Summer 2007

Hooked on a Feeling

By Elaine McArdle ’00     |     Photographs by Michael Manning

With juries, it’s about creating a genuine connection

Reza Breakstone ’08 makes his case while Professor Dan Williams offers guidance.

It’s a raw Thursday night in March. In the law school’s moot courtroom on the ground floor of the Knowles Center, you can hear the hum of traffic as it passes by on Huntington Avenue. Reza Breakstone ’08, a dark-haired, second-year student stands before his 22 fellow students in this Criminal Advocacy Clinic. He takes a breath, rubs his hands together, and begins to recite a poem:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …

He speaks slowly, naturally, looking up at his classmates seated in the jury box. His professor, Dan Williams, is taking a radical approach to this clinic, and he watches

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too …

After a few minutes, Breakstone pauses. He’s forgotten a line from Kipling’s “If.” “I’m sorry, I’m nervous,” he shares without embarrassment. When he finally finishes, the others applaud.

“Well, it took courage to fly solo like that,” says Williams, getting to his feet and walking over to Breakstone. “I never go up [before a jury] without notes. So I admire that.”

Breakstone’s performance is polished, confident, more than adequate for a budding trial lawyer. But Williams has more ambitious plans for these students: he wants them to be among the best trial lawyers in the country. To do so, they need to set aside the formality that so many attorneys exude and instead reconnect with their emotions. They need to show they care about their clients and their cases, that they believe in their cause. A genuine, human bond with jurors, Williams tells his students, is the key to winning trials.

Williams instructs Breakstone to recite the poem again. But this time, he is to grasp the hand of one of his fellow students and hold it while locking his eyes with the recipient and reciting a single line from the poem. Then he is to move to another student and recite the next line.

Breakstone walks up to a young man in the front row, takes his hand firmly and fixes his eyes on the student.

If you can keep your head when all about you …

Immediately, there is a palpable difference in Breakstone’s delivery. There’s a kind of electricity in the courtroom as he seizes the attention not only of his target but also the entire class.

“Keep doing that,” Williams encourages.

Breakstone grasps the hand of another student, locks his eyes on hers and continues:

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …

“Now he’s really looking at each person, connecting to them,” Williams tells the class.

Breakstone gets it. There is something intense and compelling about this moment, Breakstone in tune not only with his audience but himself. He’s no longer performing, he’s feeling it. The jury is his. This time when he finishes, the applause is vigorous.

Williams smiles with satisfaction. “An opening statement is not a speech,” Williams tells them. “When you recite your poem, you want to convey the beauty and power of that poem. It’s the same with an opening statement. When you lock in on a juror, that’s where the power is. When you make a personal connection with jurors, that’s real communication.”

Real communication is what this clinic is about. “Legal education is absolutely inimical to learning how to communicate with people,” says Williams, a trial lawyer who’s represented numerous high-profile clients, including Mumia Abu Jamal and the government of Cuba, and who was awarded the Thurgood Marshall Award for his work opposing capital punishment. “Law school is not the best place to learn how to communicate. The irony is, lawyers are professional writers and communicators, yet law schools continue to struggle in teaching students how to persuade and inform. Actually, the traditional curriculum often doesn’t even make an attempt to teach people how to genuinely communicate. So I see my mission as trying to foster communication skills and an awareness that genuine communication is rooted in self-knowledge and sharing yourself with others.”

Williams, who joined the Northeastern law faculty in 2004, has taught each summer for more than a decade at the Trial Lawyers College in Wyoming, where lawyers learn to reconnect with their emotions in order to relate better to jurors and other ordinary people. The college, founded and led by famed trial lawyer Gerry Spence, believes that legal training overemphasizes technical and intellectual skills; lawyers end up disconnected from their own humanity, which is harmful not only to their trial skills but to their souls.

“I call it the ‘cult of professionalism,’ this idea that to be professional means to be devoid of emotion and to be totally objective, and that having feelings cuts against your ability to be professional,” Williams explains later. “And I go against that.” Being a successful lawyer and person means being vulnerable, being open to others — reaching into yourself to find genuine passion for your work. While this is a radical approach in the law school setting, it’s something great trial lawyers have always recognized.

