Our consulting mission is to contribute all we know about language evidence to support lawyers as they choose what strategies and tactics will best serve their clients. Together, we aggressively advocate from the recorded evidence to deliver an accessible, sensible and logical presentation of the favorable proof.
Recorded conversation is complex at so many levels that it is easy to mistake appearances for fact. Illuminating the dynamics of language and human intentions as they are captured in recorded evidence has a powerful impact upon jury perception of the evidentiary weight and benefit of the conversations.
Even the most ordinary verbal communications contain both obvious and subtle meanings. There are words that misdirect and words that inform, words that intend to conceal, words that convey nothing and words that confuse. Everyday conversations include responses that are misconstrued or confusing to the participants who are often unaware that they are confused. Casual sounding speech presents ambiguities of meaning, accidentally or by design, along with mutual assumptions and shared references born of prior conversations that may be months or years in the past. Add to this knotted realm of possibilities all the secret intentions of compromise, humiliation and incrimination that exist in recorded conversations, and there are more mutations of possible meanings and interpretations in an hour of conversation than can be counted. Once trial lawyers are in touch with the appropriate analytical and reasoning strategies, it becomes easier to grasp the polymorphous implications of one cryptic conversation or a thousand.
The only way to master the complexity of language as evidence is to deconstruct the sum of the parts into the often overlooked patterns of communication expressed in the conversational topics and responses, changes of subject, mutual references and associations. Once we are thoroughly grounded in the structure of a communication, we can translate the words, sentences and conversational patterns into a portrait of the parties' spoken intentions. We can contextualize the conversations in the framework of other known facts. We can compare and contrast through the course of numerous conversations common themes of communication that expose the larger purposes for which the conversations took place. Most importantly, we can logically demonstrate our observations to the jury with scientific precision. While the unwitting targets of secretly recorded evidence may, at first glance, seem to be walking out on a plank, recorded evidence is but one floorboard among many in the evidence beneath our feet, once it is rigorously studied as a construct of interpersonal communication occurring in the full context of all available facts.
