Category: Trial advocacy

Moot court judging—once more unto the breach

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Moot court student leaders and faculty advisors are now registering for 2018-2019 competitions. One factor in choosing a competition is the quality of volunteer judges at the competition. As anyone passingly familiar with moot court knows, most of the moot court judging is done not by actual judges but by attorneys volunteering to play the role of judges. Moot court is a massive annual undertaking in legal education, with approximately 75 competitions listed on LSU’s catalog of moot court opportunities nationwide. If each competition uses 20 volunteers (a conservative estimate) and if each attorney judges at only one competition, that’s 1500 attorney volunteers annually. And that figure does not include the many internal competitions at various law schools also utilizing attorney volunteers. It also does not include the many volunteers at mock trial competitions, ADR, and other litigation-skills competitions. This post is relevant to those as well—it’s relevant to any skills competition that uses attorney volunteers to play a role during the competition, score the competition, and give feedback to law students.

These attorneys are crucial to making moot court broadly available so students can demonstrate and use their advocacy skills in a (simulated) high-stakes environment. These attorneys also have tremendous influence over the quality of competitors’ experience. The volunteer attorney judges must ask questions, evaluate answers and transitions, and give scores that determine which teams progress to the next rounds. The volunteer attorney judges also are often given the opportunity to address the competitors and share some brief commentary and advice. Moot court is “moot,” but advocating for a client before strangers, accepting feedback with aplomb, and firing up to “go again” in another competition round on short notice does help prepare students for high-stakes experiences in practice.

On all of the volunteer attorney judges’ objectives—educationally valuable questions, fair scoring, and wise feedback—their performance can vary widely. When they ask judge-like questions, score fairly, and give useful, constructive commentary, moot court succeeds. But when they badger or dominate a round, give superficial, inconsistent, or unfair scores, or share unhelpful or unnecessarily damaging comments to competitors, moot court fails.

After hearing positive and negative stories along these lines shared by other faculty advisors, I invited contributions about moot court judging. The questions contributors could choose from included the following ideas:

  • What are some of the best experiences you’ve had with attorney judges at moot court competitions?
  • What can attorneys do to prepare for judging to make it an excellent educational experience for students and helps the attorneys share uniquely valuable advice and feedback with students?
  • What are some of the worst experiences you’ve had with attorney judges at moot court competitions?
  • How do you distinguish between critical feedback and scores that are poor but fair, and inappropriate feedback and unfair scores?
  • What can competitions do to prepare their attorney judges and minimize bad experiences for students?
  • Have you ever pulled your law school out of a competition because of inappropriate judging or other problems with a competition?
  • How do you prepare students to handle any type of attorney feedback they may receive?
  • Some attorneys argue that harsh words and even harassment are part of legal culture, so moot court can help students by preparing them for that too. What are your thoughts on that stance?
  • When moot court is done right, what does it offer students and attorney judges who are willing to volunteer?

In response to the call, this compilation features three contributions: Patrick Long of Buffalo, Susie Salmon of Arizona, and Barbara Gotthelf of Rutgers. Thanks to each contributor.

PLONGBy Patrick Long 

Legal Analysis, Writing and Research Program Coordinator and Lecturer, and Director of Moot Courts, University at Buffalo School of Law

Q: What makes a good—and a bad—volunteer moot court judge?

We tend not to hear about the good experiences with judging. Few people talk to us as directors when arguments go well, judges are engaged, and there’s enough coffee. So as directors, no news is really good news. As a result, my most vivid experiences are all bad ones. I know: we need to be thankful for our volunteer judges. CLE is not much payment for the work a good judge does, and we simply could not do moot courts without their help. Nonetheless, there can be some real stinkers. The bad judges fall into two broad categories: lousy humans and lousy teachers.

In the lousy human camp are these judges:

  1. The judge who told a student with mild cerebral palsy and a slight stutter that “because of your speech impediment, litigation is probably not a great fit for you.”
  2. The judge who complimented an Asian-American student on how well she knew English.
  3. The judge who reads the bench brief for the first time when he arrives at the competition.
  4. Any judge who says “I know the dean …”

In the lousy teacher camp are those lawyers who have forgotten what it means to be a student, or to be responsible to educate students. They expect 2L’s and 3L’s to match their own (self-inflated) knowledge of law and procedure, and they expect problems that present near-actual legal issues and facts. These judges are incapable of inspiring students about the profession, or teaching them what they need to know. They also refuse to understand that those who write the problems need to find two issues, on interesting legal topics, that are not factually on point exactly with cases pending (because students will just download the briefs from Westlaw):

  1. The judge who disagreed with a student’s version of the facts because she had not read the record or the bench brief. Then castigated the student for the ridiculous problem “that could never happen in real life” after the student showed her the fact pattern. At lunch, she spent 20 minutes complaining to me about the idiot who wrote the problem, not aware that it was me. That evening, that’s team coach told me in all the years he had been coaching moot courts, he had never seen so lousy a judge, and he was convinced she intentionally tanked his team’s score because of her own failure to read the record.
  2. The judge who tells war stories about his own fabled career for 25 minutes in the feedback portion, ruining the entire day’s schedule, and ignoring the students entirely.

There are those rare angels, however, who really make me proud to be a lawyer:

  1. The judge who actually reads all the cases cited in the bench brief.
  2. The judge who tells you she enjoyed the problem.
  3. The judge who says for an extra round because you are thin on volunteers.
  4. The (actual sitting) judge who told the competitor who crashed and burned how poorly she did in her first argument in court, and how she thought about quitting the DA’s office.
  5. Your former student who comes back to judge, because she knows how much she learned from the experience, and because she knows it’s part of her duty as an attorney to give back to the profession.

These angels make it worthwhile, but they seem more and more rare these days.

 

salmon_susanBy Susie Salmon

Director of Legal Writing and Clinical Professor of Law, The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Q: Some attorneys argue that harsh words and even harassment are part of legal culture, so moot court can help students by preparing them for that too. What are your thoughts on that stance?

I think that attitude is at best misguided and at worst disingenuous. How do we create a culture of civility and respect in the legal profession if members of the profession model this type of incivility and disrespect (and frequently seem to be having so much fun doing it) at moot-court competitions? And, honestly, I’d give that justification more credence if the attorneys who misbehaved while in role then told the students in feedback that their misbehavior—while not unheard of in the profession—should nonetheless be unacceptable. I strongly favor moot-court judges who hold advocates to account, force advocates to use law and fact to support their arguments, chastise advocates for making false statements of misrepresentations, and prevent advocates from evading difficult questions.

