Workshop teaches Georgia lawyers to ‘take control of judges’ and jurors’ brains'

Linda Sheffield ends her closing argument by laying her head next to a bathroom tile splattered with ketchup, careful not to stain her cream suit. There is a brief hush in the courtroom before applause erupts from the jury box.

Sheffield, a veteran criminal defense attorney in Atlanta, stands as several camera operators stop filming, awaiting feedback from former Hollywood character actor and director Judson Vaughn. He tells her she should have let the ketchup get on her hair.

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This is not a typical day for Sheffield or the handful of other Georgia lawyers in the courtroom of Alston & Bird’s office in Midtown, who have each paid $5,000 for Vaughn’s help.

“It’s expensive, but it’s worth it,” Sheffield tells The Atlanta Journal-Constitution as she packs away the various props she used under Vaughn’s guidance, adding his instructions will prove “invaluable” in her advocacy for clients.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

In his heyday as an actor, Vaughn shared the screen with many film stars, including Brad Pitt, Kevin Costner and Jim Carrey. He moved to Atlanta and started a production company, WHAT Films, in the 1990s while continuing to develop a unique “language” of precise body movements.

Vaughn says this language, which he dubbed “CommuniKata,” is rooted in neuroscience and incorporates what he has learned over 40-odd years about winning and losing someone’s trust in a nanosecond. He says it’s what landed him role after role in Hollywood and is how lawyers can win cases regardless of the evidence or which side they are on.

“Emotion beats the crap out of logic,” Vaughn says when summing up his methodology.

For years, Vaughn has taught thousands of actors, lawyers and corporate professionals and prepared scores of witnesses for trial. He says some of his teachings come from his time as a gerontological researcher before he started acting.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

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Now, Vaughn is teaming up with Judson Graves, a storied Alston & Bird litigator who tried more than 100 civil jury cases to verdict, and Jason Sheffield, one of Vaughn’s former acting students who ultimately followed in his mother, Linda’s, footsteps and became a criminal defense attorney.

Together, they are offering a quirky trial skills workshop called JurisPerfect Performance Lab. So far, they’ve held three.

They say trial lawyers need to ditch boring, traditional techniques and instead channel the on-screen charisma of celebrities delivering dramatic courtroom performances in fractions of the time litigators usually take. After all, the average juror’s “legal education” comes from what they see on film, they say.

More importantly, a lawyer must gain jurors’ trust, the trio instruct. And so, their workshop teaches how to be both engaging and believable. It’s all about tapping into people’s emotions and instinct.

“Once people take the course, it changes the way they view trials forever,” Vaughn told the AJC. “Lawyers come out of law school believing that their most powerful tool is logic and reason and rhetoric, but logic and reason and rhetoric, neuroscientifically, is not how we make our decisions.”

Handshakes, asymmetry and facial expressions

In the first hours of the latest JurisPerfect lab in August, half a dozen Georgia lawyers sat in a conference room of Krevolin & Horst’s office in Midtown’s One Atlantic Center, surrounded by cameras. Each had a binder laying out “the six elements of instinctual trust” at the heart of Vaughn’s teachings, as well as dozens of associated concepts.

In a nod to his director days, Vaughn started the course with the crack of a film slate. Jason Sheffield then took a seat in front of the students.

“We’re going to teach you how to take control of judges’ and jurors’ brains,” he told them.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

By lunchtime, the lawyers had learned several things about communicating without saying a word. Who knew slight differences in a handshake can make or break a connection before it has begun?

Vaughn, that’s who.

He showed pictures of handshake “masters,” former presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, as well as an image of their counterpart George W. Bush locked in a less convincing welcome.

The secret? Don’t hold someone at arm’s length.

To teach charisma, Vaughn recalled his observations of Hollywood’s elite, saying Faye Dunaway’s charm was off the charts. He said it starts with an asymmetrical posture. Just leaning against a courtroom lectern with ankles crossed will appeal more to jurors than standing straight before them, he said.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Another lesson was rooted in a well-known concept with a crass name, where a person’s relaxed or neutral expression is unappealing. You can fix that by thinking about something positive, Vaughn said.

He said a pleasant, passive face is critical at trial, from the moment prospective jurors walk into a courtroom and instantly start thinking about which side to back. There is something creepy about someone with an unpleasant resting face who smiles when they look at you, Vaughn explained.

Cheesy or genius?

On the workshop’s fourth and last day, each participant was primed to perform.

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They had a few minutes to deliver closing arguments in a fictional trial against the owner of a Dunwoody apartment complex where a tenant was murdered by an intruder.

One by one, the lawyers tested their newfound skills on the rest of the class in the jury box. Their every move was captured on film for a sizzle reel they can show prospective clients.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Linda Sheffield placed a baseball cap backward on her head and sauntered toward the jurors with an arrogant swagger, embodying “Bill,” the intruder. By the end of her presentation, she was “Emily,” the tenant lying dead on her bathroom floor.

Ralph Hinman, a Dalton-based criminal defense attorney of around 40 years, centered his closing argument on a cowboy hat and at one point slapped himself on both sides of the face when referencing a scene in the 1987 war film “Full Metal Jacket.” He threw the hat across the courtroom and asked the jurors to toss aside the apartment owner’s “cover.”

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

There were many other, more subtle tactics used as the lawyers made their cases.

“There’s so much to take in,” said Megan Harrison, an Atlanta criminal defense attorney, as the workshop ended with a feedback discussion. Harrison said she initially thought the promise of controlling jurors’ brains was cheesy, but now she understands the rationale behind it.

Sarah Khan, an Atlanta defense lawyer in her first year of practice, said the course gave her confidence to step away from the lectern and engage with the jury.

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

Nautica Rollins, who has worked as a solo practitioner in Atlanta for about three years, said she learned to bring out her personality and not get so hung up on perfectly reciting the law.

For Hinman, who is taller than most, the workshop helped his fear of taking up too much room in court.

“This has freed me to some extent,” he said.

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