The Washington Post
Monday, July 22, 1991
Learning Acting Techniques for a Real-Life Courtroom Drama

"Many lawyers treat a trial like a college debate," said former student Conrad Varner, head of the Maryland Association of Defense Trial Counsel. "It turns the jury off faster than the speed of light...the jurors are emotional human beings. You have to give them an emotional reason to go with their intellect."

Enter professional director Gillian Drake, who says that lawyers are good at figuring out "what they want jurors to know but not at what they want jurors to feel." If she can get them to evoke emotion by giving "one million percent" in class, as she told one student this month, then they can scale back their gestures to what’s appropriate for the courtroom. The same technique, she asserts, works whether the lawyer is meeting a client, lobbying a senator, or closing a trial.

D.C. plaintiffs’ lawyer Mark Brice hired Drake for a seminar when he was preparing for a medical malpractice trial. His client was dying of prostate cancer. "In my mind, my opening was very dramatic," Brice joked recently. "Gillian very quickly straightened me out on that."

Drake’s most valuable lesson was "tell the story from the client’s perspective...so the jurors have someone to empathize with," Brice said. "It was a million-dollar verdict," he added. "In large part, it had to do with restructuring my presentation."

Drake does not restrict her advice to lawyers. At their request, she counsels witnesses from a performance perspective. In a Maryland case, she worked with a doctor in a medical malpractice case. The impression he made at first was fidgety, unfocused, and unconvincing. Drake worked with him to stop his extraneous movements and give him a "point of focus". He stopped fidgeting.

If this seems to be getting far afield from truth and justice, Drake and her actors protest. Drake said she is helping lawyers ensure that their witnesses get to "tell their slice of the truth" by helping to remove what is extraneous from their behavior.

But that is only part of the story, said New York University legal ethics expert Stephen Gillers. Preparing witnesses "is not only permissible, it is considered essential," Gillers said. An acting coach is only "one step further on the spectrum." It’s not unethical, Gillers said, as long as lawyers "avoid encouraging the witness to speak falsely."

Gillers also cautioned that "the lawyer’s job is not to convey the truth;" it’s to "encourage the jurors to believe the truth that most benefits his client...lawyers are not lying. They are creating the truth. The lawyer is a kind of performance artist."

And so the lawyers press on, under Drake’s demanding tutelage.

"You cannot ignore the fact that you are center stage at a trial, whether you like it or not," Brice said. "If you’re going to be center stage, you better do something interesting."