But I do not support moot-court judges modeling unprofessional, uncivil, or disrespectful behavior just because some real-world judges and attorneys will behave poorly.

Should we sexually harass students during moot court just because Kozinski existed? Should we make bigoted statements because students might be subjected to such behavior in the real world? No. Of course not.

We prepare students for those unpleasant realities—without perpetuating them—by discussing real-world examples and how to handle them, not by modeling that poor behavior ourselves.

Q:  What can attorneys do to prepare for judging to make it an excellent educational experience for students and help the attorneys share uniquely valuable advice and feedback with students?

Nothing devalues the moot-court experience for the students like unprepared or underprepared attorney judges. Unprepared judges cannot accurately assess the substance of a student’s argument and thus will reward superficial polish and bluster over truly proficient persuasion. Read the bench memo thoroughly and make sure you understand the legal principles and crucial facts. If you have time, read some of the key cases. Discuss the law and facts with your fellow judges, if possible, and ask clarifying questions as necessary. If the problem presents an area of law with which you are entirely unfamiliar, consider browsing a treatise or two. Try as much as possible to prepare as you would if you actually had to decide the issue.

Q: What can competitions do to prepare their attorney judges and minimize bad experiences for students?

Competitions can help by making it as easy as possible for judges to be well prepared for argument. Look: I know it’s often hard to recruit judges, and there is only so much a competition can do to control what busy volunteers do to prepare.

But competitions can make it easier, more fun, and more convenient for judges to be prepared. Many competitions—including our internal competitions at Arizona Law—provide not only thorough, well-organized written bench memos and judging guidelines but also instructional videos that include an overview of the key legal and factual issues and some tips on judging and scoring.

With the proliferation of online education, most educational institutions have access to the technology that will help you make the material accessible to judges in a mode and at a time that’s most convenient for them. Explore whether the jurisdiction allows you to offer CLE credit to attorneys who review the prep materials (maybe even create a quiz to make sure people have digested the key information); attorneys always need CLE credit!

When you create the problem, resist making the legal issues so complex and convoluted that lawyers of ordinary intelligence will struggle to get up to speed; the students will work hard to understand those issues and develop sophisticated arguments, and few things are quite so demoralizing to a moot-court advocate as having an ill-prepared judge favor your opponent’s slick but flawed retort over your nuanced, thoughtful, accurate argument.

And I love it when competitions give coaches comment cards to make it easier to share feedback on the competition, including judging issues. I provide many more suggestions in my article, Reconstructing the Voice of Authority, which came out in Akron Law Review in fall of 2018, but those would be my top tips.

Gotthelf-Barbara-photoBy Barbara Gotthelf

Professor of Professional Practice of Law and Director of Externship Programs, Rutgers Law 

Q:  How do you prepare students for comments from moot court judges that focus on superficial issues?

I’ve stopped calling our program at Rutgers “Hunter Moot Court.” Instead, I call it “Hunter Appellate Advocacy” because I want it to be seen—by students, faculty, and guest judges — as an educationally focused simulation course rather than a public speaking contest.

Hunter Moot Court, named for the late Third Circuit Judge James Hunter III, is a year-long, five credit course in which students brief the case in the fall and argue it in the spring—more or less the way it happens in real life, which is the point. The course is designed to approximate actual practice as much as possible. That goal—making it as real as possible—governs how we approach the judging of the arguments.

This is what I tell my students. From their perspective as advocates, the purpose of oral argument is to persuade the court by narrowing the issues; answering the court’s questions, rebutting arguments; and explaining in simple, concrete terms, how and why they should win. From the court’s perspective, oral argument is a chance to clarify, to probe, to challenge, and to resolve any issues that stand in the way of reaching a decision.

I also tell my students this: None of this has much to do with their oratory prowess.

As Justice White once commented, judges view lawyers as resources, not as orators. As long as the lawyer can be heard and understood, I honestly don’t believe the court cares one bit whether the lawyer appears nervous or pauses to gather her thoughts.

Judges do care, and care a lot, if the lawyer is prepared; if she is respectful; and, most of all, if she answers the court’s questions, fully and directly. I tell my guest judges this as well, and I ask them to evaluate the arguments from the perspective of an actual judge hearing a real argument, focusing on what truly matters to someone who must render a decision in a real case involving real litigants.

And then I warn my students that no matter how well we try to prepare the lawyers who will judge their arguments, some of them are still likely to give feedback on things like inflection, use of verbal fillers, dramatic flair, and rhetorical wizardry.  Worse yet, I tell them that at least one student—probably a woman—will be told to smile more, and another—probably a man—will be told to “come out swinging” on rebuttal. This is the cyclical curse of moot court. As law students, these are the criteria many of us were judged by, especially those of us who went to law school before much thought was given to what “practice ready” means.

The lawyer/judges don’t always get this. But the students do. By the time we get to the argument phase in March, they have lived and breathed the case for six months, and frankly they don’t want to be told to smile more. Because we’ve discussed this, they are able to filter out the superficial comments and focus on the substantive feedback.  This is one of many reasons I always invite Hunter alums to judge the arguments.

__

Thanks again to the guest contributors above. For more information on moot court judging, see Barbara Kritchevsky’s law-review article Judging: The Missing Piece of the Moot Court Puzzle, reprinted in the Legal Writing Institute’s Monograph Series, Volume Six on Moot Court and Oral Advocacy. (Full disclosure: I was editor-in-chief of that volume.)

And good luck to every student competing in moot court and other skills competitions this year. You are making yourselves into stronger and more skillful future lawyers by all your work!

 

Beyond formal rules of evidence

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Last year the Wall Street Journal wrote about problems with sleeping jurors. Brooklyn law professor I. Bennett Capers’ new article Evidence Without Rules, forthcoming in the Notre Dame Law Review, points out a much more pervasive issue: all the information jurors take in when they are awake.

