By Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. & Kevin R. Boully, Ph.D.
“It’s Sept. 22, 2025, and an account manager named Lauren walks down the busy hallway and knocks on her boss’s door. But this meeting does not go like it should. For seven years, Lauren has worked to build her accounts, sell medical supplies, stand up for her coworkers, and make money for the company. Lots of money for the company. Today she is hoping for the good news that her work will be recognized; maybe she will be promoted for her leadership and her success. But her boss has something else in store for her.
“Her boss is Damon Walters. Just a few days earlier he met with the company’s top two executives. They know about Lauren’s successful sales record and the millions of dollars she has earned for the company. But that is not why they are talking about Lauren. They also know about her claims that too many employees, especially women, are not compensated fairly. They know other women at the company have been asking for raises and better career options. So, what do those three men decide? They decide to call Lauren into her boss’s office, dress her down, and give her a fake choice: Take a pay cut or voluntarily resign. They say: Quit or be quiet.
“This case is about that moment — what came before it and, most importantly, what happens after. It is about how this company violated Lauren’s rights. I’ll tell you right now that when they told Lauren to quit or be quiet, she responded calmly, maturely, and appropriately. Now, it is about your response when you learn of the retaliatory acts that violated Lauren’s rights: Quit or be quiet. So, let’s talk about how this happened.”
You have long heard attention spans are waning and you must maximize the power of first impression. We learned in our earliest public speaking classes that the first part of every presentation should be an attention getter. One of our colleagues, Karen Lisko, calls it a curiosity filter. When it comes to oral argument and opening statements in legal advocacy, our colleagues tracing all the way back to Joyce Tsongas have called the first few minutes of your oral presentation the “silver bullet.” In our theory of jury economics, we call this first pulse of your argument the “first four,” and this month we tackle how to craft your first four minutes to lasso your audience’s rapt attention, set the stage for effective advocacy, and begin the persuasive process.
Goals of the First Four. The first four minutes should accomplish a few critical things, depending on whether you are the first speaker or addressing an audience who has already started to form some impressions and expectations (i.e., plaintiff or defendant). Four universal goals include:
- Create Interest. Of course it needs to be interesting. This often means jumping into action or events that occur at a key juncture of the factual narrative. Don’t begin at the beginning by default. Instead, start the story where something interesting and identifiable is happening and provide only the critical information to quickly paint the picture and transport your audience to the scene. The first four is more about how you make your audience feel and what you signal as important, so they start to create expectations and identify a narrative in which to fit the evidence. You want them to be feeling the manifestation of moral values such as fairness/cheating, care/harm, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, or sanctity/degradation. Lauren’s first four introduces at least two of these moral principles in a setting most people will recognize.
- Identify the Conflict. You don’t have to fully express the ultimate conflict at the heart of your case, but you need to give a sufficient hint for the audience to create some expectations and identify the battleground. This helps them to use their prediction-addicted brains to begin imagining what the evidence might be, what events they might hear, and engage them in thought about how your case will unfold. This is engaging. Then, you decide where and when you will fulfill those expectations or surprise them with unexpected evidence that overturns expectations and takes the story more fully in the direction you have promised. This is easy to imagine in employment cases where people have so many expectations about workplace conflict. The audience may start to expect the boss is a hyper-masculine, chauvinistic man, the aggrieved employee is a soft-bellied complainer, the company is a profit-monger, and many more. Playing in and with these tropes should not be an accident but conscious decisions you begin to unfurl in the first four minutes. Surprise the audience by recognizing their expectations before you violate them: “You might be thinking Lauren was a problem employee, a squeaky wheel. We wouldn’t blame you for that. But you’ll hear she was far from it. …”
- Relate to your audience. Whether it’s the main character of your story (i.e., Lauren) or something more abstract (i.e., employee rights), your first four minutes must introduce someone or some problem to relate to your audience and generate resonance. It is not necessary that the main character or problem be likable, but it must be relatable. Your audience must see something they can see in themselves, acknowledging the fact that people make decisions that are egocentric. This means putting your main character in a common or relatable situation, giving them a common tension or conflict, and showing how they respond in a way that many people may respond. Lauren walks down a hallway to her boss’s door just like so many of us have done in life, or seen on a screen.
