This is Paul Luvera, talking about how to “frame” issues in how we “frame” our words. Personal Injury Lawyers need to take note here. How many times do we use the defense’s words in our personal injury cases? As lawyers, we have to take a harder look at the words we use. I would suggest that to get defense jargon out of our vocabulary, we need to use our own words starting from the time we take the case from the client, when we are evaluating our demand letters, when we draft our petitions and when we address a jury.
Defense jargon includes terms like: “accident”, “damages”, and “personal injury lawsuit”. Dump the defense jargon.
Look at the word “accident”. An collision between automobiles is rarely an “accident”. Usually collisions are caused by intentional acts (not accidents). The person who causes the collision is a vast majority of the time someone who is speeding, distracted by a cellphone-radio-lipstick or whatever of their own doing, turning into traffic instead of waiting until they can see if the way is clear, texting on their I-Phones, trying to beat the light, not checking the blind spot by turning their head around prior to changing lanes, not leaving enough distance between themselves and traffic ahead. All these acts are intentional and not an accident. The word accident makes a jury think that nobody meant to do anything wrong. How can a jury find someone being a wrongdoer and make them pay for the harm they caused if they didn’t do anything wrong? You have to use language that lets the jury see that this was no “accident” that caused the injury. It was intentional, it was dangerous behavior, and its behavior that society has an interest in stopping, or else it will happen again. The jury need to know that if they let this bad driver off the hook, they are telling him that its ok to drive the way he did, and its fine if he runs into someone again. That is not the message a jury wants to send. A jury wants to tell a person who deliberately defies the law and hurts someone that they need to take responsibility for their actions.
“Damages” is another term that conjures up the seedy personal injury lawyer in the minds of a jury. Instead, talk about what actually happened. Talk about the harm done. Talk about the losses incurred. Talk about the extent of the injury. Talk about the financial consequences of the defendant’s decision to ignore the law and cause an accident. Let the jury know that the law is written to protect us all from injury. If we let people go without letting them know they did wrong, then we all risk additional injury from that person going out and doing it again. If you send a strong enough message. One that makes the defendant pay for all the harms and losses he caused, then he won’t forget the message, and hopefully that will be enough to cause at least some of these dangerous drivers to curb their behavior and if it does that it certainly will save lives in the future.
Paul mainly talks about “framing the issues” in lawsuits in this clip. Take a listen, he’s got a good message on how to do exactly that:
Doug Goyen, Attorney
www.douggoyen.com/