The rules of evidence strictly limit what jurors can consider. They are have been “understood, and continue to be understood, as all-seeing, all-encompassing gatekeepers, checking all of the information juries may hear or see for relevance and trustworthiness.” Capers shows this view to be inaccurate and incomplete:

The assumption is that the rules are all-encompassing, unbounded. But the truth is far different. To be sure, the Rules of Evidence place limits on some of the information jurors hear and see, such as witness testimony and exhibits, the type of information that is formally announced and introduced as evidence by lawyers. Other evidence, however, passes by evidentiary gatekeepers practically unseen and unnoticed. Jurors use it to decide who was right and who was wrong; who committed a crime and who did not.

It is this other evidence that “breeze[s] unchecked” past the gatekeeping function of the evidentiary rules. And, Capers argues, “[i]f the goal of evidence law is ‘that truth may be ascertained and proceedings justly determined,’ then that objective is frustrated when outputs turn on improper and unchecked inputs.”

He gives three major examples pertaining to all the players in the courtroom—parties, witnesses, attorneys, and others:

  1. Their dress
  2. Their demeanor
  3. Their race

First, dress—for example, glasses, which can be used for a “nerd defense” but may also make white-collar defendants look more guilty. As to the role of glasses, the article left me actually speechless with a jury consultant’s advice: “savvy lawyers should spray a defendant’s glasses with PAM cooking spray so that the jury cannot see the person’s eyes, at least when the lawyer fears the defendant might come across as ‘shifty-eyed.’”

Second, demeanor—Capers points out that the lawyer can use nonverbal behavior to supplement or tear down testimony. It was this aspect of the paper that seemed most connected to the topics here on this blog. A lawyer’s demeanor can serve as a kind of “performative listening” that doesn’t just elicit testimony but gives some kind of statement in its own right:

Consider the lawyer who drums her fingers on the table while a witness testifies on the stand, or rolls her eyes or raises a skeptical eyebrow. Or the lawyer who quietly nods along at a certain point in a witness’s testimony. . . . They are in effect vouching for witnesses, or in the case of opposing witnesses, implying a witness is unworthy of belief. They are offering the equivalent of opinion testimony without themselves swearing an oath or taking the stand.

The way the lawyers sit aligned with their client or put a protective arm around the client is itself a form of opinion evidence, Capers argues—unacknowledged evidence that would violate Rule 404(a) if it were considered “evidence” in the first place.

Third, race—which connects with demeanor evidence but is of course much broader. As to demeanor, which has proven crucial in death-penalty juries’ deliberations, the impact of race makes jurors worse at reading faces: “Several studies have found that how jurors interpret facial expressions depends on the race of the juror and the race of the defendant; not only do we have trouble with cross-racial identification; we have trouble with cross-racial identifications of remorse.”

The impact of race also makes jurors worse at remembering the facts fairly:

[In one study,] participants invented aggressiveness when the actor was black, [but] actually failed to remember evidence of aggressiveness when the actor was white. In short, it is not only in cases involving minority defendants where race matters. Race also matters in cases involving white defendants, whom jurors are more likely to view as presumptively innocent, and cases involving white witnesses whom jurors deem presumptively credible.

Beyond these three factors explored in the articles, there is, of course, sexism such as jurors’ bias toward male experts as more authoritative, bias toward people with families, bias against the use of an interpreter, and male bias against overweight women. “Outsider accents” are viewed as less credible, whereas neutral and especially British accents gain extra credibility.

The question Capers struggles with is what to do about all of this. Given the almost impossible bar of overturning a jury verdict, even on evidentiary issues formally recognized as evidence, the basic effect is “What happens in the jury room stays in the jury room.”

And he points out that existing instructions may exacerbate the problem. Telling jurors to decide based on what they “saw and heard in court” may “giv[e] them tacit approval to consider anything they hear or see—including the dress of witnesses, or the presence of supporting family members, or the defendant’s demeanor even if he does not testify—so long as they do not consider as evidence anything the court explicitly prohibited, such as the questions of lawyers.”

Capers goes on to suggest a stronger admonitory instruction, phrased in concrete, plain language. He also suggests providing jurors with an evidentiary checklist of the witnesses and the documents. Capers’ suggestion here fits well within insights from cognitive science. For example, Daniel Kahnemann coined the phrase “WYSIATI”: What You See Is All There Is. Under WYSIATI, people rely heavily on affirmative information in front of them. Thus, an affirmative list of what the evidence actually is could direct attention toward the evidence actually presented and away from the natural tendency to fill gaps using other cognitive shortcuts.

Capers’ most radical suggestion is to redefine the scope of evidence itself. Under his proposed definition, evidence would include “anything that may come to a juror’s attention and factor into a juror’s deliberation.” The implications of such a definition seem vague at times. For example, he says that a rape victim’s clothing might trigger a 403 issue with the risk of unfair prejudice. But there is an aspect of personal autonomy in how people dress for court; if clothing could be prejudicial enough to trigger 403 then could it somehow come within the court’s discretion to order someone to, say, put on a sweater or take off a sweater? This reminded me of the incident from a couple of years ago where a weather reporter was asked to cover up, on air. And what should a judge do with flamboyant courtroom observers in high-profile cases, for example the Tex McIver trial that just wrapped up in Atlanta:

Capers answers most such questions by relying on detailed jury instructions. Footnote 153 in the article cites scholarship that instructions are not futile and do make a difference, especially when repeated and explained clearly.

I appreciated the realism at the end of his article, acknowledging a possible counter-argument: Why does any of this matter? Why shouldn’t jurors consider all that stuff, as they always have? Drawing on Critical Race Theory and his own professional and personal experiences, Capers out that dress, demeanor, race, and all those other factors are not neutral:

Who benefits from the status quo when we pretend dress does not matter, or demeanor does not matter, or the presence of family members does not matter, or language ability or up-speak or race or gender does not matter? Who benefits? And who does not?

Silence for lawyers

Jennifer Romig1 Comment

Silence.

That was the heart of Emma González’s speech at March for Our Lives on March 24. After a introductory remarks, she named the 17 dead and the small experiences in life they would never partake of again. Then she stood, silent, for the remainder of six minutes and 20 seconds—the time it took for the gunman to kill and then escape at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. The Washington Post called it “the wordless act that moved a nation”:

The absence of language, the extended pause for contemplation, remains a rare thing in public discourse, and even rarer onstage. A moment of silence is the ritualized form of respect we employ on many occasions to mark tragedy, but it’s usually only a moment. González’s silence was an act that felt, in its way, radical. It was as if she dropped the mic — yet a mic was still in front of her.

