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As a trial attorney, you want the jury to believe your message. Jurors will believe a credible message.  A credible message is a message that offers reasonable grounds for being believed. A message can draw upon two sources of credibility:

• External Credibility: We believe ideas because family and friends believe, we have experiences that support the belief, our faith supports the belief, or trusted authorities endorse the belief.

In a trial setting, experts are the most common form of external credibility. Still, do not overlook the possibility that your message might have other forms of external credibility, e.g., let’s say that several jurors have a conservative, religious orientation, then a message that emphasizes conservative religious values would be more credible to those jurors.

• Internal credibility: You can structure your message so that it has internal credibility, which is to say that you can create a message that is its own source of credibility. There are three ways to construct a message with internal credibility.

(1) Detail – Adding detail is one way to increase the credibility of the message. By making claims tangible and concrete, details make the message more real, more believable.

(2) Statistics – If there are statistics to support the idea, then use them. But statistics don’t speak for themselves, you must make the statistics concrete and real.

(3) Testable Claim – If your message can be proven by the evidence, then emphasize your claim that evidence proves your message, “See for yourself.” This is what Wendy’s did with the commercial, “Where’s the Beef?” This type of credibility is powerful because it essentially allows the juror to test the idea before they buy into it.

Putting it all together

Whether you are going to mediation or trial, if you expect to win, you must have a credible message.  Ideally, you should be able to have a message that has both internal and external credibility.  This will help you Combine the art of Law…with the laws of Science.