By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Apologies are very much in vogue. If you accidentally run your cruise ship aground, or surreptitiously wiretap phones in order to discover great newspaper stories, then it has become a well-known next step in the script to make a public apology. The shamed politician, loose-lipped celebrity, and the guilty criminal all recognize the
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: At a conference, I once met another consultant who actually claimed that his mock trial findings would line up with actual trial results with a definite confidence interval of, he said, plus or minus five percent. It was one of those conference moments when you realize that you urgently need
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Leave it to the engineers. While we all have our subjective methods of estimating our odds in litigation, in the field of construction litigation, the act of handicapping has apparently been raised to a level of mathematical precision. Computer modelers have found a way to input known factors and predict
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: “Whatever happened to causation,” defendants sometimes wonder. For example, a drug company is targeted for inadequate testing, and for attempting to hide research showing a statistical link to cancer. The Plaintiff took the drug, and now has cancer. For many jurors, that would prompt them to break out the check-book: “Liability established… Lets talk
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: As the pack of Republican presidential contenders heads out of Iowa, there is an important lesson for litigators and other persuaders, but it is partly simple and partly complex. The simple part is that negative campaigning works. Just ask Newt Gingrich who was on the receiving end of more than four million dollars
Take a Lesson from Political Campaigns: Going Negative Works (Partially) Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: As we turn the page on a new year, it is a good time to look back on the trials of 2011. The year had its share of high profile cases from the ‘second times a charm’ prosecution of Rod Blagojevich, to the conviction of Dr. Conrad Murray, and even the grand jury phases
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Around the war room conference table, all of the eyebrows went up at once as I shared a recommendation for the opening statement. I can’t share the idea without revealing the case, but suffice it to say that it was unorthodox. Several around the table shared that they had never done
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By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: “Your honor, this pattern of making a list for those deemed “Naughty” and “Nice” has the clear and foreseeable consequence of disparate treatment – namely, coal and switches – for those in the former cateorgy, and can only be seen as a persistent (annual) and intentional (he ‘checked it twice’) pattern resulting in the intentional infliction
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Speaking of faces, it turns out that Facebook is planning to sue Mark Zuckerberg. No, not that Mark Zuckerberg, the iconic founder of the world’s social media homepage, but an Israeli businessman, formerly named Rotem Guez, who legally changed his name to Mark Zuckerberg in order to support a business
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Most litigators now understand that their case fares better when it is framed as a story. And everyone knows that a good story always carries a point or a moral. Even information that follows a narrative structure (e.g., I went to a store, then bought broccoli, then returned home) isn’t received
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