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1. A Lawyer Prepares
• Neither opening statement nor closing
argument can be done off-the-cuff. Each is a
performance. As such, they require detailed
and careful preparation.

2. An Actor Prepares
• When I think of preparation, I draw inspiration
from the world of acting.
• Many theatergoers have a sense that
somewhere in the actor’s psyche lies the
potential to forget himself when authentically
getting into character.
• However, few people understand the work
that goes into acting and what it means to
convincingly portray another person onstage.

3. An Actor Prepares
• Fully inhabiting the mind, mannerisms, and
reality of a fictional character is no small feat.

4. A Lawyer Prepares
• Step 1: Begin by brainstorming
–Creative thinking or brainstorming produces
the ideas for opening statement and closing
argument.
–This is a spiraling process. It begins before
the trial starts and continues throughout
the trial to take advantage of new
developments.

5. How I Prepare
• Tip: Start backwards. Begin with your closing
argument. Ask yourself the question: “What
facts must I establish during the course of
the trial – through oral testimony or through
the introduction of physical evidence and/or
exhibits – in order to make the kinds of
arguments that I need to make at closing to
advance my defense and to get an
acquittal?”

6. How I Prepare
• Brainstorming requires a lot of “free association,” which
can be torturous for those who are perfectionists and
prefer structure. It's like being afraid of heights but finding
the courage to bungie jump off of the steepest cliff.
• In other words, you have to “let go” and give yourself
permission to think outside of the box. There is no such
thing as a "bad idea."
• Of course, this does not mean that every thought that
comes out of the deepest recesses of your mind is going to
be brilliant, much less that it will be a “keeper.” Like
minnows swimming upstream, only a few ideas will actually
survive. But the only way to realize these ideas is by
allowing your imagination to run wild and not to self-edit or
censor yourself.

7. To Type or Not to Type?
• Step 2: To type or not to type?
– Typing up your opening or closing on your
MacBook has shortcomings. Two points:

8. To Type or Not to Type?
– (1) If you prepare your opening/closing on your
MacBook to the utter exclusion of rehearsing it, then
you risk losing the human connection that is essential
to establishing trust and transparency with the jury.
Studies show that typing up a speech on a laptop and
delivering it are two radically different things. Those
who prepare exclusively on a laptop are often
perceived as being “distant” – as if they are in an
isolation chamber – when they get up to deliver the
speech. You don’t want to squander what is perhaps
the most precious moments of the trial – when you
get to address the jury directly.

9. To Type or Not to Type?
– (2) The spoken word is radically different than the
written word. As Mark Twain once said, “It’s like
the difference between the lightning bug and the
lightning.”

10. A Lawyer Prepares
How do you prepare?

11. To Type or Not to Type?
– To borrow an analogy used by Gerry Spence, the
written word is like a stuffed bear. The spoken
word is like a real bear standing on its hind legs
and drooling from the mouth. It’s alive!
– The punctuation that is present in the text of a
play is intended for the reader, not the actor.
Words like “softly,” “angrily,” or “with effort”
dictate a kind of life which can only be there
spontaneously.

12. To Type or Not to Type?
– If you memorize your opening with punctuation,
the jury will hear all of the periods, commas, and
semi-colons and it will sound unnatural.
– Example: “Good grief. Home to mother. Minerva
Pinney returns home to mama and the ancestral
homestead. You disappoint me Minney. This
started out as a good, honest row but now you’re
being common place.”

13. To Type or Not to Type?
– When actors are given a script, they re-write it
from beginning to end in their own hand crossing
out all stage directions and punctuation. Each line
looks like a big run-on sentence but there is a
method behind this madness.
– Nobody, not even the playwright, can determine
how a life is going to live itself out sensitively,
instinctively, on the stage.

14. To Type or Not to Type?
– My advice: Feel free to type up your opening and
closing. However, remove all of the punctuation
and be sure to memorize it!

15. Don’t Rush
• Step 3: Don’t rush. Rushing is the enemy of
the moment. Things take the time they take.
Stated otherwise, if all the moments are
crucially important, then none are important.

16. Rehearse
• Step 4: Rehearse using non-lawyers as your
audience. This will also help you get
comfortable in hearing the sound of your own
voice.
– Rehearse your opening.
– Rehearse your direct examination.
– Rehearse your cross-examination.
– Rehearse your closing.

17. A Lawyer Prepares
• Plaguing question: How will my opening sound
spontaneous if I’ve rehearsed it countless times?
• Actors have the same problem: As the actor, they
know what’s coming next because they’ve
memorized the script and rehearsed the scene
hundreds if not thousands of times. But as the
character, they don’t have the foggiest idea.
• So how does the actor behave? He behaves as if
it’s happening for the first time.

18. A Lawyer Prepares
• You may think that the same play with the
same cast is performed the same way every
night of the week but it’s not! An actor might
blush in a scene on Tuesday night causing his
scene partner to respond more playfully and
with more glee than he did the night before.
This subtle behavior can change the entire
course of the scene even though the lines
haven’t changed and are always the same.

19. A Lawyer Prepares
• Don’t memorize your opening/closing in a pre-set
fashion. Why? Murphy’s law says that lines will
be delivered in the live performance the same
way they are rehearsed.
• Nothing is worse than the actor who memorizes
his lines in a pre-set way. This prevents the actor
from being open to any influence that comes to
him from his scene partner and avoids calculated
results, which is critical to being spontaneous.

