Uncategorized

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: When an audience decides whether someone is credible or not, what do they look for? To a large degree, they look for confidence. In some ways, confidence can be viewed as performed credibility. Someone who is telling the truth is confident. Someone who is winning is confident. Of course, we know that

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Persuasion is often a matter of overcoming barriers and, in the courtroom, those barriers can be very real. The wall of the jury box is a physical analogy for the differences in class, age, race, education, and many other factors that can separate the fact finders from the attorneys, the

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The cooler sat in the  courtroom throughout the trial. A 40.5 gallon Igloo fishing cooler, it was a key piece of evidence in the murder trial of an attorney, Tom Capano, charged with killing his lover who was the Delaware Governor’s scheduling secretary. A recent story in Delaware Online focuses on one of

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Written in the context of the civil rights and Vietnam war protests of the Sixties, there is an old Buffalo Springfield song with a line about the marchers, “Singing songs and carrying signs [that] mostly say, ‘hooray for our side.’” That ‘hooray’ is what the political psychologists call “partisan affect,”

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: A fair proportion of the legal advocacy in America today is taking place via written communication. With only a small percentage of cases actually ever seeing a jury — three percent, or less — cases are more and more often reaching their ends based on written motions. Summary judgment decisions

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: As special counsel, Robert Mueller, files the first charges stemming from the investigation of events surrounding Russia’s involvement in our presidential election, the issue of corruption touching on the government looms large. In Chapman University’s  2017 “Survey of American Fears,” just released in time for Halloween, the results put “corruption of government officials”

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Every persuader, and legal persuaders in particular, understand that bias is both pervasive and powerful. The idea that potential jurors will be carrying attitudes and experiences that could influence their decision is the norm and not the exception. As a trial attorney, your goal is to eliminate it. In practice,

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The idea of a reluctant jury — a jury of people who would really like to be just about anywhere else, a jury of people who tried like hell to get out of it and failed — that idea is fairly well ingrained in our system. Among many, especially those

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The law expects legal decision making to work like a smooth and well-oiled machine. But as any experienced legal persuader knows, there is sand in those gears. That sand takes the form of cognitive biases: mental shortcuts or heuristics. They’re not necessarily mistakes, but factors that make legal decision making