Kenny Adair on Discovering the Essence of the Story

“Lawyers get bogged down in minutiae and facts. The facts are important. The facts are the latticework upon which you hang the flesh of your case, and the flesh of your case is going to be the principles, the values, the emotion, the feelings, the betrayal; those types of things are what make a case relatable to a jury.”

This week, Kenny Adair, former district judge and 2007 graduate of the Trial Lawyer College (TLC), attributes his success to TLC. When he left the program, he felt better equipped to discover and understand his clients’ stories and tell them in a way that the jury would embrace. Through the use of reenactments, among other methods, he can discover the backstory and connect personally and emotionally to each case.

Adair tells the essential story during voir dire, during the opening statement, when questioning the clients and witnesses, and during the closing argument. He identifies the hero or would-be hero and the villain, the liable party. He shows the villain’s betrayal and is ready to capitalize on the defense counsel’s trial behavior that compounds the original harm to the client.