Advocacy: Art form or learned skill?
Welcome to the French Quarter Chambers CLE Series. Your legal CPD in a podcast. Today Rachael Hempling speaks with fellow chambers member, Jane Fitzgerald, about whether advocacy should be considered an art form or learned skill.
Jane FitzGerald
In addition to her busy practice as a barrister, Jane also teaches and provides advocacy and communication consulting services in Australia and internationally. In Australia, she teaches and provides advocacy consulting services to the Bar Association of Queensland - Bar Practice Course, the Australian Advocacy Institute, the College of Law and to firms, groups and individuals offering communications advice and workshops. In the US, she provides advocacy training as part of the Building Trial Skills program offered by the National Institute of Trial Advocacy (NITA) in San Francisco and San Diego. She completed her teacher training in 2009, and achieved her Advocate and Master Advocate Designations from NITA in 2011.
Understanding advocacy
While advocacy is a unique and refined art form crafted by the individual lawyer and perhaps adapted for a specific judge and/or jury, it should also be considered a practiced skill that can be learned and developed further.
“Advocacy is like any other skill, whether it be swimming, walking or playing tennis. We don’t expect that the only time Roger Federer picks up a racket is when he is playing a Grand Slam. There are many components to his training.”
As lawyers we need to practice the components parts of advocacy so we can make what is an interesting a viable product even better.
Spent time in front of the mirror.
Practice your appearance.
Video what you look like.
Don’t be so hard on yourself!
Join us as we find out the how and why of developing our advocacy skills as both an art form and a learned and practiced skill.
