Dan Ambrose:

It’s the most exciting thing to see somebody get up and really have the confidence, because it’s a confidence game, to be able to present and connect.

Chris Dreyer:

In trial, slowly ramp up the connection to hold jurors’ attention.

Dan Ambrose:

When you understand what connection is and that you can control how connected you are with others, it changes the game.

Chris Dreyer:

Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and a CEO of Rankings.io, the preeminent personal injury marketing agency. Before we get started, if you like what you hear, head on over to Apple or Spotify and pound that five-star review button. And if you don’t like what you hear, tell me about it in a one-star review. Each week we talk to the best in the legal industry. Ready to dominate your market? Let’s go.
Nearly every attorney that goes to trial has the evidence to win their case. To realize the full value at verdict, the jury needs one thing above all else, connection. How well you hold their attention determines the outcome. Concept may be simple, but better connections with jurors take practice and acting on insights that come from years of experience. Today, Dan Ambrose, co-founder of the Trial Lawyers University, offers practical advice on how to boost your confidence in court and create persuasive connections with the jury. He has studied trial advocacy for over 20 years and shares what he has learned with hundreds of lawyers, helping them hone their craft. Here’s Dan Ambrose, co-founder of the Trial Lawyers University on how he got into law.

Dan Ambrose:

Well, my dad was a lawyer. Two of my brothers were a lawyer and my sisters were all lawyers. So it seemed like the only natural thing to do, after going to college was to go to law school. I didn’t really have any burning passion at that time to do justice, help people. Even after I finished law school, I didn’t actually practice law for about five years, because I had a painting contracting company. It paid several times as much as the starting salary that my dad was going to give me at his law firm. So I figured I just didn’t understand that you have to pay a price as a new lawyer, which is being paid nothing while you’re learning.

Chris Dreyer:

How did you get into criminal defense? So you were a criminal defense attorney for 18 years and then making the leap to PI after having so much experience in criminal defense, tell me about that path from a criminal defense to PI.

Dan Ambrose:

Well, criminal defense is a natural default to go into, I think, if you are hanging your own shingle up. And I enjoyed it for the most part back in Michigan, even though it didn’t pay very much. But I didn’t know that at the time, because I only knew what I knew, and the hours were extreme and the stress was over the top at times, and when you’re talking about somebody serving life in prison and the only thing between them and life in prison is you and your ability to persuade. So that is pressure of a whole different level than this money pressure that’s in the PI world. But then 10 years ago, my friend Nick Rowley, who was my roommate at the Trial Lawyers College, invited me to come watch him speak at the Consumers Attorney of Los Angeles, CALA, Convention. And so I did and I met a lot of people there and it was just a whole different vibe than the criminal defense world.
So because of that, it seemed like a lot better vibe too because people seemed like they made a lot more money, were having a lot more fun, and it was warm and sunny. When I got back to Michigan, I told my partner at the time, “I got some good news and I got some bad news. What do you want first?” She goes, “What’s the good news?” I said, “The good news is I’m moving to California.” And she’s like, “What’s the bad news? ” I’m like, “There really isn’t any bad news, because if you decide to come with me after I get set up, you’re going to have a great life in California. If you decide not to, you could have the firm and you’re going to make a hell of a lot more money. So it’s a win-win for you.” And about a month later, I put my cars on a shipping truck and moved to LA. And I spent about 10 years there.
And then about a year ago I moved to Las Vegas, ’cause I figured I’m more in the seminar and convention business than I am in the actual practice of law right now. And so to be the best, I think it’s important that you’re in the right environment. And the environment for conferences, and learning, and these get togethers is Las Vegas.

Chris Dreyer:

With your experience with the criminal defense, did you get to take a lot more cases to trial? Did that set you up for a different path from the PI perspective? ‘Cause it seems like a lot of the PI attorneys, the trial attorneys, don’t get as many reps in and of course, you need to get in the courtroom and get the experience.