The length of the silence is what made it more than rote. Long silences challenge the senses and the mind, reflected in an art critic’s visual and auditory hallucinations within a “supersilent anechoic chamber” on exhibit at the Guggenheim in New York.

Silence in these political and artistic contexts operates as rhetorical Silence. On a more pragmatic note, addressing silence with a lowercase “s,” Bret Rappaport recently published “Talk Less”: Elloquent Silence in the Rhetoric of Lawyering, 67 J. Legal Ed. 286 (2017). He quotes Che Guevara:

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

When silence is done correctly, it brings a “participatory dynamic between speaker and audience” in which the audience fills in the unspoken premise of an argument. In his article Rappaport goes on to describe background and techniques of silence. He lists three kinds of silence: simple silence as when you stop speaking so someone else can take a turn, silencing another by not allowing them to speak, and the “eloquent silence.” The article focuses on the latter. Silence can be eloquent when it violates expectations, leads the audience to understand a shared meaning, and is understood by the audience as directed at them. (Here he cites Purdue professor Barry Brummett.)

Rappaport goes on to show that silence enhances thinking by moving past quick, intuitive reactions to the world. Awkward silences can also yield better results in negotiations because the counter-party feels compelled to fill the silence, perhaps to their detriment. Silence also functions as flattery and, since by definition it means not talking, it reduces the risk of unintentional revelations.

Rappaport breaks down examples from movies and well-known trials (O.J. Simpson of course). He says early on that his argument for lawyers is remedial: silence as a “lawyer’s tool [is] one too often unappreciated or outright ignored.” For lawyers who wish to become more powerful public speakers or achieve better strategic results by saying less, I recommend Rappaport’s article.

I also recommend closing all other tabs, notifications, and alerts to watch the full-length version of Emma González’s speech at March for Our Lives.

 

 

 

 

New book: Litigation in Practice by Judge Curtis E. A. Karnow

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

What does a veteran trial judge have to say about . . . everything trial related? On my summer reading list was Litigation in Practice by Judge Curtis E. A. Karnow of the San Francisco Superior Court. It has some of the obvious—be nice to court staff; how to introduce documents into evidence—but also delves deeper into complex litigation, statistical evidence, expert witnesses, and the strategy of timing settlement.

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The book doesn’t directly address listening at trial. But it indirectly touches on listening by criticizing lawyers who interrupt the witness or use “body language such as a raised hand.” Judge Karnow advises lawyers to ask the judge for help directing the witness to answer. He points out that “[y]our questions, too, might be part of the problem, in inviting a meandering, narrative response.” And that leads to my favorite section of the book: “Bad Questions.”

I thought the section on bad questions would be good for this blog because I know I’ve heard many of these questions used repeatedly in depositions and at trial. In fact, one of the questions on Judge Karnow’s list was described to me by a senior trial lawyer as his favorite question.

So I’m interested in blog readers’ reactions to whether they agree these are bad questions. or perhaps just in California where Judge Karnow sits. What are other bad questions you’ve heard lawyers try?

“Is it possible that . . . .” Unless the matter is a logical impossibility (is it possible that 2+2=8?) or a factual impossibility (is it possible you saw a unicorn?) the answer to this question is always “yes.” Anything is possible. Accordingly the question is pointless . . .

“Didn’t you testify that . . . .” This is often a squabble about wording. I assume the jury has been paying attention, and testimony on what a witness has testified about poses the risk of a dangerous infinite regress. Find another way to impeach. . . .

“You heard witness X say . . . (or, “Assume witness X said . . . .) . . . are you calling X a liar?” This is either rhetorical flourish, argument to the jury, calls for speculation, or all of the above.

“Would you be surprised to know . . . .” or “Would it surprise you to learn that . . . .” Nobody cares if the witness is surprisable or not. The question obviously is designed to get a fact in front of the jury whose source is the lawyer, not the witness.”

“Is it fair to say that . . . .” What would it mean if the answer were yes? Or no? Fair to whom, exactly? . . .

Judge Karnow also says that “[a]ny question longer than fifteen words” is a bad question.

For cross examination, he agrees with the “common wisdom” of asking short, focused questions that avoid double negatives. His introduction to the whole section on bad questions serves as a conclusion here: “While most of these are ultimately harmless, they confuse the issues and are a waste of time.”

My question to readers is: Do you agree with Judge Karnow that these are bad questions at trial? Have you used these questions with success? Do you have ideas for better questions that do work across contexts? 

 

 

 

 

Deliberate practice and lawyering skills

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

This past weekend, the Legal Writing Institute hosted its second Biennial Moot Court Conference at John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Several of the talks touched on listening-related themes. Kent Streseman of the Chicago-Kent College of Law explored the concept of “deliberate practice” for moot court competitors. His summary of the tenets of deliberate practice could be useful for anyone who wants to improve their mental dexterity and ability to think on their feet. 

I once heard Rutgers Law professor Ruth Anne Robbins refer to moot court with an analogy to “muscle memory.” In sports, building up muscle memory can be a good thing—or a bad thing. If you learn how to swim the wrong way and then repeat the mistake over and over, she said, you won’t become a better swimmer no matter how much you practice. (Likewise for lawyers preparing presentations and arguments, creating wordy PowerPoint slides and then silently reading them to yourself may not be the path to great public speaking.)

In his Chicago talk, Streseman made a related point about sub-optimal practice: Even practicing correctly but in the standard, same way over and over is not going to produce results, especially if it’s ill-informed to begin with. Repetitive practice doesn’t help a learner progress beyond a certain fixed point, and in fact, “skills tend to regress.” 

The “gold standard” of preparation is “deliberate practice,” a concept from Anders Ericsson’s work summarized for a popular audience in Ericsson’s Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise. The purpose of deliberate practice is to yield expert performance:

The hallmark of expert performance is the ability to see patterns in a collection of things that would seem random or confusing to people with less well-developed mental representations.

To build up these mental representations, you need deliberate practice. In his talk Streseman outlined some of the conditions of deliberate practice:

  • The practices must be challenging, with the learner giving their full attention to a task demanded beyond the edge of their comfort zone.
  • The feedback needs to be informed by experts’ accomplishments and understanding of what they themselves do to excel.
  • The feedback must be followed by the opportunity to modify the performance in response, and to recover and reflect on the practice.

