Virginia Lawyers Weekly

Lowell A. Stanley had admired trial lawyer Gerry Spence for many years. He had seen Spence once, at a Virginia Trial Lawyers Association conference in Williamsburg. Then, Spence had answered a question Stanley had about dealing with judges.

Last August, Spence answered many more of Stanley’s questions.

Stanley, a personal injury lawyer from Norfolk, was one of 50 lawyers from across the country selected to attend Spence’s first annual Trial Lawyer’s College. The month-long college was held at Spence’s ranch in Wyoming.

Many well-known trial lawyers, called “Old Warriors,” volunteered to teach at the college. Among them were Philip Corboy, Morris Dees, Alan Dershowitz, Joe Jamail, Rikki Klieman and Howard Weitzman.

The ad did not promise only to teach trial technique, but also to help lawyers discover their own potential. “As they say in Wyoming, you can put a thousand dollar saddle on a hundred dollar horse, but all you have is the same old plug underneath. To win we must discover our own magic,” the ad read.

Stanley found out about the camp when he saw an advertisement in an American Trial Lawyers Association publication, he said. The cost for the 30-day college was $2,900. The price included everything except transportation to and from the ranch.

“Send us your letter,” the ad said. “Tell us what you do, what you have done. Tell us your dreams. We are not interested in your grade average, your law school, your clubs or your golf handicap. We are not interested in your financial or social successes or how many cases you’ve won or lost. We don’t care about your sex or your race. We want to know something of your experience as a person, something of your life goals as a lawyer and how you think we can help you achieve them.”

“All [Spence] want[ed] to know is who are you and why you want to come,” Stanley said. “And you’ve got to put it in the letter. That’s scary business,” he said.

In the letter, Stanley described himself as “an ordinary guy with a wife, a daughter, and a dog.” He said in the letter that he worked for a large law firm and left in less than a year. He then worked for the federal government and left in two years.

Then he “went to work for a people law firm,” Stanley wrote. “Now I have my own practice and with my two friends, I try to help persons who have been injured and who have been accused. I do the best that I can. I need to be better.”

Stanley also asked for help in dealing with juries, judges and clients. “Help me cut through the Gordion Knot of mumbo jumbo justice,” he wrote. “I hope you have room for an ordinary person who has ordinary abilities, who needs to sharpen those abilities to be a force for the people who seek help,” Stanley’s letter said.

The letter was effective. He was chosen from a pool of 500 applicants. And he was the only lawyer who lived between Baltimore and Atlanta.

Once at the ranch, the participants worked hard–usually from 8 in the morning to 10 at night. But weekends were mostly free, which left time for sightseeing, Stanley said.

Accommodations were rustic. Each participant shared a room with another lawyer in a remodeled barn. As promised in the ad, rooms were “small and spartan.”

“It was dorm living,” Stanley said. Except for gender, “the roommates were picked by lot–they just threw keys in a bin,” he said. “You had to learn to get along with your roommate and the other people in the dorm, and that was part of it,” he said.

Participants also helped with chores on the ranch.

“We cleaned the latrines and we washed dishes,” Stanley said. Spence “felt, and he’s right, that if you’re going to [be] a lawyer for people, you have to know how people are,” Stanley said.

Spence advised the participants to pack light. “Closet space is limited and anyone who comes with a full, fancy wardrobe will be held up to shame as grossly bourgeois,” Spence said in a letter. “No dress clothes are required even for mock trials, and I can’t imagine where you would wear them. They will throw you out of the Rustic Pine Saloon if you show up there so garbed,” he wrote.

Spence did encourage participants, however, to bring a particular problem with a particular case so that the experts could offer solutions. And he asked them to bring mosquito repellent.

The seminar itself did not focus entirely on trial technique. At first, the college “helped lawyers get in touch with who they were as a person–as a human being,” Stanley said.

The initial three days and the final day involved psychodrama. The participants watched the sunrise one morning, painted and acted. “We had to sing and we had to talk; we had to recite poetry,” said Stanley. “That was part of it. But it wasn’t the major part,” he said.

