Three Types of Listening Every Attorney Must Master

When I first started working with lawyers, I was surprised to find that voir dire was the part of trial most lawyers dreaded.

This made no sense to me: voir dire was the one part of trial that was unscripted. It was a conversation, a "get to know you" type of deal. But I soon realized that the "unscripted" part of voir dire was the very thing that made it difficult.

So I set out to fix this problem. I developed a method to help attorneys craft a voir dire that would get jurors talking. And it helped. But there was still a problem. 

You can prepare your side of the conversation, but you still have no idea how the jurors will respond. 

And that's when I realized that good questions are important, yes, but they're just the start. What you really need to get good at is listening.

When you think of listening you probably think of focusing intensely on someone else (in this case, the juror) and giving them your full attention.

You might be surprised to learn that there are three types of listening.

The first type of listening is the listening I see all the time in voir dire: listening to yourself. This is where you act as though you're listening to the juror but what you're really doing is listening to your own inner chatter. 

"Is this a good juror for me?"
"How do I follow up on this?"
Etc.

I hardly need to point out that this is -not- the type of listening you want to be doing in voir dire.

The second type of listening is where you listen to someone else. This is what most of you have been taught to do in voir dire, but to stop here is a mistake. There's a third type of listening you need to develop.

You need to listen to your intuition. When you listen to your intuition you listen for what's not being said, what's in the room, and how the group is reacting to what individual jurors are saying. This is where every good thing in voir dire happens. 

When you listen to yourself, you miss out on all the good information the juror is sharing. 

When you listen intently to individual jurors, you risk boring the group. 

But when you listen to both jurors and your intuition, you can shape the conversation and infuse it with meaning and purpose. You are present with the individual juror, yes, but you also have an eye on the entire group and what needs to happen next.

But here's the thing about intuition: it doesn't shout at you or slap you in the face. (At least, not most of the time.) It shows up when you get quiet and give it space to arrive. And yet most of you are afraid of silence! So when the juror stops talking you immediately jump in and crowd out the opportunity to let your intuition speak.

Stop. Slow down. Trust that what needs to be said next is just lurking under the surface. Start giving your intuition time to show up and you'll begin to master voir dire with each passing trial.

Give this podcast a listen to learn more.