These types of focused practices lead to more effective mental representations of the argument in the competitor/advocate’s own mind. And having those effective mental representations mean the competitors can react more quickly to questions and make better decisions on what to say next and how.

The closest connection to listening seemed to be the crucial fact that deliberate practice requires the learner’s full attention. Moreover, the learner has to actually listen and adjust to the feedback provided. Speaking and speaking and speaking again without attention to feedback may be practice, but it’s not deliberate. You can do that in front of a mirror or your dog, and we all know sometimes that’s what a person needs to initially prepare. As beginners approach a task, they may need some repetitive practice with no feedback to get into their comfort zone. Once there, they can then start to push beyond that zone.

But rehearsing to a dog is too comfortable. It’s not deliberate practice, as the dog’s feedback is not informed by experts’ accomplishments and methods of excelling. My dog has been a lawyer’s dog most of his life, spanning three owners with a variety of practice experience both civil and criminal. All three of these lawyers were moot court types. But the dog still can’t coach moot court effectively.

Thanks to Kent Streseman for his talk on deliberate practice and moot court, and to John Marshall Law School and the Legal Writing Institute for hosting the conference.  I look forward to reading Peak and sharing any additional insights from delving into it.  I also hope to share more posts from the conference with additional connections to listening. Until then, you can access tweets from me and others at #LWIMootCourt.

 

Future trial lawyers, take heart

Jennifer RomigLeave a comment

Listen Like a Lawyer will be delving into communication and writing in the next few posts. One reason this blog is generally dedicated to listening is that there are already many excellent legal-writing blogs available for the legal community. (For example: Forma Legalis, Lady Legal Writer, Law Prose, Legible,  and Ziff Blog, just to cite a few.) The writing-related posts here will connect to broad communication themes such as voice, empathy, and the relationship between senior and junior lawyers emerging from a lot of writing and talking as well as reading and listening.

Law professor Philip N. Meyer once did an unusual thing: he spent thirteen weeks observing a federal jury trial on a daily basis. Day after day throughout an entire summer, Meyer sat as a watcher and listener, taking in the spectacle of the trial and everything it entailed—from the painful moments to the surprisingly lighthearted. Leaving court late at night, he spied the lead defense lawyer sitting alone in a car in a remote parking lot with the windows rolled up, practicing his closing argument. This experience is just one of many inspirations for his book Storytelling for Lawyers (Oxford 2014).

Storytelling for Lawyers has neither a chapter on listening nor an index entry on listening. The book is about talking and writing—in other words, producing—narratives, much more than listening as such.  But Meyer mentions listening on page 2, talking about his work as a trial lawyer:

I learned to watch and listen to how my audience listened to me, and I would respond to their concerns, reshaping my stories to fit the shape of their imagining.

The book is about crafting stories that will resonate with audiences, whether at trial or in motions practice. So I recommend it.

But now let me get to the point of this post and why I titled it “Future trial lawyers, take heart.” Meyer teaches a variety of classes including doctrinal classes in criminal law and torts. In his chapter on voice and style, he begins with a reflection on what it’s like to grade law-school examinations:

As I grade these examinations, as best I can articulate it, the singular difference between the mediocre examination answers (C and below) and the middling to good examination answers (B-range grade) is primarily in the “substance”—whether students can identify the relevant issues and accurately articulate the relevant legal rules necessary to analyze the problem.

The distinction between the B exams and the A exams is, however, primarily in the “voice” and “style” of presentation. Voice and style, however, mean something much different in the context of law school examination taking than in the artful trial and appellate narratives that litigation attorneys construct in a factually far more complex and indeterminate world. (This, I think, speaks to why excellent litigation attorneys were often poor law school test takers.)

Meyer goes on to explain that the voice and style of top law school examinations “clamp[] down” on the facts, use clean organization, and employ the King’s English.  The student’s voice must be neutral and must not call attention to itself. “A” exams certainly don’t use colloquialism or humor. And they don’t explore the story embedded within the exam hypothetical in any depth. Meyer quotes a former student describing the events in an exam as “floating factoids.”

This is just one professor’s reflection on his experience grading exams, and he prefaces all of this by saying he grades holistically rather than with a detailed objective checklist. Still, it’s refreshingly transparent and I think every law student should read this—especially those just receiving their first round of law-school grades.

Law students who want to get into the courtroom and try cases may be disappointed that the skills distinguishing great trial lawyers maybe aren’t really tested in this (very popular and prevalent) type of law-school exam. That disconnect is the subject of discussion, critique, and reform, and more discussion, critique, and reform. The positive side here is that Meyer’s reflection invites law students to understand their grades as only loosely related (if there is much of any relationship) to how they might expect to perform in court.

Meyer’s reflection on the emasculated role of facts in many law school exams reminded me of an attorney’s recent #PracticeTuesday tweet. Bryan Gividen was responding to a call to bust law students’ myths of what it means to be a lawyer:

 

Working with the facts, crafting the story, developing a voice, testing whether the voice and the story resonate with an audience, all of these tasks are deeply connected with what it means to be a trial lawyer. The best appellate lawyers experiment with all of these things as well, but there are limits: the idea of “clamping down on the facts” by rigorously adhering to the record, and controlling one’s voice for the genre of the appellate brief and the audience of the appellate panel. Gividen draws this line when he identifies competitive appellate work as an exception to “practicing the facts.”

Any law student or lawyer who wants to develop their skills practicing the facts should benefit from studying Storytelling for Lawyers. Meyers concludes the book with a reflection on why law stories are different from stories told by journalists, filmmakers, and artists:

A final characteristic of law stories, especially the stories told in litigation practice, is that these stories are typically open or unfinished stories—their endings are strongly implied but not ordered or prescribed. It is up to a decision maker to write the ending, provide the closure and the coda that gives the story its meaning, and determine the outcome.