Dan Ambrose:

Yes, absolutely. I got a lot of trial experience. It’s only an estimate, but about 175 criminal jury trials. If they’re not offering you something that’s better than what you’re charged with, well, there’s no downside to go to trial. I mean, unless you have some judge that’s anti-constitutional and is going to hammer your client and put them in jail when they normally would’ve got probation. Most of the time people were overcharged so that way the prosecutor could use it as a negotiation and leverage. And when I was younger, I was really a lot more abrasive and I was never politically connected. I was never a prosecutor. I never had the ability to go do those backroom deals. My only leverage with the government, with the prosecutor, was going to trial. Criminal defense is very, very competitive and people really, especially locally, don’t share and teach each other.
And they don’t collaborate on cases like they do in the civil world, because in criminal defense there’s a limited pie. The pie is only this big and every time you bring somebody in it cuts it. And so if you got a $50,000 fee, you don’t want to cut that in half and have your buddy come try it. Whereas in a PI case, there’s no set fee. It’s all based upon your ability to imagine, and believe, and create, and be persuasive. I got to trial a lot more, but there wasn’t much training. I’d go to conferences, just to try to get a nugget a here, nugget there, because I hated losing. I hated injustice. And especially when I’m young, I just had the time and I’d spend all my resources just trying to learn and get training. But I do prefer this new life better than the old life.

Chris Dreyer:

I was watching a video of yours, I think it was a really well done video. And you were talking about some of those early days, those home workshops. And it led to now that the formation of the Trial Lawyers University, so tell me about some of those early days, how you were assembling essentially your own little private Mastermind, your own community.

Dan Ambrose:

Well, I got started right around 2014. When I moved to California I didn’t really know anybody, and so I started doing these workshops at my apartment, trying to trial skills presentation. ‘Cause I went to the Trial Lawyers College for about 12 years out in Wyoming and I really didn’t connect with how they taught. I was frustrated by their teaching methodology, because I didn’t really see a methodology. And I was complaining to one of my friends, Jacob Norman. He’s like, “Well, if you think you’re so smart and you have a better way to do it, you should start your own program.” And I was like, “Okay, I’ll do it.” And he is like, “If you do, it has to have a cool name.” And so then we started brainstorming. We came up with the name Trojan Horse Method, ’cause it was like trying to access the unconscious mind of the listener, where they’re more easily be persuaded.
And so I started with that and I did that program for about six years. And I thought I had relatively success. I mean, I probably did a hundred programs and I had a bit of a community. But then the pandemic came along and within a day or two though, I got the idea to do these webinars. I’d never been on a webinar before. I’d never seen a webinar. I didn’t know what Zoom was. I just knew it was something I had to figure out. And the next day I broadcast a replay of Chris Dolan’s program that he did. He did this program called Case Analysis back in 2019. He was the first one. So I just did a replay of it. The next day, I did a live broadcast, replaying one of Sean Claggett’s opening statements, I think, that was on Courtroom View Network. And the first day there was 60 people on. The next day there was 120 people on and then did about 250 webinars during the pandemic.
Sometimes I was doing two a day and I was just getting to meet all the great trial lawyers in the country, Panish, Parris, Freed, Claggett, Rowley, Mitnik, and spent hours with them, because they had nothing to do. So I could spend hours with them prepping for programs, but really, I was getting them just to mentor me and explain to me all of their thinking and all the why’s behind all their decision making. And then we’d do it again. I’d spend three, four hours prepping with them. Then we’d do a three-hour webinar the next week. So it gave me a lot of time and connection with these people and a lot of learning, which I’m very grateful for. After the pandemic ended, I did a program in 2021 live.
I was nervous about it of course, because the pandemic wasn’t completely over. And I hadn’t done a big program before, signed contracts for 700, $800,000 for the space in Vegas. And so when you have to sign contracts of that size, that’s a lot of money. I don’t know if people are going to show up or not, but it worked out and people showed up. And we’ve continued to do these live programs, these little bit bigger, mid-size programs. The first year we had about 750 people. Last year we had about 1,200 people. I’m taking this year off, because I’m working on other things this year.

