Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes

• Once we get in touch with our own feelings, we become better equipped to express the feelings of others, particularly our clients.

• This is what it means to be empathetic. Gerry Spence has dubbed it, “crawling into the hide of the other.”

• He uses this phrase as a metaphor for “tapping into another person’s experience in order to see things the way he saw them and feel them as he felt them.”

Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes

In other words, we must put ourselves in our client’s shoes and enter the matrix – this very strange and

unfamiliar world that our client inhabits.

Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes

• Once inside the hide of another, we can understand how the facts were experienced by our client. Slowly we begin to care and as we do, we acquire the power to cause others to care.

• As challenging as this might seem, it is not the hardest part. The hardest part is shouting out to the world – from this dark and frightening place – what you see.

Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes

• For those willing to take this risk, there is no greater reward. By the time the jury begins their deliberations, they will have no choice but to see your client as a “human being” with blood coursing through his veins rather than an inanimate object who has been branded with the sterile label of, “the defendant.”

Walk A Day In Your Client’s Shoes

• A word of caution: The hide of a defendant in a criminal case is not a warm and cozy place.

• As Gerry Spence so eloquently states, “There is wretchedness there, not to mention pain and sorrow. There are always the scars of injustice and the evil mangling of the mind of the once innocent.”