“What that did was help break down the barriers so that you could become more comfortable with 50 people who you were going to spend a month with,” he said.

“It wasn’t all touchy-feely,” Stanley said. “It was serious business,” he said. Participants practiced voir dire, opening and closing statements, direct and cross examinations and summations, he said.

Seminar participants conducted two trials. One case involved a shopping center assault and the other was the trial of O.J. Simpson.

Learning trial technique “was the bulk of it,” he said. “But the approach was different.”

“I have spent a good part of my professional career looking to learn to be the best trial advocate that I can be,” he said. As a result, he had attended several well-known trial advocacy seminars. “Those things teach you how to do it, and they teach you technique,” he said. “But what this did was teach you to combine the technique with the feeling,” he said.

The Spence seminar teaches lawyers to empathize: to feel how jurors, witnesses and judges feel, Stanley said.

Spence tells a story about cross-examining three witnesses, said Stanley. In the story, Spence questioned the first witness. “He cut him, and he slashed him, and he buried him,” said Stanley. And he went to his partner and said, “We really got him, didn’t we?” And the partner said, “You sure did, Gerry.”

Then Spence questioned the second witness. Spence said, “I cut him, I slashed him, I buried him.” To his partner, he said, “We really got him, didn’t we?” The reply was, “Sure did, Gerry.”

With the third witness, Spence said, “I cut him, I slashed him, I buried him.”

And Spence lost the case, said Stanley.

Later, a juror came up to Spence and said, “Mr. Spence, why did you make us hate you so?”

“I think that says a lot, because you can accomplish the same thing without being hateful,” said Stanley.

In most cases, the witness is trying to tell the truth, Stanley said. “I want to … help him tell the truth,” said Stanley. “And to be gentle with him and to be understanding of him. Even if he is perjuring himself, to understand why and to let the jury see why,” he said. “Not in a mean, sarcastic, vindictive manner, but in a gentle, understanding way so the juror can see that I do not bear any ill will towards the witness, I just want the truth to come out,” he said.

After studying with Spence, “you realize that the courtroom is a very intimidating place,” Stanley said. Lawyers are afraid. Jurors are afraid, because they want to do the right thing and they fear that other people in the courtroom will keep them from doing the right thing. Witnesses are afraid of being pushed around or of looking foolish. And judges are afraid that the case will not be tried well or will have an error that could lead to an appeal, he said.

“Everyone in the courtroom has fears … and you must understand how everyone is feeling to help you try your case,” Stanley said.

The participants also learned that their teachers–the “Old Warriors”–dealt with fear.

At the seminar, “the barrier between student and teacher was broken down,” Stanley said. “We lived with [the teachers]. We talked to them about our personal lives. About their personal lives,” he said. “And we realized that these great lawyers … have the same fears that [we] do,” he said. “Maybe even more, because they have so much more of a burden on them. They’re afraid of losing,” he said.

“When you see how they face [that fear], it makes it easier for you to face it,” he said. “In facing it, you can reach your greatest potential,” Stanley said.

Since returning, Stanley has changed the way he deals with the people he encounters in his practice.

Stanley shared what he learned with the two other lawyers in his firm. And he has found the information helpful. “We’ve had much better success in dealing with the cases, of course, and the trials, of course, but also in dealing with our clients” and with insurance adjusters, he said.

“We find that if we’re real with them, it’s better, instead of putting up a front or a bluff,” Stanley said.

And he said he looks at others in the courtroom now as human beings.

Previous trial advocacy teachings said that in cross examination lawyers should “hit hard and be tough and … make the witness shake and quake with fear of you,” he said. “I don’t do that anymore,” he said.

Increased communication is key.

If a judge is being difficult, Stanley now will ask why and try to resolve the problem. “That’s helpful,” he said.

“I hate to sound … new ageish, because that’s not me,” Stanley said. “And I know sometimes that when I talk like this, people may think that it’s foolish or silly.”

But “it’s all true,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you don’t live in the real world and don’t practice in the real courtrooms every day and see the real people, but it means that you do it better.”

“I wish that every lawyer could go to this.”

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