Chris Dreyer:

Give me a broad overview of the Trojan Horse Method and how it’s evolved and what are some of the frameworks or just the summary of it.

Dan Ambrose:

Well, it was my attempt to systematize the teaching of persuasion/connection, the physical presentation. And now I do a program called Trial Lawyers University Trial Skills Bootcamp. And that’s a three-day program. At Trojan Horse, we didn’t have preset scripts. We would just pick a story, somebody would tell a story and then we’d practice retelling it, like we have to tell a trial story. But it was a story from somebody’s life. It wasn’t an actual case. And the shortcoming of that was people spent so much bandwidth trying to remember the story that they couldn’t perform. Whereas now, what we teach is I give people very specific scripts on voir dire, especially the first five minutes when they’re trying to get the trust, they’re trying to get the connection with the jury. We have a set script for an opening statement that’s about four minutes long.
But it teaches all the requisites and how to use visuals, how to use your hands appropriately when you’re speaking with the jury, how to make appropriate eye contact, how to control your facial expressions, because you have to be able to smile authentically and be able to flash a warm face whenever possible. If somebody mentions a parent, “Oh, your dad. Instead of your dad. What’s your dad’s story? Your dad? Tell me more about your dad.” Well, to be able to do that intentionally because the more you can flash that authentic, just warm face, we know that mirror neurons, the jury’s going to have a warm face back to you. And you have to practice connecting in the eyes. I call it micro connections when you stand up and you got 14 people in front of you to look in their eyes as fast as you can to keep moving on. So it takes about two seconds to look in everybody’s eyes just for a second, but to get people comfortable connecting in your eyes.
‘Cause if you don’t and you go an hour, well, they’re going to just look away from you. We see that happen because people are not comfortable with eye contact. So you have to slowly get them comfortable, slowly ramp up the eye contact, the connection with them, the listening, the speaking to individual jurors. So I have it much more dialed in now. And the effects on the students is just, it’s transformational. It’s the most exciting thing to see somebody get up and really have the confidence, because it’s a confidence game to be able to present and connect. And when I hear stories back from my students, my participants, from verdicts, but just beyond verdicts, in everyday life, I mean, with their wife, with their kid, with people at work, when you understand what connection is and that you can control how connected you are with others, it changes the game. It changes your life. It really does, because nobody’s in this alone.
And the only way ever can get anything done is with the cooperation of other people. And the only way that anybody ever is going to really cooperate with you is if they’re connected to your mission, your story, what you’re doing. Just like a jury, if a jury’s not connected with your story and your mission of what justice is, you ain’t getting shit from them. It’s just a reality of it. So it’s been an evolution from Trojan Horse. And I had to put the horse down in the pasture, but this program is much more, and there’s only me and one other instructor, so it’s very systematized. It’s very dialed in and transformational.

Chris Dreyer:

When you watch a Brian Panish or some of those other individuals that you mentioned, Nick Rowley, what makes them great? What makes a Brian Panish great? What makes a Nick Rowley great? These individuals that really stand out, they’re these just elite attorneys, these elite trial attorneys. And of course, they’re as passionate as you are. You have all this experience. What makes the great great?

Dan Ambrose:

