About the Book
Facts Can't Speak for Themselves Reveal the stories that give facts their meaning.
You can't tell where a legal decision-maker is going until you know where he or she is coming from. The book, Facts Can't Speak for Themselves, helps you find out where people are coming from, including the parts the jurors themselves can neither articulate nor even fully grasp on their own. The author Eric Oliver points out, those are the parts that most control every legal decision made both by professionals and by the lay juror. And, these mental processes are a lot more involved than influences traceable to zip codes, jobs, or lifestyles.
Facts Can't Speak for Themselves explains how your case story automatically reminds people of the private, stored references for where they are "coming from." Perceptions of your case spring out of the infinite number of possibilities in each fact-finder's unique warehouse of life experiences and unconscious imaginings. With them, all legal decision-makers first construct many versions from which they finally build a single story. According to the research, it is beyond dispute that those unconsciously imagined, private versions of the case story drive each decision-maker's judgments.
You'll learn:
- How the stories decision-makers imagine affect verdicts as much as juror backgrounds and beliefs or the attorney's presentation in court.
- Which focus groups best reveal the range of stories listeners can build from your case.
- How to apply focus group results in negotiations, mediation, and trials.
- How to run voir dire more like focus groups and focus groups more like voir dire.
- How focus group deliberations are the least valuable part of the process.
- Why you do not want to ask focus group members which side in a case they like.
- Why you should think twice before ever gain 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.
- How to recognize, refine and use story elements like theme, position and sequence most memorably.
You'll come to see that the Facts Can't Speak for Themselves goes farther, wider, and deeper than just your cases. It applies not solely to judges and juries, but to the other "fact-finders" in our lives: our mates, children, parents, neighbors, partners, friends, enemies - everyone; and its message is too powerful to ignore. If we all do make up our own version of the story-at-hand to make decisions, then how long can we afford to stay at arm's length from the process?