20. A Lawyer Prepares
• What does it mean to “work off of your scene
partner?” On a primal level, it means to live
off of him as if you are an appendage to his
body.
• Let me give you an example.

21. A Lawyer Prepares
• Have you ever been to a play where the
“speaking actor” was so oblivious to what was
going on around him that his scene partner could
have had an epileptic seizure without so much as
causing him any interruption? Such actors might
just as well be in an “isolation chamber” because
they are destined to deliver their lines the same
way night in and night out regardless of whether
their scene partner even showed up.
• Not working off of your scene partner is a
common pitfall that even the most experienced
actors fall into.

22. A Lawyer Prepares
• Provocative question: When the jury is in the
courtroom, can you tell a difference between
the way you are delivering your
opening/closing versus when you are
rehearsing it alone?

23. A Lawyer Prepares
• Example: Your line is, “I hate you.” You memorized this
line by putting special emphasis on the word, “hate”
and hitting it hard so that the word is full of scorn. In
the moments before your line, your scene partner’s
behavior turns flirtatious, with hints of seduction. She
is as transparent as glass. When it’s your turn to speak,
you assault your scene partner with the line the way
you rehearsed it irrespective of your scene partner’s
flirtatious behavior. The audience will instantly observe
the contradiction. Your tone and voice inflection was
incongruent to your scene partner’s behavior in that
moment. In other words, the actor’s emotion did not
come out of what he was getting from his scene
partner in that moment.

24. A Lawyer Prepares
• Important lesson: “Listen to what your partner
means, not just to what they say.”

25. A Lawyer Prepares
• As humans, we’re always being affected by other people.
The same is true when we’re in front of a jury. Even though
they can’t speak back to us verbally, their body language is
always communicating something to us just as our body
language is communicating something to them.
• You might pause, allowing the jury to respond through
facial expressions and body language. For example, a smile
from one of the jurors might cause you to smile back or to
nod.
• Allow yourself to experience that! It’s as though the lawyer
is having a conversation with the jury even though the jury
is not speaking back.
• When you’re alive in what you receive, you’re alive in how
you respond.

26. A Lawyer Prepares
• My advice: In order to become more
spontaneous in front of the jury, learn to let
go! Also, I recommend memorizing your
opening and closing in a neutral way just like
you memorized your “ABCs” when you were in
grade school. In other words, without any
meaning.

27. A Lawyer Prepares
• Why should an opening and closing be
memorized in a completely neutral way?

28. A Lawyer Prepares
• Learning the text in an unmeaningful, yet in a
relaxed way allows an actor to be open to any
influence that comes to him and avoids
calculated results.
• Neutral and relaxed – not firm and tense.

29. A Lawyer Prepares
• Learning the text this way deprives actors of
any preconceived emotional associations, so
that once the text is learned this way, the
emotion will come out of what the actor is
getting from his partner.

30. A Lawyer Prepares
• This requires an enormous amount of restraint
because we all memorize by using an emotion
to give the words some sort of significance so
that we can remember them.

31. A Lawyer Prepares
• Your opening and closing must be so well
memorized that you could recite them
verbatim if you were woken up out of a sound
sleep or as easily as you can recite your
address!

32. Meisner on Preparation
• Step 5: Simplicity is essential!
– “I think one of the problems that you all have with
preparation is that you try to make it too big. It
isn’t enough to be in good spirits; you have to be
hysterical with pleasure. That’s too much.”
– “… [I]f you feel you have to have ten thousand
pounds’ worth of good spirits, then you get in
trouble.”
– Not everything is an atomic bomb waiting to go
off.

33. Meisner on Preparation
– If an actor “… attempt[s] a herculean preparation
to work himself up into the lowest depths of
misery, the audience [will] be as old as I am by the
time he finally [makes] his entrance.”

34. Meisner on Preparation
– When it comes to emotional preparation, it
cannot be “sorta,” “kinda,” or “just.” That is too
vague.
– Emotions are specific and meaningful: joy,
sadness, happiness.
– Emotion does you. You don’t do it.
– Simplicity is essential. The more complicated it is,
the harder it is to get involved emotionally. “All I
have to say to myself is ‘Hitler’ and something is
there.” Think, “less is more.”

35. Meisner on Preparation
• Step 6: Why do we hate to rehearse?
– There’s a certain element about rehearsing that
makes you aware of yourself. But the moment you
stand up in front of the jury and focus your
attention on them, your self-consciousness will
erode.

36. A Lawyer Prepares
• Step 7: Inspiration for rehearsing
– Rehearsing allows you to try out new things in the
safety and comfort of your own home.
– No one is going to jail if you fall flat on your face
or go down in flames.
– The more you put yourself in uncomfortable
situations, the more resilient you will be to deal
with the unexpected things that come up during
the course of a trial.

37. A Lawyer Prepares
– Step outside of your comfort zone no matter how
uncomfortable it might be. Increase your
tolerance for things that are uncomfortable.

38. A Lawyer Prepares
• Actors are always asked the provocative
question, “Can you be as private in public as
you are in private?”
– When you’re alone in your bedroom standing in
front of the mirror combing your hair, the
relaxation and completeness with which you do it
is poetic.
– On stage, this relaxed behavior is called, “public
solitude.”
– This is what actors strive for.