The Independent
(Published in London)
January 3, 1992
Coached For a Starring Role In Front of the Jury: American lawyers are learning acting techniques to improve their courtroom performance.

American advocates include their share of great actors. Washington's legendary defense attorney Edward Bennett Williams, who died in 1988, achieved extraordinary emotional control over juries, according to a recent biography. In a routine bribery case, Williams made jurors weep out of sympathy for his client.

Ms. Drake aims her classes at attorneys who perform brilliantly in their heads or in front of the mirror but not in the courtroom. "Acting for Lawyers" also offers to cure stage fright. One pupil, whose firm is a regular client of Ms. Drake's, came for help to overcome the fear that "I wasn't getting through to the jury. They would listen for a while and then drift off."

In this crash course in dramatic techniques the jury is considered not as an arbiter of fact but as an audience that must believe the lawyer. And all audiences, Ms. Drake says, want the "three Es": to be engaged, entertained, and enlightened. In preparing opening statements, we urge students to tell the human story.

Jury research carried out in the U.S. is on her side. Interviews with jurors show that they make up their mind early in a case: 80 percent of verdicts agreed with the first conclusions jurors reached after hearing opening speeches. At that stage of the trial, they have assessed the credibility of just one witness: the attorney.

"You have to impress them about your case, about your client, about your conviction," says Jonathan Halperin, a graduate of Acting for Lawyers' class of 91. Mr. Halperin specializes in medical negligence trials, where in the U.S. it is usually the jury who hands out the damages. "If they like you, they want to help you," he says. "And whatever you can do to represent your client's interest, be it taking acting classes or learning to ride a unicycle in front of the jury, you are duty bound to do it."

Student often begin skeptically, but generally end up singing the classes' praises. "Initially I thought this is really silly," says Mr. Halperin. "I thought I looked like an idiot doing these things, but I actually enjoyed it." Mr. Halperin and fellow former students go further. They put a high value on having their performance assessed by a professional who is not just another lawyer. They say that few than 20 hours of acting lessons changed their approach to juries and filled a gap in their traditional legal training.

"At law school, the emphasis is on content, which I think is correct," says a senior partner a a prominent Washington law firm. "That's the thing law schools do best. But it probably leaves a lot of people insufficiently aware of the music as distinguished from the words."
The 52-year-old attorney spoke on condition that he was not named, concerned that colleagues might think he was trying to manipulate them. After taking the classes out of curiousity, he says, he better understood the "emotional sub-text" in legal cases and how to use it.

Ms. Drake puts it a different way. "Being a legal scholar is a left-brained activity. Performance and speaking persuasively in front of people is a totally-different facility. It's right-brained."