Today, most trial lawyers and consultants accept the fact that all legal decision makers decide cases by first making up their own version of the case story. Yet, few have yet to fully adjust their practices to meet the demands of that reality. Facts Still Can’t Speak for Themselves offers specific methods for trial professionals to increase their reach into the full range of potential stories decision makers can construct (and will construct) during any single case, and then shows you how to refine those stories into the one most compelling presentation for any legal decision maker to judge, in any legal decision-making venue. What you’ll find inside: * How the stories decision makers imagine affect verdicts as much as their backgrounds and beliefs or the attorney’s presentation in court * Which focus group method reveals the real range of stories decision makers can build from your case * How to profitably apply focus group results in negotiations and mediation equally well as in trials * How to run voir dire like a focus group (and a focus group like voir dire) improving both in the processand how to avoid common misleading mistakes * How focus group deliberations are the least valuable part of the process * How asking focus group participants which side in a case they “like” could be a major mistake * Why you should think twice before ever again asking a “why” question or using the word “any” during voir dire or in focus groups * How to establish immediate rapport with decision makers and to manage how they build their perceptions of your client’s case storyin time to affect their final judgments In this new edition, Eric Oliver dives deeply into cutting-edge research in communication, human judgment, perception, and influence and breaks down the process of turning theoretical abstractions into effective persuasive practices that help legal decision makers hearand seethe case story from your client’s point of view. Each chapter is now supplemented with some of the most relevant developments in the science of decision making, as well as with the decade of additional experience Eric has acquired working with trial lawyers and their clients since the first edition was published in 2005.

A Brookings Institution Press and Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation publication It started two decades ago with CompStat in the New York City Police Department, and quickly jumped to police agencies across the U.S. and other nations. It was adapted by Baltimore, which created CitiStat—the first application of this leadership strategy to an entire jurisdiction. Today, governments at all levels employ PerformanceStat: a focused effort by public executives to exploit the power of purpose and motivation, responsibility and discretion, data and meetings, analysis and learning, feedback and follow-up—all to improve government's performance. Here, Harvard leadership and management guru Robert Behn analyzes the leadership behaviors at the core of PerformanceStat to identify how they work to produce results. He examines how the leaders of a variety of public organizations employ the strategy—the way the Los Angeles County Department of Public Social Services uses its DPSSTATS to promote economic independence, how the City of New Orleans uses its BlightStat to eradicate blight in city neighborhoods, and what the Federal Emergency Management Agency does with its FEMAStat to ensure that the lessons from each crisis response, recovery, and mitigation are applied in the future. How best to harness the strategy's full capacity? The PerformanceStat Potential explains all.

Major thinkers in various intellectual disciplines are featured in Thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Your patrons will find this guide a perfect start to their studies on 450 intellectuals from philosophy, theology, literary criticism, aesthetics, history, social sciences, politics and the sciences. Entries are divided into two parts. "Part One" includes: a biography, complete bibliography and reading list of the major books and articles written about the entrant. "Part Two" consists of an extended 1,000 to 3,000 word essay on the entrant. These essays explain in clear, comprehensible language the work of the entrant and his/her influence on the intellectual of the 20th century.