We recommend that litigators pepper their presentation with  strong verbs, simple sentences, and apt phrases.  It might be useful to make a list of nicely turned phrases.  Use them in court when the right occasion presents itself.  Here are a few of our favorites:

 ·         The accused is a formidable man, an individual of prudence and sturdy morals

 

·         The accused has been betrayed and hung out to dry

 

·         Senior leadership is down on this  accused.  You can see it from the way middle management NCOs treat him…and it clearly comes from higher up.  As they say, if you want to see what the czar wants done, , watch the Cossacks.

 

·         You do not turn off your problems at 1600 hours as a defense counsel.  It keeps you awake nights, breaks into your mornings, and invades your coffee breaks.

 

·         In 1434, a man in Britain left all his property to the poor, naked, and hungry. The will was set aside on the grounds that he was crazy.

 

·         The state of Tennessee commented in Ferguson vs. Moore, 98 Tennessee 342, (1897) that if a lawyer had tears in his command, it was his professional duty to shed them on the proper occasion.

 

·         Our sense of military discipline often atrophies our sense of indignation for what is flatly wrong

 

·         Bureaucracy: forms, folders, folderol, and forgotten files…

 

·         Reasonable doubt:  Honest to God, I’m not sure…

 

·         The huge majority of human beings take drugs daily –in caffeine and nicotine