Legal Practice Guide 3: Lizard-Brain Hyperbole, Applied to Insolvency

You'll never try a case, young'n, but one of the neatest tricks in the persuasion arsenal for an opening or closing is to take two things that don't have nothin' to do with each other and sell a beneficial connection between the two of them through emphasis and repetition.  A second great trick is to jumble a whole bunch of bad-sounding words together to break through the listener's rationality with mood.  Combine 'em and you've got rhetorical fire that could burn the village.

For example, say you're trying to convict two people at once and you want to re-characterize relatively normal lower-class teenage male friendship as a Satanic cult to rope one into the other's angsty hobbies.  You could do something like this:

[O]ften times what you've got with these offshoots that aren't formalized cults or satanic groups. But they're just kindly offshoot groups that are kindly self-styled occultists, and you usually have one guy that's kind of like the charismatic leader and then you have some followers...usually when you see people that associate that frequently, there's some sort of tie. Play basketball together, they're in athletics together, they go to school together--they have some common interest that binds them so that they spend that much time together....When you have multiple people involved in a murder like this there's got to be some thread that connects them, that holds those people together so they act together in a focused effort. And I put to you, as bizarre as it may seem to you and as unfamiliar as it may seem, this occult set of beliefs and the beliefs that Damien had and that his best friend, Jason, was exposed to all the time, that those were the set of beliefs that were the motive or the basis for causing this bizarre murder.

Shit, this is just one paragraph and they're already guilty - why?  Bizarre, occult, satanic beliefs.  This is how you win cases you shouldn't, friends.  Real lawyer work.  Justice.

Personal injury attorneys of the last decade have tried to tap into the so-called "reptile brain" of juries, put them into a shocked, primitive, protective state to generate astronomical "punishment" jury awards, but that's merely a hack's take of a larger body of work from neuroscience and persuasion 101.  

You're programmed, computer.  Beep beep. 

Now consider this letter to the editor regarding Savannah's closure:

Savannah Law School’s closing is a tragedy not only for its students, faculty and staff, but Savannah, as well. Many of the school’s students are locals, mature and nontraditional. Their education extends well beyond the sterile confines of the classroom and into our vibrant community. Now, as a result of the school’s closing, students are outraged and feel betrayed and beleaguered with uncertainty about the future.
...
I don’t presume to have the magic-bullet answer to these multiple tragedies. But this much is for sure. Education is more than bricks and mortar. Savannah has lost its only law school; one that produces attorneys who are committed to serve Savannah and other communities. 

Tragedy.  How...Elizabethan.  If you're not persuaded by this, you might not be a gullible hu-man, incapable of appreciating mature and nontraditional locals.  Normally, bankruptcy doesn't exactly engender passionate rhetoric, but hot damn, some people get off to anything.

This letter gets an A-, only falling short because our writer Lloyd failed to personify Savannah to drive home the idea that education is more than sterile bricks 'n' mortar.  Savannah's fertile 'n' horny, boys, and what a tragedy to leave her residents uninseminated.  

Sadly, some people just don't get the metaphor that law applicants are like a giant money shot.