A quality opening statement requires becoming one with our client’s story. Becoming one with our client’s story means feeling the emotion of our client’s story. To accomplish this we follow the following steps:
Listen. We begin by asking our client to show us her story in the first person present tense. We listen to our client. The tendency is to project our story into our client’s story, rather than listening and identifying with our client’s emotions. After we listen to the story we probe our client by asking her what she feels as she relives the events in the first person present tense.
Role Reverse. Next we role reverse and become our client. As Atticus Finch tells daughter Scout: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view — until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” Through role reversal we feel the emotion of our client. This allows us to understand and relate to our client at the highest level.
Doubling. Once we feel our client’s story we go deeper into the story through doubling. We sit or stand behind our client as she tells the story in first person present tense. When we feel something deeper in the story we speak to our client from behind by becoming our client’s voice. We coordinate this so our client adds our input into the story if it fits how she feels if not our input is ignored. When doubling works our client is assisted in getting to a deeper emotional level.
Recreate Scenes. Seeing is believing and seeing can cause a subjective (spoken) fact to rise to the level of an objective (visualized) fact. Thus we recreate key scenes in our client’s story using props. Props are as simple as office chairs to represent a room where the scene occurred. We can also use people in our office to play the role of others in the scene. We assist our client in reliving the scene by directing the scene. Once the scene is created another person can play our client as she observes the scene, verifies accuracy and gets in touch with her emotional response.
Identify Emotional Power. Now that we have recreated what we feel are key scenes we and our client can identify scenes that contain emotional power in the story. This emotional power is felt at a deep level by both attorney and client. We have now discovered where the emotional power will come in our opening statement. Cases are won when the emotions of our client flow into the courtroom.