DRI Damages Seminar

Using video clips from social science experiments and Gallup polls about the public’s perceptions of the honesty and ethics of various professions, including lawyers, partner Sid Kanazawa explained how stories about ourselves, others and our profession often blind us to the fact that we are not seeing or experiencing the same reality. He argued that lawyers have a special obligation to help our society find harmonious ways to live together by affirmatively creating and recounting stories about the 98 percent of the cases we settle through compromise and about how juries and great trial lawyers find harmony in discordant facts in the 2 percent of the cases we do try. This harmony can only be achieved through respectful interaction with those with whom we disagree. As Abraham Lincoln once noted: “The best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend.”