroom or Elsewhere 10 Types of Value Added by Litigation Graphics Consultants Explaining the Value of Litigation Consulting to In-House Counsel 17 Reasons Why Litigation Consultants Are Better at Graphics Than Law Firms $300 Million of Litigation Consulting and Storytelling Validation Top 7 Things I've Observed as a Litigation Consultant

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