Sonya Hamlin Interview |
Posted March 2009 |
What inspired you to start writing, and what has motivated you to continue writing?
I hosted a television talk show for a long time. One of the things you want to do is bring in experts to talk about subjects that are current and important. I began to recognize that specialists really have trouble relating, and that I was having a terrible time making them stay on subjects that were interesting to the general public. I realized that the more specialized you become, the more your training takes you away from what daily life is about.
I came to understand what it takes to talk to the lay public - to create an environment in which it is possible to get people to really listen. Lawyers need to talk to juries about very complex material and need to make them understand. I developed a great series of techniques for getting people to relate to difficult, complex material.
So I had this great idea. Then, I was going to South America to run the first women's conference there. I got on a plane, sat down, and found that my seat partner was Vernon Countryman, professor of labor law at the Harvard Law School. Ah hah, this was it!
I made up a whole course based on understanding the things that people need to know in order to reach others, get attention, keep attention, make things clear, get people involved, and so on. He said, "I like it. When we get back, I'm going to want you to meet the dean at the Harvard Law School."
And so that was the basis for me to work at the Harvard Law School. I created a three-hour lecture. I talked to the faculty and students, but also to the most famous lawyers and judges in the country who were there to take the advocacy workshop. And so I was launched out of a cannon that first night when so many powerful people in the law heard what else we ought to be thinking about if we wanted to be successful in litigation.
And before you knew it I was writing book number one. I was teaching everywhere. I was lecturing at the National Institute for Trial Advocacy and the circuit judges' conferences and so on. And that's how it started.
Why did you keep revising the first book, What Makes Juries Listen?
You see, the first book, What Makes Juries Listen, was written in 1984 and my biggest single problem then was to convince anybody that making anything - any demonstrative evidence - visual, was very important. So, in 1984, it was a groundbreaking book. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. One lawyer said, "Listen, lady, I've been winning cases for years. You can't tell me anything."
Well, it went through 10 printings. I was lecturing all over the world with this material. But, by 1998, things had definitely changed. Now computers were really and truly here. People were doing and expecting such different things, plus we were beginning to develop a big generation gap. That was something that needed attention, because these four generations all sit in the jury box together ... They think and behave very differently. So I wrote the second edition called What Makes Juries Listen Today.
That went along just fine and dandy. But, of course, the world changed again. New issues came up, like how we process information and what we dismiss and discard now. The idea of sitting still in a box and giving over one's attention to just one person is foreign. So I had to create all new techniques for lawyers to be able to grab and keep attention in a one-and-a-half-minute-attention-span world.
What responses did you get when you asked lawyers to change what they usually do?
You know, when I first began, mostly it was, "Well, who are you? What do you know? Have you ever tried any cases? You're not a lawyer." And I dared to tell [people] that that was my best qualification. Because, if I was a lawyer, then I'd talk like one. And what I'm bringing is the alternative of how just plain folks talk. It was a great struggle.
So we got super-high-level folks attending. The faculty was even quite intimidated about critiquing them. And here was me, Mrs. Non-Lawyer, leading that group. But in a way I wasn't nearly as afraid because, you see, I didn't know a lot of them and didn't know their reputations. I felt that I was coming from such a different place. I was not another lawyer competing with them, saying, "You'd better do it my way."
We would videotape the group - everybody was up three times a day, to perform on tape. I would play back the videotape in private sessions. It was just me and a lawyer and he/she saw the ways in which he/she was talking to a jury. It was a very safe, private place [where] people could really share and it was a way to build confidence.
So now they take my word for it and they simply call me and say, "Please come and do your thing." They do not ask if it is a valid thing. But in the early days, boy, that was tough.
Do you have any advice for authors just starting their careers?
I would suggest that as an author the first thing you ought to do is meet other people. And ask yourself the questions, "Why do they want to know this? What would happen for them if they knew this? In what way could I affect someone's life?"
You have a passion to write. You have a reason. Something wonderful could happen if someone else heard this, knew this, found this. Whether it's a novel or a nonfiction work, the ability to reach out and touch someone that you've never met is astonishing. You're never there when they're reading it, but you've actually sent your message out into the world. That is the stimulus to do it.