Well, they’re all different. Obviously, a Nick Rowley, a Brian Panish, a Keith Mitnick, a Joe Fried, very different demeanors, very different personalities. But what they have in common is A, they try a lot of cases. And so if you try a lot of cases and you study trial, you’re going to get superior trial strategy. And that is very important. How you tell the story, the sequence in ordering of witnesses, how you frame the opening statement and the closing argument is critical. But the one thing that they have in common that really can’t be taught is that they all really focus on the connection with the jury. And they all have different abilities to connect. Nick Rowley, if you watch him on CVN, he’s very, very, very, very, very good at it. He’s a super connector. Whereas somebody like Brian Panish, he’s a great connector too, but he just takes a little bit longer, because he’s just not as warm and friendly until you get to know him.
When you get to know him, he’s one of the greatest guys I’ve ever met. But until I got to know him, I thought he was gruff and just not very friendly. So when the jury gets to know him after a week or two, then they can connect with him, because it’s all about the connection with the jury. And so I think Brian knows he’s just not as warm and bubbly, that’s not him. So his trials tend to take a little bit longer for the jury to get to connect with him and get to know him and get comfortable with him. But they all focus on their connection with the jury, because that is the whole game. Everybody’s got the evidence. I mean, to different degrees, if you don’t get kicked out of court on a directed verdict, you have evidence to win the case. You just have to have the connection. I said to Joe Fried, I said, “It doesn’t matter what story you’re telling if nobody’s listening, if you’re not connected.”
And he said, “Dan, the inverse is true. It doesn’t matter what story you’re telling if you are connected, because a jury is going to find the facts to support your case, because they want you to win.” And that’s just all there is to it. So it’s all connection.

Chris Dreyer:

I wanted to dive deeper into the concept of connection. It comes naturally for the Nick Rowleys of the world, but for everyone else, I wanted to pull apart the mechanics of the concept of connection.

Dan Ambrose:

So the micro skills of connection are appropriate eye contact, and that’s the ability to learn how to connect in people’s eyes really quickly and then keep coming back and keep ramping it up until you are having a three-minute conversation with them. But you have to let them get comfortable looking you in the eye. Controlling the pacing and pausing of your voice is critical. If you ever listen to audiobooks, they speak very slowly. They pause frequently, because their only medium of teaching and communication is the voice. Most great trial lawyers are very cognizant of their speech patterns. And it’s important to speak slowly, to pause frequently, because what it does is allows your audience to process the information. People that speak very rapidly and don’t pause appropriately, they leave no time for the mind of the audience to process the information.
And then eventually, the listener gets worn down because they can’t process the information fast, quickly enough, and they stop listening because they’re exhausted. So that was clearly an example of that. And I’ve found that people of higher intelligence speak more rapidly, just unconsciously because they’re processing at the same speed with being completely unaware that their audience may not have their Mensa IQ and are not processing at the same speed. So speech patterns, facial expressions, learning how to smile authentically or to look concerned or whatever you want the jury to feel. Because it doesn’t matter how I feel or any particular lawyer feels, it only matters, how do you want the jury to feel in that moment? And to be able to control your facial expressions is everything. And people are like, “It’s like acting.” Okay, well, or it is acting, frankly. But great acting comes from inside. It’s living the role.
And the difference between an actor and a trial lawyer is a trial lawyer has to actually connect with the audience and an actor has to just to connect with the part and the other actor. Being a trial lawyer is a lot more like being a standup comedian. You have your set scripts or shtick, what you wanted to say, but you have to be able to riff or flow with the audience and connect to your audience and make sure they’re getting it. That ability to control the facial expressions is critical. We use our hands naturally when we talk as human beings. But when people get up there in front of a jury and they get all in their head and the tension starts, it’s like their arms sometimes become paralyzed. Or they do weird shit, like grip their hands and make this little fist next to them. And it’s the weirdest stuff.
If you want to connect with one person, then you should turn a little bit to the side and learn to move your hand with a rhythm of your voice and keep it a couple inches below your chin. So that way besides the eyes, the face, the voice connecting, now you have a visual beacon almost to bring them into your face. Because when your hand’s moving, it’s constant saying, “Come on. Come with, come follow me,” when it’s moving with the rhythm of your voice. But it takes a lot of practice and not only draws in that one particular listener, but it draws in the listeners, the other jurors who are around them, because you have all this, you’re hitting so many sensory perceptions. The learning of hand gesticulation, how to control where the jury looks, like if I want you all to look at, “Hey, when I look at my picture on my phone,” but if I look back at the jury because I’m insecure, now, they all look into my eyes and so I can control where they look.
There’s a few of them. They’re obviously listening. Listening is the bridge, the jury listening to you. And that’s why you have to demonstrate to the jury that you’re listening to them by occasionally repeating back what a juror says to a different juror, paraphrasing it, so that it was like, “Oh, I’m listening. Oh, I made that particular juror feel important.” I mean, that’s just natural communication. And you listening, really listening, to the jury, so many lawyers don’t listen because they have tension and they’re thinking, “Where am I going? Where am I going? Where am I going?” Not being present, right here. And so those are some of the skills that are critical, but it’s critical to practice these skills too. People don’t practice. It’s the craziest thing. They just think they’re going to not do a trial for a year or two and go into court and it’s all going to come back to them. That’s insane.
I think being a great trial lawyer is like being a martial artist, because you have to coordinate so many things, your eyes, your voice, your face, your hands. And you have to remember what you want to say because words matter and you have to look like you’re not trying at all, or else you’ll look stiff. And the only way you get there is to practice. Yet lawyers want to practice and learn to be trial lawyers by just going to lectured seminars and listening to lawyers speak or watching videos on CVN. That’s like trying to teach a kid how to ride a bike and you show them a picture of a video of a guy riding a bike, “Go ride.” “That’s crazy. I could fall. I’m not going to go ride.” If anybody ever wants to be good at anything, they get a coach, they practice, they practice, and they practice, if you want to become worldclass. But these skills require practice.

