Jamie Oliver, a chef and a child advocate focused on ensuring kids receive proper nutrition through their school lunch programs as well as at home, has a television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, showing how he changes eating habits in school districts (this season he is in Los Angeles). In each episode, he creates a visual showing the terrible foods kids are putting in their bodies. It’s one thing to tell kids (or their parents) that fast food and processed food is bad for them, it is quite another to create a visual showing how bad it is, and creating such a powerful visual that it convinces those kids, their parents and the audience watching the show (including myself) how bad those foods are. In a recent episode, he filled a family’s house with all the fast food they consume in a year. Every square inch of furniture and floor was covered. In another episode, he filled a school bus with sugar to show how much sugar the school board permitted in the kids lunch meals over a year. It was powerful images like those that made folks change their minds and change their behavior.
When preparing for trial, we can take a page out of Jamie’s book, and think about what visuals (whether a photograph, a diagram, an animation, or some other representation) that encapsulates our theme and does so in such a powerful manner that the image we create carries through the trial, into the deliberation room and turns the jurors’ hearts and minds toward our view-point and toward our position. Keep a file folder in your office drawer where you include pictures, images and ideas you clip from magazines and newspapers. These images may later serve you at trial.
Being that it is Monday, my partner Craig Salner has his weekly tip for young lawyers. This week he discusses the importance of getting involved with social networking. You can find his post at http://csalner.wordpress.com/.