Legal storytelling has a rich literature, and anyone intrigued by this brief exploration of Meyer’s book would enjoy delving into the legal storytelling/applied legal storytelling scholarship. One gem is  Ruth Anne Robbins’ Harry Potter, Ruby Slippers, and Merlin: Telling the Client’s Story Using the Characters and Paradigm of the Archetypal Hero’s Journey, 29 Seattle L. Rev. 767 (2006). She argues that the client should not look to the judge as the hero and savior; the client should show how they are traversing a series of challenges and need the judge’s help in a mentoring role. The client is the real hero, a flawed hero but a hero nonetheless, seeking to carry on with their larger, bigger, more meaningful challenge. So the judge is not supposed to save the client; the client can save themself if they can just get through this lawsuit and carry on with their larger quest. Thus the opposing party is not the true antagonist but merely a “threshold guardian” impeding the client’s real quest.

Law students can take heart in this advice as well, in understanding their own personal story and quest. Law-school exams are basically a “threshold guardian.” They are a gatekeeping challenge the law student must face in the larger quest for something more meaningful.

 

 

 

You should watch The People v. O.J. Simpson

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To echo what many have said, I now know what I’ll be doing for the next ten Tuesday nights. The People v. O.J. Simpson: An American Crime Story (FX Networks) is as incredible as everyone is saying. For viewers who lived through the spectacle, it brings back memories (“Where was I the night of the white-Bronco chase?”) and forces connections (an even closer look at the Kardashian family, which didn’t seem possible). More broadly and as the New York Times has pointed out, the opening scenes of the Rodney King beating and subsequent riots (mediated through TV news) set the stage not just for the investigation and “Trial of the [20th] Century” but for connections to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement today.

The People v. O.J. Simpson is also a story about lawyers and lawyering, with a deeper view than anyone got in real-time, drawing from Jeffrey Toobin’s book The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson (interview with Toobin here).

There’s the distracted Marcia Clark cradling a landline and feeding cereal to her cute but ungrateful kids while she learns about the murders. (Actor Sarah Paulson told the Wall Street Journal: “I didn’t understand what I do now—that it was a great failure of women everywhere to not have come out rallying behind her in what was a real assault on her by the media.”) There’s Robert Shapiro holding court about his greatness in a posh restaurant when he’s interrupted to take O.J.’s call. There’s Robert Kardashian patting his friend O.J.’s shoulder, his eyes widening perhaps just a bit when Shapiro suggests that he reactivate his law license and join O.J.’s defense team. There’s Christopher Darden in an unguarded moment with Johnnie Cochran before either of them knows what is about to hit.

During the first episode, I tried to watch with an eye toward blogging something about listening. The most obvious scene was Shapiro’s show of meeting alone with O.J. to ask him if he did it. O.J. looks him back in the eye and says, “No. I loved my wife.” The police demonstrated some really poor listening and questioning skills in their early taped interview with him, sending Marcia Clark into paroxysm and foreshadowing trouble for the prosecution. (Later listening to the tape, an officer notes how hard it is to question a famous guy like The Juice.) Yet there’s the initially positive and collaborative environment within the prosecutors’ legal team, fueled by confidence at the story they perceived to be coming together.

By the end of the episode, however, I turned off the analytical brain and just watched. Even now, it was too much. How did this all happen? I couldn’t parse it objectively from a distance. And I guess that’s the problem and one of the show’s essential points.

Do you know it when you hear it?

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When taking a deposition, can you immediately recognize the testimony you want to quote in a later dispositive motion? Do the words jump out at you like a “nugget” in a “treasure hunt”?

Legal writing and nonfiction writing have a lot in common, as a recent New Yorker article by John McPhee suggested. I studied his work in journalism school and continue to follow it more as a hobby than anything strictly related to lawyering. But McPhee’s article on selecting material is very much relevant to what lawyers do in taking depositions and conducting witness examinations to generate powerful, memorable words later used in writing such as motions and briefs.

The article is Omission: Choosing What to Leave Out (September 14, 2015). This post explores his essay and draws some points of contrast with legal writing, before arriving at the real connection to listening, which is the art of the quotation. McPhee is partly a luxury for the novelists disguised as lawyers among us, but here’s the pragmatic sell:

Lawyers who can elicit, recognize, remember, and effectively frame quotations in writing have an advantage in their writing and advocacy just as creative nonfiction writers do. In other words, being an effective listener leads to more persuasive writing and lawyering.

McPhee’s broad point in Omission was to explore the experience and process of cutting his own work and having it cut. From the beginning to the end, “[w]riting is selection”:

Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter?

And then when the draft is complete, it may need to be cut in order to fit on a magazine page, or just because readers may not persevere through 40,000 words about a topic such as oranges. It’s not surprising that he wrote 40,000 words on oranges because, according to McPhee, the decision to leave something in should be based on whether it is “interesting to you.”

And by “you,” he means the “you” doing the writing, not the hypothetical “you” doing the reading:

At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

This writer-centric view is very different from client-driven legal writing such as trial and appellate advocacy. If you as a lawyer writing on behalf of a client and putting something in because it interests you personally, you may be on the wrong track. In some cases, I’ve seen writers insert comments in their memos and briefs such as “Interestingly, . . . .”

These types of comments are rarely effective. And in that sense, the tenets of good legal writing and good nonfiction writing come back into accord, as McPhee instructs: “If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost.”

After exploring these thoughts on how to select material, McPhee narrowed the focus to selecting quotations. He received the following inquiry from a reader:

“I was curious—do you know right away when you hear a quote you want to include in the story, or do you usually mine for it through your notes?”

He responded in part as follows:

Dear Minami—Across my years as a writer and a writing teacher, I have been asked myriad questions about the reporting and compositional process but not before now this basic one of yours. And the answer comes forth without a moment’s contemplation: I know right away when I hear a quote I’ll want to include in the story.

McPhee is a master of weaving themes throughout his writing. (For anyone who likes thinking about themes and structures in writing—such as modifications to the “IRAC” format taught and derided in legal writing—read McPhee’s incredible essay, Structure.)

In the essay on omission, the theme comes back again and again:

Writing is selection.

He doesn’t explicitly mention listening very much, but it runs throughout.

McPhee takes copious notes so he can have lots to choose from later. (In a separate article, Elicitation, he goes into more depth about creating conversational settings for interviews, and how he uses a tape recorder unobtrusively when possible.)

He doesn’t need good notes to recognize a “nugget” in the “treasure hunt” immediately when he hears it.

And he brings affection to his work; about one subject, he says, “I loved just listening to him talk.” The joy McPhee described is perhaps not exactly what a lawyer experiences sitting at the deposition table for hours on end—until that moment of hearing a perfect quote that will ice the dispositive motion. (Forget about the Bluebook;

Forget about the Bluebook; block-quote it for emphasis even if it’s only one word.