- Something to Root For. In a perfect world, the main character will be relatable and will present a socially affirmative, redeeming personality or principle that your audience will want to protect if not fight to uphold. Legal decision-making is social, and if you are not equipped to deliver a moral or ethical value that you want the decision to support, you are missing an opportunity. Your first four does not have to fully present or articulate the principle, but it should provide the audience with the reassurance that there will be one, and they will want to fight for it. For Lauren, it could be rewarding honesty with fairness, protecting courage in the face of corruption, doing what’s right even when it costs, or many other options. Ask yourself throughout discovery: What am I asking an ultimate jury to fight for in this case?
Essential Techniques. Some key techniques for delivering your first four include:
- Postpone the introductions, patriotism, and thankfulness. Introductions, appeals to the greatness of democracy and the court system it has brought us, and thankfulness for the jurors’ time should come after the first four minutes. Capture their attention first and then go to the boring stuff. Otherwise, leading with this risks losing their attention early.
- Get microcosmic. Jury economics focuses on humans’ tendency to rely on efficiency and symbolism to process complex information. Nothing achieves these two goals better than a microstory that is also a microcosm of your larger case message — a scene in your case that is emblematic of your case. “Storyworthy” author Matthew Dicks teaches storytellers to focus on the key moment of the story that happens in those precious few moments that encapsulate the reason the story matters — the reason the story is worth telling. This moment can be when everything changes, the revelation of a universal truth about human behavior, the demonstration of the heroine’s values contrasted with the villain’s, or the moment a key conflict is ripe and something must forever change. Identify in your case at least three candidates for this microcosmic moment, and write each candidate moment in three paragraphs as if you were telling someone for the first time. See which one resonates, and which has the most potential to be a microcosm of your ultimate message.
- Use present tense and active voice. Deliver the first four minutes in present tense and active voice, taking your audience to the moments when the events occur and putting them into the action. It should be a narration of events, not simply the description of what the events mean in hindsight. Choose wisely who the agents should be: The door is not knocked on by Lauren. Lauren knocks on the door. Liberate yourself from the need to be technically precise or to represent a perfectly accurate timeline. Instead, focus on the sequence, the bigger meaning, the way to structure the events to maximize the impact of the feeling it elicits rather than technical perfection in the first few moments.
- Withhold information. Don’t try to fit all the key facts in the first four. This is a common and consequential mistake. The first four minutes are to make your audience feel a certain way, not to ensure they understand everything they will ultimately need to understand. This means holding back a key fact — sometimes the most critical fact — so you can deploy it at the perfect time down the road. For instance, if a key witness has crossed an ethical line as part of a key event (e.g., drug or alcohol abuse, sexual misconduct, etc.), it could be most powerful to reveal that evidence only when it becomes absolutely necessary in the story. Maybe that is long after all the other events are complete and the story is winding down when you regather everyone’s attention with a new and critical fact of the game-changing documentary report. You cannot and should not assume the most important facts belong in the first four minutes when the better choice is to use the first four to establish expectations and set a tone that you can enhance by deploying lightning strike facts at the perfect time.
- Don’t overpromise. Keep the language reasonable and do not overstate or overuse adjectives to describe your claim and manipulate emotion. Use action to show the ideas you want to communicate rather than telling the audience what to think. When necessary, acknowledge the complexity, humanity, and weakness of your case and your main characters. Most people relate to imperfection since they experience it in their own lives, so don’t be afraid to acknowledge it in your case or in yourself when appropriate.
- Consider a visual “pairing” cue. It can be powerful to pair your first four with a well-timed central visual cue that helps lock your audience into the way they feel during your first four minutes. It is a symbolic reminder of that key message and should be simple, visual, and self-evident. It could be a closed door in a long hallway that jurors watch as you reveal the first four minutes of Lauren’s story of suffering her employer’s retaliation.
- End with a thematic transition. Finish the first four minutes by previewing thematic language or a critical case theme and then providing a preview of the chapters to come and a clear transition that you are shifting from that precious attention-getting phase to the pace of a more complete and gradual narrative.
Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D., is president of Sound Jury Consulting in Seattle. Kevin R. Boully, Ph.D., is senior consultant at Perkins Coie in Denver.
