Personal Injury Law

Trial Practice: Part I - Watching the McCain team can teach you the why and how to give an opening statement.

By Steve Lombardi

We can learn a lot about how to give an opening statement at trial by studying the U.S. Presidential campaign.

Recent psychological research indicates that trial lawyer opening statements, if done with a theme and sub-themes can win a case before jurors actually hear the evidence. Research conclusions indicate that jurors make up their minds during the opening statement. Then when listening to evidence they use confirming testimony to corroborate what they already believe and disregard that information which doesn’t confirm what they want to hear and believe. I wondered if this could possibly be true and so I’ve been looking for something that corroborates this premise. Looking at American politics I think I’ve found it. It’s the in the percentage of voters supporting John McCain and Sara Palin.

First John McCain. I’m shocked at his popularity amongst Republicans. He’s been in Congress long enough to have made a difference and yet he’s made very little difference. The banking debacle strikes during his campaign and realistically voters should be saying to throw all the bums out of Washington. John changes his platform to fit each crisis and his latest seems to be that we need to run the greed out of Washington along with all of his peers in the Republican Party. He tells us to send him to Washington (Isn’t he already there?) and he’ll clean house. Well, if you couldn’t clean house in twenty-something years what would make us believe he can do it in four? So I asked myself who is the real John McCain? I watched the video clips at The Real McCain and was frankly appalled.

Remember I said I was not surprised, just appalled. I admire John for his prisoner of war time served, but that doesn’t qualify him to be President of the United States. The fact that a large percentage of voters continue to support him says more about their mindset before he started to run then after the campaign got underway and his contradictory statements began to multiply. The voters, like jurors made up their minds with the opening statement and no matter what he says of does will change the way they think. This could be confirmation of the psychological premise being taught to young trial lawyers. But let’s look for more evidence. Let’s examine his choice of a running mate, Sara Palin and the large percentage of voters supporting her as the choice for U.S.V.P.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss the choice of McCain’s running mate and whether that made any sense.

Full post as published by Des Moines Personal Injury Lawyer on October 13, 2008 (boomark / email).