That’s a type of joy unto itself.

 

 

 

 

 

The 4 T’s of Listening

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One of Listen Like a Lawyer’s most enduringly popular posts is “A Model of Listening.” The honest truth about why it’s so popular appears to be that students enrolled in listening classes are doing searches like these:

models of listening
model of listening
HURIER model
HURIER model of listening

One clue that these are college students is the timing of these searches: they tend to spike toward the end of the fall and spring semesters. I had actually never heard of a college course in listening until starting this blog two years ago. That’s when I found Judi Brownell’s textbook, Listening: Attitudes, Principles, and Skills. One of the blog’s earliest posts was that Model of Listening posts exploring the “HURIER” model and how it fits with lawyering. (HURIER stands for Hearing, Understanding, Remembering, Interpreting, Evaluating, and Responding.) Apparently a lot of students are assigned to write about this model.

Thinking about college classes in listening leads, inevitably, to thinking about the idea of a law school class in listening. I am not aware of any law-school class focused directly and solely on listening in the way a legal writing class focuses on writing, for example. (Please comment or e-mail if this is not correct.)

Of course listening is directly involved in any class with interviewing, deposing or examining witnesses, or negotiating. It’s a small but crucial part of effective oral advocacy. And part of the overall motivation for Listen Like a Lawyer is that listening plays a subtle role in just about all law school and lawyering activities. A more effective listener is going to be better at taking exams based on in-class material, better at writing papers building off of class discussion, and better at handling skills classes and clinics. Essentially, listening helps in any context where other people are involved. (Professor Tami Lefko presented a menu of ideas for incorporating listening throughout the law-school curriculum at the 2014 Biennial Conference of the Legal Writing Institute, with slides available here. Her awesome collection of listening-related YouTube clips is available as a guest post here as well.)

At the conclusion of my legal writing class, I like to talk about the content of the class and next steps for the students using the following framework, the 4 T’s:

  • Tradition
  • Trends
  • Techniques
  • Transfer

The same framework could be useful in shaping a law-school listening course. So here’s an exploration of what the final class session might look like in a law-school listening class.

Tradition

Listening has its traditions (which have been covered and practiced throughout this semester). Perhaps the listening tradition most deeply embedded in law comes from the conflict resolution field. Mediators seem to have the most training and, in the mediators I’ve been lucky to meet, the most personal affinity with the value of listening. In mediation, the chance to be heard is respected if not absolutely paramount. The mediator’s role in “nuanced listening” for the real conflict is crucial.

Advocacy presents the opportunity for high-stakes listening. Lawyers who examine witnesses must be able to listen to a witness, echo the testimony when needed, and recognize what is not being said. (The same is true of listening to opposing counsel.) There is a strong tradition of listening as part of appellate advocacy as well: Listen to the specific question and respond to it. Listen to the overall feel of the bench and adjust your argument accordingly.

Unfortunately what seems to be the most significant actual or perceived listening tradition is the law is this:

Lawyers are terrible listeners.

This recent observation from John Suh of Legal Zoom may capture it all:

It does not seem a stretch to say the legal profession attracts talkers, not listeners. Any traditions of listening within the legal profession must thus reflect a knowledge of the audience. Essentially, many bad listeners will only want to get better if they think it’s in their self interest. That was one lesson of experience suggested by Debra Worthington, a professor at Auburn University and experienced trial consultant as well as co-author of another college listening textbook. In this sense listening can be coached in a somewhat Machiavellian way, like mindfulness coaching for Type A personalities.

Trends

Legal project management is one movement with listening-related implications such as planned and spontaneous face-to-face meetings. When is face time valuable or a waste of time? What about collaborative platforms that allow clients and lawyers to access and monitor each other’s work real time, with no “wall” of email protocol to separate the work from the communication about that work?

“Social listening” on social media channels is not really listening at all, but it speaks to the way business is done and people communicate today. Lawyers interested in social media will encounter advice to engage in social listening essentially for marketing and understanding how they and competitors are perceived. “Listening” on social media is also of course a trend in juror and witness research.

Returning to depositions for a moment, court reporters may give way to voice recordings and digital transcriptions, a controversial topic to say the least. (How would a listening course be graded? A lot of ideas come to mind and frankly many of them involve some aspect of writing about listening. For example, a good essay question in a listening course would be to discuss the movement toward “digital court reporters” and what that would mean for the judicial process.)

Artificial intelligence-enabled devices that can detect facial expressions—and perhaps predict lying—will be an interesting development to watch as well. Wearable “sociometric devices” may be able to measure and report a person’s ratio of talking to listening.

Techniques

Techniques of listening would of course include “active listening” as well as “passive listening,” as outlined in Professor Neil Hamilton’s law-review article Effectiveness Requires Listening.

There is also the technique of fact investigation that involves first listening with open-ended questions throughout the witness’s first narrative, and then reviewing each step with closed questions to firm up the information.

The art of asking good questions is so critical for lawyers not just in litigation but in any activity including—importantly for those who need to earn a living in private practice—marketing.

And listening for what isn’t being said is one of the most challenging and valuable skills a listener can work on. (Peter Drucker is the most often quoted on this point:  “The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.”)

Those are just a few examples of the “listening toolkit” lawyers can develop.

Transfer

As with any skill, the ideal is to be able use that skill in a variety of settings beyond the specifics of how it was taught and learned. This is the core of what “learning transfer” mean—transferring learning to new contexts.

Listening skills could be transferred in a myriad of ways. Strong recall of spoken language is always a benefit, but has to be adjusted for the social context. For example, a lawyer may show a high level of skill at remembering and echoing key parts of a witness’s answer and moving forward in an unforgettably effective direct or cross before a jury. However, this echoing might seem aggressive and/or robotic in a private and casual conversation with a prospective client. A subtle and selective echoing could work quite well. Or, weeks later, a thoughtful handwritten follow-up note that paraphrases the conversation can make a very positive impression.

One of the most difficult questions about lawyers and listening is the role of trust. Lawyers simply cannot deeply and trustingly—and naively—listen with an open heart in a combative deposition or negotiation. Different listening skills are required in collaborative and competitive contexts. Even with clients, too much trust may lead to trouble:

But if lawyers transfer distrustful listening to all contexts, that’s really not good either. Several great posts have been written on bad things that happen when lawyers bring certain communication techniques home with them, as in “6 Things We Learned in Law School that Shouldn’t Be Tried at Home.”

