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1. Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes
• Once we get in touch with our own feelings, we
become better equipped to express the feelings
of others, particularly our clients.
• This is what it means to be empathetic. Gerry
Spence has dubbed it, “crawling into the hide of
the other.”
• He uses this phrase as a metaphor for “tapping
into another person’s experience in order to see
things the way he saw them and feel them as he
felt them.”

2. Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes
In other words, we must put ourselves in our client’s
shoes and enter the matrix – this very strange and
unfamiliar world that our client inhabits.

3. Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes
• Once inside the hide of another, we can
understand how the facts were experienced
by our client. Slowly we begin to care and as
we do, we acquire the power to cause others
to care.
• As challenging as this might seem, it is not
the hardest part. The hardest part is shouting
out to the world – from this dark and
frightening place – what you see.

4. Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes
• For those willing to take this risk, there is no
greater reward. By the time the jury begins
their deliberations, they will have no choice
but to see your client as a “human being” with
blood coursing through his veins rather than
an inanimate object who has been branded
with the sterile label of, “the defendant.”

5. Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes
• A word of caution: The hide of a defendant in a
criminal case is not a warm and cozy place.
• As Gerry Spence so eloquently states, “There is
wretchedness there, not to mention pain and
sorrow. There are always the scars of injustice and
the evil mangling of the mind of the once innocent.”