Juries wants to do the right thing. They need someone to follow. Who will they follow? According to Gerry Spence, “juries will follow the one they can trust.”

As Gerry so eloquently states in his national bestseller, “How to Argue and Win Every Time”:

“My experience confirms that everyday people employing their natural credibility detectors can almost always recognize the disingenuous. Therein lies the great virtue of the American jury. In nearly every jury trial, lawyers on both sides hire experts to testify on issues that are beyond the ordinary knowledge of lay people. But everyday people judge the experts, and they do so with uncanny accuracy.”

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“Jurors are natural-born experts in judging credibility. And like jurors, the people we speak to every day are also experts. They test us with their credibility-feelers. When something in the communication string does not fit, they are alerted. They hear and see subtle differences, often subconsciously. They hear the difference in the sound of words. They perceive the subtle inconsistencies between the chosen words, the sound words, and the physical words. The polygraph attempts to analyze our physiological responses when we lie, but each of us is many times more sophisticated than that primitive device. Our senses record hundreds of signals over the course of a brief encounter, and, faster than any computer, we assimilate the information, and pronounce our judgments. While the lie detector with its operator may take minutes, even hours to complete its analysis of a single sentence, our minds, as rapidly as the words fall from the speaker’s mouth, record split-second conclusions concerning the speaker’s credibility.”

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“Throughout our lives we must all face our juries — our fellow workers, our bosses, our spouses, our children. We all have cases we must win. But fancy words and gilded phrases usually don’t prevail. Always the argument is more in the person than in the words, more in being credible than in appearing credible.

The problem of credibility, of course, arises when what we say is not what we mean, when we speak of caring but do not care, when we feign deep beliefs but our soul is empty. The problem of credibility arises when we fail to tell the truth — when we fail to tell both the factual truth and the emotional truth, when we fail to tell the Other how we feel.

The form and content of the winning argument may stem from the logical, intellectual, linear progeny of the mind. But the energy, the power, the stuff that excites and moves, that makes us credible and eventually convinces, is born of the soul. Because an argument from the soul is truthful, it bears the ring of truth. When we fail to tell the truth, our communication string will always be out of sync. It is as though a platoon marches down the street, but one of the soldiers is left-footed. The slickest of prevaricators cannot keep the entire platoon in step for long. But when we truthfully reveal our feelings, the chosen words are released in sync with the sound words and physical words. When we tell the truth factually and emotionally, all the elements of communications, physical and verbal, automatically come together.

Successful argument unfolds when we have regained the ability to reveal ourselves, to expose our feelings, and simply ask for what we want. In the end, we must undress our psyches and stand naked before those to whom we make our arguments. Ah, the power of the honest who will but tell us who they are and what they want!”

In this video, Gerry Spence emphasizes the need for credibility to guide juries in a way that only he can.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InCTF0onqJM&feature=youtu.be