And even within work-related contexts, there is certainly room for lawyers to compassionately listen to one another. Perhaps a stronger listening culture with in the community could in some way help ameliorate some of the stress and alienation, not to mention substance abuse and depression, that afflicts the legal profession. Practices such as bar-sponsored “take opposing counsel to lunch” events are a start.

Learning is a process

The ultimate message of this “traditions-trends-techniques-transfer” framework is that learning doesn’t end—or at least it shouldn’t end, and for the truly effective lawyers and lawyer students it never ends—when any given class is over.

Where does this leave the lawyer who wants to be a better listener? For one thing, the lawyer can seek training and the opportunity to reflect on his or her current skills as a listener. Here are a few CLEs related to listening that were offered this past year: “Civility Skills CLE: The Art of Listening” and “The Ethics of Listening—and Not Listening—to Your Client”. I am fascinated with the idea of actors teaching “improvisation CLE” and hope to take one of these classes sometime. On a more traditional note, in a few weeks I will have the privilege of taking an intensive mediation class and fully expect it to address listening in depth.*

Beyond CLEs, lawyers can read about listening, not only on blogs (ahem) but also books such as Thanks for the Feedback (which is about taking feedback effectively and has a lot to say about listening more generally) or Power Listening (which is more in the strategic, utilitarian school of listening). A thoughtful and challenging legal blog that often touches on listening is Lee Rosen’s Divorce Discourse. (For example here’s a post on how not listening is one of the worst mistake a lawyer can make in an initial consultation.) Kenneth Grady’s Seytlines blog and other writing touches at times about listening to corporate clients in the context of larger themes about legal-services delivery and innovation. (Here’s his “5 Reasons to Become a Doctor Dolittle of Client Communication.”)

That’s at least 75 minutes worth of material to talk about. So that’s  the end of these hypothetical lecture notes for the hypothetical final class in a hypothetical law-school listening course. Good luck and please stay in touch.

*Side note for 2016: I’ve also recently had the pleasure of meeting and talking with several listening experts who are working on a potential listening CLE at the International Listening Association’s meeting in Tucson in March 2016. I may have the opportunity to be a guest speaker or contributor in some way, and will let blog readers know more about that as it develops.

A myth about listening and learning

Jennifer Romig2 Comments

Listening is a loser, at least according to the widely circulated Pyramid of Learning:

Slide1

I’ve been hearing about the Pyramid of Learning — also known Dale’s Cone of Learning — since I was a child. Yet it has a problem. Specifically, a lot of credible people believe it to be “zombie learning theory that refuses to die.”

Digging through the evidence to find out exactly what is true turns out to be difficult, partly because there are just so many sources that repeat these numbers. One of the best I have seen is by Candice Benjes-Small and Alyssa Archer on the Association of College & Research Libraries blog (these are the folks that called the learning pyramid a “zombie learning theory”). They gather sources and trace how this idea started as a conceptual model about conveying information at various levels of abstraction. There were no numbers making any retention claim. At some point, most likely during World War II, the graphic of the pyramid emerged with numbers attached to it representing retention percentages.

The graphic of the pyramid and numbers makes it feel irresistible. Matching the strength of their appeal with a strident attack, Will Thalheimer has described the pyramid as “dangerous” and a “fraud” on his blog Will at Work Learning. A fairly comprehensive timeline of debunking sources can be found at the Institute for Learning Professionals. The American Society of Engineers published a conference paper with a detailed, balanced refutation including graphical representations of where these numbers appear to come from.

In her textbook Designing Information Literacy Instruction: The Teaching Tripod Approach (2014), Joan Kaplowitz commits the debunking to print:

As appealing as that notion [of the learning pyramid] might be, an exploration of the literature shows there is no solid, research-based data to support it. 1

Kaplowitz goes on to suggest the numbers themselves contain the seeds of their own destruction:

Even the numbers themselves should make us raise an eyebrow and question the so-called data. The percentages are just too perfectly distributed with each number being a multiple of 10 and the spacing of categories somewhat even to have arisen from any real-world experimentation.

That’s a lot of debunking, but is it enough? The appeal of the learning pyramid creates a pedagogical Scylla and Charybdis: If you tout these numbers, many teaching faculty will discount your credibility. But if you doubt the numbers, you may lose your connection with other faculty who embrace them. Benjes-Small and Archer advise “treading carefully.”

What does this mean for lawyers and law professors?

We are experts in being precise with words as well as being skeptical about claims. So we can avoid broad assertions of the pyramid’s scientific truth.

We can be careful in how we present information, testing it on audiences when possible and relying on our own experience as a guide. For example, showing a text-heavy Power Point while simultaneously reading the words is terrible. it doesn’t reinforce the information; it creates competing streams of information and, in a broad sense, is just plain annoying.

We can rely on more recent and more specific research into information retention. Not surprisingly, studies support the use of images: “Humans can remember pictures with 90% accuracy in recognition test over several days, even when the images are presented for only a short time during learning.” This is from Doug Linder and Nancy Levit’s The Good Lawyer: Seeking Quality in the Practice of Law, citing a study that is about 1000 percent more scientific than the cone of learning (as well as 1000 percent more difficult to read and understand). The science confirms the art of lawyering, as recounted by Linder and Levit:

Images are so effective to effective communication that David Ball contends a “trial attorney without images is like an art book without pictures.”

The fundamental truth behind Dale’s original concept is that information can be presented in many forms ranging from the concrete to the abstract. Whether teaching a class, making a presentation to clients, or arguing to a jury, we can “mix it up.” That’s not scientific, and there are fancier ways to say it, like Benjes-Small and Archer’s recommendation: “Think multimodal.” However it is phrased, this broad recommendation is more reliable than a neat set of mythical percentages.

  1. Kaplowitz cites Char Booth, Effective Teaching, Effective Learning (2011); James P. Lalley and Robert H. Miller, “The Learning Pyramid: Does It Point Teachers in the Right Direction?” published in volume 128 of Education (pages 64-79) in 2007; and Michael Molenda, “On the Origin of the Retention Chart” in volume 44 of Educational Technology in 2004. ↩