“It’s about being who you are and recognizing what your failures are,” says Richard Egbert ’72, a Boston trial lawyer who’s handled some of New England’s most high-profile and difficult cases. “One of the things I often say in front of juries — and it’s heartfelt, believe me — is that this is my 489th closing or whatever it is, and I’m as scared about this one as I was about the first one. I’m petrified. And it’s true, it’s really true.”

Stephanie Page ’78, a Boston public defender named a Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly 2006 “Lawyer of the Year,” agrees. She learned the value of genuine, human connection from her mentors in the Committee for Public Counsel Services. “I think what separates the great trial lawyers from the good trial lawyers is that they recognize they have to relate to a jury, and that means analyzing each case on an emotional as well as an evidentiary level,” she says. “Often, good defense lawyers are ones who bring emotion in.”

But the emotion and passion must be sincere. “The main thing is, you have to be yourself,” says David White ’84, a Boston plaintiffs’ lawyer and incoming president of the Massachusetts Bar Association. “Jurors are on a truth-searching mission, and if they sense someone is acting, that it’s not your true self, you’ll lose credibility and never get it back.”

Williams agrees. “I think people gravitate towards authenticity,” he says. “I think that’s what charisma is: people letting their true selves shine through. There’s something irresistible about it. People have a hunger for honesty. Gerry [Spence] talks about it as just being magical, that there’s a certain magical quality to lawyers who can do this.”

Williams is not teaching his students something foreign, he insists. Instead, he’s helping them uncover their authentic selves who’ve been buried after years of formal education. “I see myself in the clinic trying to help them build courage to remove those obstacles, to learn to take risks, to have the courage to be vulnerable to other people and to understand that all those things are okay in the courtroom. In fact, they are the source of your power with your audience, the jury.”

On the first day of class, Williams had the students mingle in a tight circle, looking at each other without exchanging words, then discuss why that interaction felt uncomfortable. The clinic includes numerous exercises on learning to listen carefully and from the heart, which has direct application in dealing with clients. And students learn to view a trial not only from the standpoint of a lawyer but from that of all the other players, including the witnesses and the jury.

Students also divide into groups of three to defend real clients in Roxbury District Court. The judges before whom the students appear have given glowing reviews, says Anthony Guadalupe ’85, a criminal defense attorney in Boston who co-teaches the clinic with Williams.

“I’ve gotten some interesting comments from judges both on and off the bench. They’re saying ‘Something is different here,’” Guadalupe says, chuckling. “I think it’s about what we’re doing in humanizing [the students]. They’ve very convincing, very passionate about what they’re saying and passionate about how they’re saying it. They believe in their clients.”

That much is clear. On this March evening, Andrew Silvia ’07 is about to present an opening statement. A tall, auburn-haired student in jeans and a black hoodie, Silvia looks like a college kid ready to hang out with friends. But, once he starts speaking, a transformation begins.

Silvia begins slowly, thoughtfully, telling the story of his client, a woman he’s representing in Roxbury District Court charged with assault and battery on a police officer. Silvia’s passion begins to show. He demonstrates how the police officer grabbed his client and threw her into a window. “The window didn’t break but her spirits certainly did,” he says, quietly.

As the class watches, spellbound, Silvia lowers his huge frame onto the floor to demonstrate his client’s arrest. He kneels, places his hands behind him, and keeps his eyes downcast. “Why me? What did I do?” Silvia intones in a low voice. “I was just trying to get groceries. What will happen to my kids?”

It’s a bold moment, but it works because it’s clear Silvia isn’t acting. He means this. He believes in his client. And everyone in the classroom is drawn into the moment, empathizing with her, too. Silvia hesitates a moment, then rises to his feet. The class is transfixed as he makes his final pitch: “I’m going to ask you to finally give her a ticket home to her children, to her family and to grant her justice.”

A half-beat of silence and then the class bursts into a long round of applause

Williams leaps to his feet and grins. “Now that’s an opening statement!” he says.

Elaine McArdle is a contributing writer.