Summer Institute Students Build Practical Skills to Win Cases
The Stephen S. Weinstein Trial Advocacy Program hosted the annual Litigation Skills Summer Institute, geared towards mastering courtroom skills. The institute offered four litigation courses – Fact Witness Depositions, Expert Witness Depositions, Civil Trial Advocacy, and Litigating in a High Tech Courtroom – and participants personalized their studies by choosing one or more of the courses.
Credits Flexibility
For Michi Kono, a visiting student from Western State College of Law in California, the flexibility of the program was what sealed the deal. Coming to the Litigation Skills Summer Institute after completing a summer abroad program in Tokyo, Kono only needed five credits to finish the semester. “To be on track to graduate in four years, part-time students have to take summer programs,” Kono says. “LSSI is a concentrated program in the middle of the summer, which allowed me to take another course right before, and I still have time off afterwards.”
Clifford Clapp, who is simultaneously pursuing a full-time internship with a Fairfax County public defender’s office, says that while balancing responsibilities was challenging, he was excited about the curriculum. “I wanted to gain practical litigation skills, and while the internship was one way to do this, the summer institute was a way to hone those skills even more.”
'Practice Being a Lawyer'
In the Litigating in a High Tech Courtroom class, taught by Ryan Flax, advanced litigation practice professor and managing director of litigation consulting at A2L Consulting, participants learn how to be persuasive in a modern-day courtroom.
Flax emphasizes the importance of framing the case as a story to have the most impact, noting that most jurors are visual preference learners. “You need to build your case around winning, showing juries what they need to know to care,” he says. “Bring in a visual presentation with all the evidence that supports your win and frame it as a story with good characters, settings, and themes.”
“This is not a type of class where you can sit in the back and just observe,” Kono says. “You get up and practice being a lawyer.”
Multi-Media Experience
With most evidence available in an electronic format, lawyers are expected to know the software to best present that evidence. Working with the TrialDirector app and PowerPoint, the students created powerful arguments for their cases.
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Raenetta Ellison, a part-time J.D. student, says it was mind-blowing to learn how juries think. “It’s about marketing your case right by integrating technology into each stage,” Ellison says.
“I can do things that other people don’t know exist in this software,” says Clapp. “I know how to immerse someone in the multi-media experience, and tell a story without throwing a bunch of bullet points and words up on a screen.”