The school year is ending and one final project looms. The most boring class in history. You remember it; can picture it. The teacher, the classroom, the wooden door with the tiny rectangle window. Peek at the class notes, maybe talk to a classmate and work as hard as possible to find the easiest way to get the grade, and move on with your life. You don’t learn the material; you learn how to get the grade you want. Step into the jury room after the closing bell and you’ll witness a familiar story: the verdict isn’t the last piece in a painstaking logic puzzle. It is not a decision reached after completing the picture of evidence and applying the jury instructions. For many jurors, the decision is a starting point. Emotional reactions, shaped by personal experience, gut-level impressions, and those “can’t shake it” feelings prime jurors to argue for the verdict that feels right regardless of the evidence. Jurors decide the way you decide, and the way your kids decide. They search for shortcuts, trust their intuition, simplify complexity using their experiences, and aim for an outcome that feels fair. They explain that outcome in the language and concepts available to them. They ignore instructions and redefine terms. They ignore facts and reimagine the evidence. In many cases, verdicts are not built brick by brick. The conclusion emerges first, and the reasoning catches up later.
Our careers are full of post-trial juror interviews and mock trial research experience that confirm this reality. Jurors are reverse engineers. And you don’t have to treat it as bad news, let alone a challenge to struggle against. In fact, you can be one, too.
Given the reality, jurors do something many trial lawyers don’t expect — they decide differently than they are “supposed to” — this month’s column explores some unique strategies for persuading jurors that you might not expect and might not typically encounter. Since jurors often reverse engineer decisions, these four strategies are important to expand your repertoire and explore new ways to persuade jurors that respect, channel, and guide decision-making when it happens in reverse.
1. Play With Sequence. Trial lawyers must stop “telling the story” by simply walking through a chronological series of events. Your favorite movies and shows never do that. They create interest, conflict, and emotion by choosing when to reveal key events and how to adjust the sequence to maximize the story’s impact. You can start a story at the peak of conflict, or its inevitable outcome. Nothing helps a reverse engineer more than knowing how the story ends, allowing them to use hindsight as a shortcut to understand what happened and what they should decide. This means starting with the moment a product manufacturer’s decisions caused a faulty product to harm an unsuspecting victim. It means starting with the scene where the corporate executive’s choice to use a competitor’s trade secret violates trust yet leads to millions in profits. Starting with a critical outcome enables jurors to actively help you complete the journey to that moment as you backfill the evidence and fill in the gaps. But consider two other creative approaches as well: First, deploy emotional sequences that motivate. How and when jurors feel particular emotions influences their perceptions and decision-making. It helps to create the emotional state that drives decisions. Emotional sequencing ensures jurors follow a path that motivates action: moving from sympathy or identification, to concern and conflict, to outrage, and ultimately relief, each tied to aspects of your evidence. Purposefully structure witness examinations, visual aids, and narrative flow in your opening statement to evoke an intentional sequence of emotional responses. Start with empathy, highlighting vulnerable moments. Progress to disappointment and conflict, even anger, showing injustices or failures — the dilemmas that people faced and the wrong decisions they made. End with hope and empowerment, providing jurors with a clear path to resolve their emotional journey through a verdict.
In an elder abuse case, for example, this means you begin with testimony about daily life and loving relationships, move to stark evidence of power and mistreatment, and close with the impact of the jury’s potential decision: “Your verdict is what ends this story with hope.” Jurors are emotionally led through a journey, making their decision emotionally satisfying and psychologically consistent.
Then, transport to the future. Construct a “future story” showing how your desired verdict creates positive change or prevents harm. Use visual boards, scenario planning, and short videos or animations that depict what life looks like post-verdict. Anchor jurors’ emotional investment in the bigger picture, not just in technical findings. Make them feel the world the way you are asking them to change it. For example, in a civil rights case, paint the vision of safer schools, empowered employees, or restored dignity. Show what the intended verdict can create. Invite jurors to imagine themselves in the future community they help shape. This big-picture focus can resonate emotionally, turning jurors into architects of a better world, and motivating decisions that serve those visions.
2. Play With Discomfort. When jurors encounter conflicting beliefs or facts, discomfort drives them to justify their positions emotionally — to resolve the conflict as quickly as possible. Leveraging this dissonance can nudge jurors toward your narrative by providing a solution that resolves their internal tension.
Present evidence and arguments that intentionally highlight your opponent’s contradictory claims, even if the examples are relatively simple. Create “cognitive puzzles,” emphasizing inconsistencies and asking jurors to reconcile them using a simple, familiar guidepost (e.g., their life experience or common sense). Present a simple narrative that comfortably explains the contradictions and allows your story to align with jurors’ feelings about justice, safety, or community standards, and your version of the case. Through this engineered discomfort, jurors are motivated to adopt your client’s case, seeking psychological harmony.