Chris Dreyer:

I love the rhythm, the cadence, the tonality, the facial expressions, the eye contact. There’s so much there and it makes sense. I get uncomfortable sometimes. When someone’s just staring at my face, I get uncomfortable and I look away and then I find myself not hearing what they’re saying. The other thing too, on the Bloom’s Taxonomy, being… So I was a former teacher for a couple years before I got into the digital marketing world. And at the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy, you got recall and you could study something and take a test and pass, but then above that you got application then analyze and synthesize at the top.
But you have to go through that pyramid. You have to do the application and move up the ladder. And then that’s where you get to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy. You can create your own method of doing something, which makes so much sense for what you’re talking about. It’s getting those reps in and can’t just go watch a webinar or read a book and expect to be a great trial attorney.

Dan Ambrose:

You can’t. It takes reps, takes practice, takes a lot of commitment and discipline. That’s why most people don’t do it.

Chris Dreyer:

For the audience listening that wants to improve their skills and become a better trial attorney, where can they go to learn more and how can they get in touch with you?

Dan Ambrose:

We are doing a conference May 17th through 21st in Huntington Beach, California. It is going to be my greatest accomplishment. And I say that because, well, first of all, it’s going to be a lot smaller. And I bought out this entire hotel and every room has an ocean view and a balcony. And everybody in the hotel is going to be with our event, with our conference. It’s going to be great for building your professional networks. But also, there’s four tracks, the best trial lawyers in the country teaching stuff that they’ve actually never taught before. Joe Fried and Sach Oliver are doing three hours on advanced negotiation. Sean Claggett is doing three days, one day with Dorothy Clay Sims on crushing defense experts, one day with John Campbell on big data, what it is and how they use it in litigation and settlement negotiations.
And one day with his partner Jordan Logan, breaking down how they built, cause you build a case, no case is good when it comes in, you have to build it. And how they built these two different kinds of cases. One’s a medical case and one’s a auto bicycle case. But they were both eight-figure verdicts, because they have a unique way of doing it. And then Rex Parris’s firm is doing three days basically on their Parris methodology, because they get tremendous results across the board in different kinds of cases and with different lawyers. So clearly, it’s not lawyer specific. But then we’ve got Brian Panish, Rahul Ravipudi, Lloyd Bell. But the point is, this is a smaller conference, so you’re going to actually get to know these people.
But besides that, there’s going to be eight workshop tracks and some of these are bootcamps. So I’m teaching a two-day bootcamp on this connection that I’m talking about, which requires six weeks of Zoom prep. Dale Galipo is teaching a two-day bootcamp on civil rights trial mastery. He’s the most prolific civil rights trial lawyer that I know of in the country. He tries at least a dozen cases a year in federal court on police brutality and wins 11 out of 12. He’s insane. David deRubertis, best employment lawyer I know, he’s doing a two-day MasterClass on employment trials and building and getting great verdicts in employment cases. Cliff Atkinson who wrote the book Beyond Bullet Points is doing a one-day workshop on visual advocacy and building your opening statement, your visual story.
And then there’s a lot of half-day workshops with different lawyers teaching different specific skills. But they’re in small groups of eight people, so you get to know these people. You get out of your chair and you’re actually practicing a skill. This is going to be the most tremendous learning that I think because learning is not just the stuff in the room, but also the conversations afterwards with the lawyers, with the great trial lawyers, with all the great lawyers that are there, because everybody who’s there really wants to get better. So that is going to be a great location to learn.
