The Bitter Law Student

One Way or Another, I'm Gonna Find Ya....

I had to deliver my Opening Statement in front of a judge and six of my classmates yesterday. It went REALLY well. I was told that my delivery was awesome, I was appropriately theatrical, I had a lot of fantastic things to say about the case that we're "mock" trying in April, and that, overall, I'll be a great trial lawyer... but I speak TOO FAST! Essentially, my critique boiled down to this: SLOW DOWN and you will be a force to be reckoned with.

This isn't a shocking revelation to me. I've always been a fast talker (Get your mind out of the gutter, Sleazy Smurf! I mean that I talk fast, literally!) and I'm aware that this could pose a problem when I am addressing a jury, or even my clients, for that matter. I've been working on this problem for years, to no avail. And then I remembered the one person that helped me with this issue in the past: my high school Speech and Debate coach (hereafter referred to as Speech Guru.)

I'll admit it. I was a Speech and Debate nerd in high school. (I wasn't alone, was I, Brian? Also, The Statesman and I used to compete against each other-- something we didn't figure out until the middle of our first semester of law school.) I'm not ashamed of my Speech and Debate experience. It taught me a lot of valuable skills about persuasion and addressing an audience, and back in the day, I used to ROCK at it. There's a shelf at my mother's house that is overflowing with various speech and debate trophies, which my mother refuses to take down, despite my protests that those trophies are almost ten years old now.

Despite the glory of those old trophies, however, my speaking skills are rusty. The basics that Speech Guru taught me are still there, but I've mixed in some of my old problems that Speech Guru had to whip out of me: namely, the motor-mouth. The problem is that I DO NOT remember what Speech Guru did to break me of that habit. So, I did what any technologically-savvy Internet user would do: I Googled her. (She moved away from Hometown shortly after I graduated high school and I had no idea where to find her.) Shortly after the beginning of my Google search, I had her name, the high school she was teaching at, and her e-mail address. Isn't the Internet great, in that slightly scary way?

I've e-mailed her and I guess we'll just have to wait and see if I Googled the right Speech Guru. Hopefully, she'll be able to give me a little bit of wisdom and insight that will help me tackle this problem.

posted by The BLS @ 3/02/2006 10:12:00 AM