For instance, in a whistleblower retaliation case, expose the company’s stated commitment to transparency alongside documented attempts to conceal the plaintiff’s report. After highlighting this contradiction, present your client’s narrative as both emotionally truthful and rationally plausible: “It makes sense that she chose to speak out, because she believed in honesty. If this company believed in honesty, we would not see this contradiction. Yet, here it is.” Jurors’ need to alleviate this dissonance leads them to accept your version and question your opponent.
3. Play With Symbols. Ask a juror weeks later about trial evidence, and they’ll remember an image, a metaphor, or a resonant phrase long before any detail from a spreadsheet or document. That’s why persuasive advocacy isn’t about information overload; it’s about delivering “sticky” moments that define your case’s moral core and make predictable emotional responses credible, lasting, and easy.
Here, you can ignore chronology altogether. Think Pulp Fiction. Use powerful moments and anchor phrases to establish emotional reference points without using chronology. Identify two or three key emotional moments, poignant testimony about a conversation, a striking visual that occurred during the events, or memorable contrast between how two people responded to the same event. Build your trial presentation around these moments, revisiting with different witnesses, tying evidence back to them, and using them in opening, direct, and closing. Encourage jurors to bring up these moments first in deliberation, as emotional anchor points, before anything else. For instance, in a wrongful death case, echo the phrase “He was always there when needed” through witnesses, video tributes, and closing. Show how the statement is relevant across various settings — at work, at home, for his family, for his friends, at his medical appointments trying to survive the injury, etc. Repeatedly pair visuals of the plaintiff’s loved ones with the phrase. Help jurors grow emotionally attached to these moments, reinforcing their gut decision and later referencing them to justify their verdict.
Find the images that help jurors forge visual connections: an exhibit that becomes a case mascot, a visual analogy that every juror can recite (“the missing page,” or “the locked door”). When their hearts pull them toward a verdict, these symbols let their minds fill in the rationale, connecting quick emotion to a lasting memory and a justifiable verdict decision that they can and will argue others should support.
Build on this tried-and-true strategy with a creative twist: Reinvent classic or rote exhibits as demonstratives. Infuse contracts or business records with color and meaning, not just data. Color-code the text of a key email so jurors recall not only the substance but the meaning your color-codes infuse. Add “badges” or “stickers” to common documents to help jurors track and categorize them and their relevance (e.g., “secret” emails or “ghosted” calls).
4. Play With Props. Jurors are more deeply moved by experiences than by observation. When they actively participate in a recreated version of the events at issue, it heightens their emotional connection and empathy, transforming evidence into personal conviction.
Rather than telling jurors what happened through witness testimony, or even showing images of the locations or objects in the case through opening statements, create video or serial photography like a social media influencer to help jurors have a direct experience. This means you show them the scene. Invite them to walk through the environment, to see and catalog the spaces, distances, and relationships among relevant objects. Bring a few of the most critical objects to the courtroom and mark them as exhibits so jurors can touch them, experience the sights and sounds, and place themselves in those circumstances at those key moments. This experiential approach makes abstract issues concrete, triggers stronger emotional responses, and anchors jurors’ memory to moments of active engagement. Coupling testimony with this immersive experience turns the decision-making process into a journey jurors feel they’ve personally traveled.
Certainly, some case types make this easier than others, but every case has potential props if you look for them. We have seen trial attorneys use all sorts of things as props. In a premises liability case, recreate the accident scene with “POV” videos and a few of the most critical objects (e.g., a wet floor sign that was stored in a closet, a smooth tile from the floor, etc.), if permissible. Place these objects in the courtroom as if they are part of the scene (or more importantly, let them visualize and touch objects that were not part of the scene but should have been). Have jurors walk the plaintiff’s path, experiencing obstacles, lighting, and hazards first-hand. As jurors experience the space, they have more active and emotional responses, creating vivid reference points for deliberation. Jurors’ own perceptions become evidence, making them invested advocates during the group decision process.
Jurors start with what feels right. Great trial lawyers show jurors why their version of the world should feel right, or better yet, makes jurors feel good about their version of the events. Just as jurors reverse engineer decisions, you can reverse engineer clever ways to persuade. Don’t give up on new ways to do it.
Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. is President of Sound Jury Consulting in Seattle, WA. Kevin R. Boully, Ph.D. is Senior Consultant at Perkins Coie in Denver, CO.
