It's always satisfying when somebody finds a solution to an enduring mystery of the cosmos.
Okay, it's not Fermat's Last Theorem, but it has bothered a lot of people. If research clearly shows that we learn and remember better if we're given pictures and demonstrations in addition to words, why don't trial lawyers do that, or do it better?
Educators get it. Heaven knows marketers get it. But lawyers? "There are big cases being tried," Kenneth J. Lopez told me, by "very smart, very experienced, very well-paid, very jury-friendly" trial lawyers, "where graphics are an afterthought or are not used at all."
Lawyers aren't like other people
Lopez is with Animators at Law, a litigation graphic design firm, and he commissioned a survey to find the answer. What they found had that surprising and yet obvious ring of "the butler did it": lawyers themselves aren't as visual as jurors are.
It was, Lopez thinks, the first survey to explore the learning differences between lawyers and the jurors they're talking to. Lopez wrote an article about the survey in the March issue of the ABA magazine Law Technology Today, and you can download the 14-page survey report here. Some key conclusions:
- "Practicing attorneys and the general public communicate in significantly different ways." While "[f]ully 61% of the general public learns visually," the survey found that "[p]racticing attorneys show a greater preference for auditory learning and kinesthetic learning."
- "Practicing attorneys are 10% more likely to be auditory learners and 4% more likely to be kinesthetic learners than the general public. Practicing attorneys are 14% less likely to be visual learners and communicators."
"Based on the results of the study, a typical twelve-person jury would likely be composed of seven “visual” jurors, three “feeling” jurors and only two “hearing” jurors. Accordingly, it is likely that a visual-majority jury is going to be listening to a non-visual attorney speak in a typical courtroom. Said another way, if a litigator is not communicating by using visual and kinesthetic tools while speaking, they are under-communicating with 82% of the jury."
It makes sense. "We try to teach the way we like to learn," Lopez told me, explaining that even he catches himself trying to draw pictures for a listener he knows perfectly well is a verbal learner. At a cognitive level we might understand that we need pictures, but if we don't function that way ourselves, we don't really get how much they will help -- so it's hard to put them at the top of the long to-do list that is trial preparation.
Lopez keeps plugging away. "Our internal standard is that for any graphic, anybody should be able to walk up to it, not know what the case is, and understand the point. If we can pull that off, that's magic."
(Photo by gavinnnn at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gavintakesphotos/432516430/; license details there.)