Kurt Zaner

Kurt Zaner

• Limited to 8 attendees but observers are permitted
• Most lawyers are boring and bore jurors into not caring.
• Or worse, they try too hard to entertain them and make the jurors hate them.
• We need to find a happy medium – keeping the jurors entertained and caring about your case, without pushing them away by acting over the top.
• I trained as a stage actor throughout college and moved to LA upon graduation to purse acting before going back to law school. I have found that learning how to emote and act brings clarity, passion, emotion to your presentations.
• We will work on some acting techniques and exercises to bring about your natural ability to do these things. You will not be "acting" in the courtroom, you will be living your true self and expressing your full range of authentic emotions and maximizing your presentation skills with an eye towards your listener/watcher.
• We will start with acting warm up techniques.
• I will take two of my case examples from two recent eight figure verdicts involving CRPS diagnoses and perform portions of closings that illustrate theatrical tools that can create drama and emotion in the courtroom in both opening and closing. We will breakdown the different dramatic techniques applied and how to use them. These techniques include speaking directly to your client, using pauses, incorporating defense counsel into the story theatrically, and story telling with emotion and intention.
• You must bring a case you are working on be prepared to practice 10 minutes of your closing related to damages and the facts of your opening.

Kurt Zaner

Lawyers hate legal writing. And for good reason - its terribly boring. So stop writing like a lawyer and tell a damn story. This CLE will teach how to write in a way that moves the reader to want to rule in your favor. You can use this technique in every brief you write (from discovery disputes to substantive motions) maximizing the chances you will be able to introduce the evidence you need at trial. Without winning the briefing, you may never be able to present the case you want at trial. I learned this after working a federal law clerk for a year right after law school and literally falling asleep at my desk, only to wake up and see the Judge staring at me.

As exemplars, I will use two cases in which a winning brief on spoliation and a winning punitive damage brief led to two eight figure verdicts in CRPS electrocution cases I tried with Sarah McEahern; both had past meds under 300K. I will break down the cases and the briefs and show you how to use the writing techniques I have developed over the years and what they look like in action. I will also show how the evidence I developed in the wining briefs was dramatically introduced at trial. The presentation, like my writing, will entertain you like Maximus in Africa. If you like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, you will be even more entertained.

Kurt Zaner

Most lawyers are boring and bore jurors into not caring. Or worse, they try too hard to entertain them and make the jurors hate them. We need to find a happy medium – keeping the jurors entertained and caring about your case, without pushing them away by acting over the top. I trained as a stage actor throughout college and moved to LA upon graduation to pursue acting before going back to law school. I have found that learning how to emote and act brings clarity, passion, and emotion to your presentations. Most jurors' exposure to lawyers involves watching lawyers on TV. So we need to give them what they want.

I will teach and model how to pick your moments to use dramatic techniques throughout trial to keep them entertained and trusting you. You will not be "acting" in the courtroom, you will be living your true self and expressing your full range of authentic emotions, and maximizing your presentation skills with an eye towards your listener/watcher. This will run the full gamut of trial – from Voir Dire, to Opening, Witnesses direct and cross, and Closing. These techniques include speaking directly to your client, using pauses, incorporating defense counsel into the story theatrically, and storytelling with emotion and intention. It's gonna be a hoot.

Kurt Zaner

We would all love to have days to conduct Voir Dire, but sometimes you just get thirty minutes, or worse, 15 minutes. In Colorado, and in federal courts in Colorado, 15 minutes is the standard. In this time, you have to establish rapport, find the bad apples, and plant seeds for concepts like money for pain, burden of proof, and introducing large damages. How to do it in 15 minutes or less is an acquired skill.

In this hour we will go over exactly how to do it, including how to memorize juror’s names, how to speak to everyone, and pitfalls to avoid. And, perhaps most importantly, how to introduce the idea of large damages in a diffusing way. In my last trial, with 15 minutes of VD in federal court, I told them I would be asking for 40 million dollars and no one batted an eye (they ended up awarding 30 million). Then, I will also cover different ways and formulas at the end of closing to argue for large non-economic and impairment awards – including the per diem, multipliers of economic damages, the “trust me” method, and other creative approaches.