“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
— Albert Einstein
We are trained from the first day of law school to think critically, spot every conceivable issue, and develop arguments from every possible angle. While this approach is invaluable in legal analysis and brief writing, it is a liability in the courtroom. As Rick Friedman emphasizes in Chapter 8 of Becoming a Trial Lawyer, titled "More is Not Better," complexity is the enemy of persuasion. He writes, "I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough. If anything is remotely close to a formula for effective trial advocacy, it is that the simpler the explanation or story, the more likely the jury is to believe it."
Friedman provides three essential principles for maintaining simplicity in trial advocacy: keeping the story easy to understand, keeping it consistent, and ensuring it is believable.
Keep Your Story Easy to Understand
As a trial lawyer, your primary job is to be a great teacher. A good teacher takes a complex concept and distills it into its most fundamental and understandable components. A bad teacher, by contrast, drowns the audience in unnecessary complexity, causing them to shut down, tune out, and disengage.
Consider a physics professor trying to explain the theory of relativity. The bad teacher might dive immediately into equations and technical jargon, losing their audience within minutes. The good teacher, however, might explain relativity using a simple metaphor: "Imagine you are on a train moving at nearly the speed of light. From your perspective, everything seems normal. But to an observer outside the train, time appears to move slower for you than for them." This analogy makes a difficult concept digestible.
Trials work the same way. The easier it is for a jury to grasp your case’s core story, the more likely they are to stay engaged, understand it, and ultimately believe it.
Keep Your Story Consistent
Inconsistencies make a story harder to follow, less credible, and ultimately less persuasive. Every additional fact, piece of evidence, or witness testimony increases the risk of inconsistency. Thus, we must resist the temptation to introduce everything that might support our case. Instead, focus only on the most compelling, high-impact evidence necessary to prove or refute each element of the case.
If you're representing the plaintiff, a clean, consistent case narrative is crucial. However, if you're on the defense, complexity and inconsistency can sometimes be tactical advantages. The more tangled and contradictory a case becomes, the more difficult it is for a jury to reach a clear decision. This is why the best trial lawyers refine their case down to the simplest, most cohesive version possible.
Keep Your Story Believable
Believability is the linchpin of persuasion. If the jury does not believe your story, you lose. A simple story is almost always more believable than a complex one. This is why slogans, bumper stickers, and political soundbites endure—they distill an argument into a form that is easily understood and remembered.
Friedman illustrates this point with an example from political messaging: "We will fight the terrorists in Iraq so we don’t have to fight them here at home" versus "The causes of terrorism are numerous and complex, requiring us to address cultural and economic forces that span the globe and are centuries old..." Regardless of one’s view of the Iraq war, the immediate and intuitive appeal of the first statement over the second is undeniable.
The Science Behind Simple Storytelling
Cognitive science supports Friedman’s argument that simplicity enhances persuasion. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains that the human brain operates using two systems: System 1 (fast, intuitive thinking) and System 2 (slow, analytical thinking). Jurors, like all people, prefer the ease of System 1 thinking. When a trial story is clear, consistent, and intuitively makes sense, it aligns with System 1 processing, making it more likely to be believed and retained.
Further research in psychology has shown that people are more likely to trust information that is easy to process. The "cognitive fluency" effect suggests that when information is presented simply and clearly, it feels more truthful. Complex and convoluted explanations, even if factually correct, often raise skepticism and doubt.
The Takeaway: Prioritize Simplicity
You should spend more time than you think necessary refining your case into the simplest, most straightforward story possible. This means stripping away unnecessary legal theories, paring down exhibits, and focusing on the most compelling evidence. It also means developing a clear, engaging narrative that jurors can understand without effort.
Before stepping into the courtroom, ask yourself: "Can my case be explained in one or two sentences? Can I summarize my argument in a way that a layperson can instantly grasp?" If not, refine further.
Simplicity wins trials. And as Friedman reminds us, "More is not better. More is just more." Einstein’s words ring true: If you can’t explain your case simply, you don’t understand it well enough. The best trial lawyers are not those who can make a case sound complicated—they are the ones who can make it sound simple.
For further discussion on this topic, listen to the recent episode of the Just Verdicts podcast, where we delve deeper into the "Less is More" principle in trial advocacy.
