Lawyers' new credo: Keep it entertaining

Pennsylvania - New Jersey - New York - Nationwide

Posted on Sun, Dec. 26, 2004
By Emilie Lounsberry
Inquirer Staff Writer

To rouse a sleepy juror, Center City lawyer Jim Griffith once nearly fell into the jury box to humorously convey a wordless message: "Pay attention. This is important."

Tom Kline, another lawyer in town, relies on high-tech imagery to keep jurors alert and intent. He uses PowerPoint, animation and a special gizmo called a Smart Board to present evidence. And he likes to show TV documentaries to paint compelling portraits of his clients.

While lawyers have been trying for millennia to put on a good show, modern technology and the era of the high-profile trial have raised jurors' expectations higher than ever.

Jurors now want everyday lawyers as good as the big-time celebrity lawyers they see on Court TV, and witnesses as sharp and succinct as the actors on Law and Order. They expect the best of science and technology, whether it's DNA testing, FBI wiretaps or electronic wizardry. And they want the case over - quickly.

Burlington County's executive assistant prosecutor, James J. Gerrow Jr., calls it the "CSI phenomenon" and says the expectations of jurors are posing special challenges for lawyers. "Jurors in this day and age are looking for more and more," he said.

The result is that lawyers are doing more to make juries happy - or at least keep them interested. They're taking acting lessons, hiring actor-consultants to coach witnesses, and even getting actors to read depositions if the real witnesses are unavailable - or are as dry as toast on the stand.

"Not everybody can be a stand-up comedian, but you've got to find some way of making your presentation interesting," said Griffith, a veteran Philadelphia trial lawyer who uses humor whenever possible to keep juries engaged.

Some say the law profession must be careful to avoid a slippery ethical slope in which the desire to entertain overshadows a straightforward presentation. Larry Hammond, an Arizona criminal defense lawyer who is president of the American Judicature Society, a judicial ethics organization, said he worries that lawyer theatrics and competition with TV court dramas will have a "corrosive" effect on the legal system.

"It tends to trivialize the trial process," said Hammond, who said he knows one lawyer who wears a Lance Armstrong cancer--survivor bracelet - but only in court. "I'm disappointed that lawyers sometimes feel that they have to do that."

The efforts to keep the attention of juries have spawned a cottage industry of professionals who are working to help lawyers present smooth, persuasive cases.

In Chicago, actor Ian Harris is expanding his 11-year-old company, Law Actors, into New York, where he hopes to break into that litigious market to supply actors to read depositions, to teach witnesses how to be more effective, and to take part in mock jury trials.

In Philadelphia, Animation Technologies specializes in using computer animation to present complex information in court cases. The company, which also has offices in Chicago and Boston, opened in Philadelphia in 2000 with three clients. Today, the company says, it has more than 50 clients here.

In Center City, actress Celeste Walker last month taught a class, Acting for Attorneys, at the Wilma Theater. After a day-long lesson, four lawyers earned seven of the 12 credits they need for continuing legal education in order to maintain their law licenses.

Walker said that lawyers, like actors, are trying to tell stories and that the key is to make the story as interesting as possible. "Jurors are stuck in that box," she said, "and they want to be entertained. They don't want to fall asleep."

In the session last month, the four lawyers worked on breathing, enunciating and relaxation techniques and played out scenarios in which they had to communicate a plot without saying a word. They focused on storytelling and how to be more effective in opening addresses and closing arguments.

Lydia A. Wiley, an insurance defense lawyer in Center City, said she took the class precisely because of jurors' raised expectations.

"They see Judge Judy. They're looking at Texas Justice. They're expecting a lot more from us," said Wiley, who found the lawyer-acting class so helpful that she is considering returning to the Wilma for regular classes.

"We need new ways to spice it up and make it more interesting," she said.

Kline, who usually represents plaintiffs in personal-injury cases, orchestrates his cases so a jury gradually learns more intimate details of his client's life, and he frequently starts by presenting a documentary focusing on the client. Then, his client makes a dramatic courtroom appearance, often in a wheelchair.

From there, the jury is taken on a high-tech journey, with Kline often relying on a Smart Board, which lets him feed in a document, mark it up, then print out the exhibit.

Kline finds that the documentary, for jurors, is like watching television. There's something about TV, Kline said, that "raises the interest level of the jury," perhaps because TV is the medium through which people now get most of their information.

Gerrow agreed. "Most people these days, if they see it on television, it's true," he said. "That makes it real in our society for some reason."

In the forthcoming corruption trial of former City Treasurer Corey Kemp, two Commerce Bank executives and three others, prosecutors are planning a high-tech case they say will include playing about 500 FBI tapes of conversations and having a TV monitor next to each juror so jurors can follow an electronic transcript and view other evidence.

Back in the old days, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael A. Schwartz said, there would be a pile of cassette tapes on a courtroom table. "Everything's now in the memory of a laptop," he said.

John R. Piznar, a teacher from Bucks County who was a juror in a federal trial last month, said technology helped make the relatively dry fraud case easier to follow.

Prosecutors displayed document exhibits on a TV monitor and could point to the part of the document they wanted to highlight. And, he said, the prosecution team was "more lively" than the defense, and that also helped.

"I assumed it was going to be boring, and it wasn't too bad," Piznar said. Even so, he said, he wished the two-week trial had taken less time.

Former U.S. District Judge Stephen M. Orlofsky, who would often talk to jurors after cases during his seven years on the bench in Camden, said jurors appreciate high-tech advances.

"They expect lawyers and courts to take advantage of it," he said.

Orlofsky said lawyers may be going a bit too far in trying to put actors on the stand. He said that when he was a judge, he once refused to let an actor get on the stand to read a deposition because of case law suggesting that such a tactic would be inappropriate.

Orlofsky said the bottom line is that jurors are quite sophisticated - sometimes more so than the lawyers - and want a straightforward presentation. "They expect the basics. They don't want their time wasted. They don't have patience with lawyers who dilly-dally or pontificate," he said.

Griffith, the Center City lawyer who likes to infuse a trial with humor when appropriate, said that was the most pressing challenge - to keep a trial moving, but still take enough time to present as much testimony as necessary.

"You're looking at the clock," he said. "If you get a jury of people who are interested in a case, and they show up on time and don't seem to be getting restless, you can take the time you feel is appropriate."

But Griffith said the bottom line is this: "If you go to a play, and you don't like the play, you just tune it out."

That's why pratfalls come in handy.

Griffith said the staged fall to which he resorted at an important juncture of the trial - served its purpose, and he ended up winning the case.

"To keep them laughing is to keep them awake," he said. "And then they want to pay more attention."