How to Begin Your Closing Argument?

 

In this and following posts, we’ll examine how to craft and deliver a winning closing argument. We start with how to structure the closing and then here concentrate on how to begin the closing argument.

In a nutshell, your closing argument should have three parts: 

(1) an attention step to get the jurors attention and make them want to hear more; 

(2) the body—where you make your argument; and 

(3) the conclusion where you wave the flag—arousing the jurors and motivating them to want to do what you ask. 

Yes, a beginning, a middle and an end. 

THE ATTENTION STEP: Skip the “thank yous” to the judge, opposing counsel and the jurors unless it’s been a long trial, and get right to it. 

Here are some effective attention steps. First, Aristotle's thought about how to approach public speaking is to tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them. Therefore, you can begin with a road map of what you are going to tell them because that will catch the jurors’ interests. 

A second approach is to begin your closing argument with the case theme that you first introduced in your opening statement because this symmetry brings power to your closing and underlines your case theme. you could simply state it: “As I told you in opening statement this case is about greed.”

A third attention step is a quote to pique the jurors’ interest. In Augustin Ballinas v. New York Health and Hospitals Corporation, plaintiff’s counsel argued:

 “Allow me to borrow a statement made a long time ago by Edmond Burke, an Irish statesman and orator speaking in, of all places, the English Parliament. Burke said, ‘Something has happened upon which it is difficult to speak and impossible to be silent.’

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have seen unfold in this courtroom event that would make Edmond Burke’s words as applicable today as they were over two hundred years ago. It is not only that this child was damaged through negligence and carelessness, avoidable though it was. It is not that they had chance after chance that went begging time and time again to save him and they did not.”

If your closing follows opposing counsel’s, such as when defense counsel’s closing follows plaintiff’s, you may grab on to remarks made by opposing counsel and use them as a transition into your closing. With this approach, you can turn opposing counsel’s closing remarks to your advantage. For example, you can draw the jury's attention to what opposing counsel did not discuss an argument and then offer a favorable reason to your client why opposing counsel neglected the subject.

Join me in future posts where we can explore how to construct a successful closing argument.