Modelling The Art Of Advocacy

A version of this article appeared in Legal Week on 6

November.

What makes an excellent advocate? What is that separates the

excellent advocate from the average advocate, where those two

advocates were called to the Bar at the same time and where they

both share the same level of experience and have similar academic

backgrounds? What are the qualities that allow an excellent

advocate to captivate his or her audience and make powerful

arguments in a persuasive fashion?

My background of working as a communications consultant to the

legal profession, coupled with my interest in Neuro-Linguistic

Programming, led me to explore some of the answers to these

questions.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is the study of excellence;

of how outstanding individuals and organisations get their results.

It began by studying the best communicators and has evolved into

the systemic study of human communication. Today, the tools of NLP

are used internationally in sports, business, education, law,

therapy, sales and many other fields.

The name Neuro-Linguisitc Programming comes from the three areas

it unites: Neurology ? the mind and how we think;

Linguistics ? how we use language and how it affects us;

and Programming ? how we sequence our actions to achieve

our goals.

The principle defining activity of NLP is Modelling, which is

the process of learning how others get their outstanding results so

that they can be duplicated. For example, if you wanted to become

an excellent public speaker, you would model someone like Barrack

Obama; or if you wanted to improve your golf swing, you would model

Tiger Woods.

In order to model effectively, NLP studies how we structure our

subjective experience and how we construct our internal world from

our experience and give it meaning. No event has meaning in itself,

and as the saying goes 'no two meanings are the same.'

If you asked two different people how they experience the same

painting or concert ? what they feel, see and hear

? you would find that they both attach different meanings

to, and thus derive a different experience from what are the same

two events. By learning how different people are 'wired'

? and in particular by learning what makes those who

excel at their art excellent ? we can add richness to our

experiences and become more effective in the areas in which we wish

to excel.

The Modelling process

I carried out in-depth interviews with experienced advocates who

are excellent at what they do. I also spent a week in the civil and

criminal courts observing the advocacy process. Finally, I studied

the language patterns used in a selection of court cases.

It is important at this point to emphasise what I was not doing.

I was not seeking to discover what technical and academic skills

equip an advocate to be proficient in court ? i.e. the

formal training one must go through before making it into the court

room, the increased competence that comes with...