But also, everything I’ve ever done is been recorded and it’s on a website and it’s now an app. It’s TLU On Demand. And so I’d gathered the pleadings, transcripts and PowerPoints for every case, everything we work on, and I keep a digital library for the subscribers to that. But again, that you’re really learning trial strategy there. To learn to skill is you just have to get up and practice. You have to find a coach. You have to go to trial. Going to trial is not enough. You have to really prepare and hone your story, hone your skills before you get there. Otherwise, it’s just an exercise in PTSD, which is post-trial stress disorder, because trial’s stressful, but getting your ass kicked and publicly humiliated and losing a lot of money is way beyond stressful.
But that can all be avoided with preparation, obviously case collection. But to get the right case, it takes a lot of preparation to get it ready to go to trial. And that’s why so few people go to trial, because it’s just so much work. It’s so much commitment out of your life. It takes so much. And I teach a bootcamp once a month on these skills in Vegas typically, but I also do it privately for law firms around the country. So that’s how you can get better. And if anybody ever needs to get a hold of me, my email is dan@triallawyersuniversity.com and my cell phone is (248) 808-3130.

Chris Dreyer:

Thanks so much to Dan Ambrose for everything he shared today. Let’s go through the key takeaways. It’s time for the pinpoints. Pinpoint number one, start small. Most people are not comfortable with eye contact, let alone eye contact with a stranger in a strange setting like a courtroom. To help the jury connect with you and the story you want to hear, you need to ramp up the connection over time.

Dan Ambrose:

Connecting in the eyes, I call it micro connections when you stand up and you got 14 people in front of you to look in their eyes as fast as you can to keep moving on. So it takes about two seconds to look in everybody’s eyes just for a second, but to get people comfortable connecting in your eyes.

Chris Dreyer:

Pinpoint number two, slow it down. Dial back on how quickly you talk. Give the jury a moment to process the information you gave them. Your voice is probably moving as quickly as your mind, but not everyone can process as fast as you talk. Pause between important parts to let it sink in.

Dan Ambrose:

People that speak very rapidly and don’t pause appropriately, they leave no time for the mind of the audience to process the information. And then eventually, the listener gets worn down because they can’t process the information quickly enough and they stop listening because they’re exhausted.

Chris Dreyer:

And pinpoint number three, get in the ring. Great trial attorneys practice how they connect. It may be easier for some, but to succeed, everyone needs practice. Watching presentations over and over will only take you so far.

Dan Ambrose:

I think being a great trial lawyer is like being a martial artist, because you have to coordinate so many things, your eyes, your voice, your face, your hands. And you have to remember what you help want to say because words matter and you have to look like you’re not trying at all or else you’ll look stiff. And the only way you get there is to practice.

Chris Dreyer:

I’m Chris Dreyer. Thanks for listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. If you made it this far, it’s time to pay the tax. No, I’m not talking about taking your cash like Big G. I’m asking you for a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. Leave me a review and I’ll forever be grateful. If this is your first episode, welcome and thanks for hanging out. Come back for fresh interviews where you can hear from those making it rain. Now, get out there and dominate.