Brent Turman, Partner and Trial Attorney with Bell Nunnally & Martin LLP in Dallas, TX, joins the podcast to talk about how attorneys can draw inspiration from Kanye West in their approach to litigation. Brent uses milestones in Kanye’s life and career to illustrate opportunities for litigators in how they manage cases. Brent and Dr. Steve Wood discuss four specific lessons including finding your voice, listening, using the right strategy, and pushing the envelope. This unique and interesting episode includes multiple examples and stories from both Kanye’s career as well as from different cases that demonstrate how attorneys truly can be inspired by Kanye West.
Full Episode Transcript
[0:05] Steve Welcome to another edition of the Litigation Psychology Podcast brought to you by Courtroom Sciences Inc. I am Steve Wood and today’s topic is going to be something of interest. You know, as individuals, as professionals, we have to look for motivation from outside other sources, and that might be athletes, movies, you know, directors, and in some instances, it could be hip-hop artists. Now today to talk to me about his inspiration from a hip-hop artist is Brent Turman. Brent, how the heck are you? Good to see you again.
[0:40] Brent Doing doing great, thank you for having back Steve. Looking forward to this today.
[0:43] Steve Sure. Yeah, so today I brought you on because you have found some inspiration in a let’s just say less than normal spot for someone who is an attorney normally you would think. But uh, you found some inspiration from Kanye West, and yes we’re talking the Kanye West the rapper. So when you had talked to me before about wanting to come on and talk about where you got your inspiration from, that I was… I was a little taken aback because I thought, “Hey Brent, this… this isn’t a hip-hop show you know. You’re gonna have to sell me on this and how it is that you pull motivation from Kanye.” But once I heard you I thought, “You know, there’s… there’s something here.” So you do this normally as a presentation, more of a CLE for other organizations, but we’re kind of doing more of a condensed version where we’re going to hit many of the highlights that you do of your presentation. So can you just talk to the audience initially and you know give us a little bit more of insight about how you draw inspiration from Kanye West?
[1:43] Brent Definitely, thank you again. My name is Brent Turman. I am a partner and a trial attorney at the law firm of Bell Nunnally & Martin here based in Dallas, Texas. And yes, this is a presentation I’ve been taking around the country to bar associations and then also litigation sections for larger firms. And once all of my in-person presentations turned into virtual, I created my little corner here upstairs at my house as my presentation center. And I’ve got my son’s artwork up there. It’s a masterpiece, right? But uh, presentation’s a lot of fun. Um, and really it’s a vehicle for me to tell war stories and teach trial skills, but through the very unique, uh, polarizing at times inspiration of Kanye West. So the presentation how it goes, we’re not to cover it all today, is we have… we kind of go through Kanye’s life, growing up, album to album, and and we see… we learn a lot of things from Kanye’s actions, both the good things and the… the not so good things that he does, right?
[2:33] Steve Yeah.
[2:34] Brent So with that we have takeaways that we can learn not only as litigators but also as trial attorneys and specific techniques and things like that. So we just kind of talk about some of the highlights here and some of my favorites, and I’m glad to be joining today. Thank you, Steve.
[2:46] Steve Yeah sure. So let’s talk about the first one that… that you wanted to bring up.
[2:52] Brent Right. So the first one is finding your own voice. And for those of you who aren’t hip-hop fans, we’re going to be brief but just give you a little backstory for Kanye West. Um, he had a very… he didn’t apologize for it, a middle-class upbringing and he was not your stereotypical rapper. Around the time his first album dropped, 50 Cent was the biggest artist, and he’s exposing his… his muscles and stuff on covers. He’s rapping about committing crimes and getting shot several times. Kanye knows he is not 50 Cent. He wears pink polos, he wears backpacks and like, not the cool way, not with one strap, but he’s got both straps on. And he worked at the Gap, right? And he raps about it. He’s true to himself and who he is. He created this very unique sound, and the presentation we dissected and how he uh modifies samples, things that nature, um, but it’s a very unique sound. Something never heard and he is true to himself. He has found his voice and as litigators, that’s what we need to do.
Now Steve, I know you help people all across the country. For those of those who don’t live in the Texas area, you may not know there’s this guy… he’s on TV and everywhere he goes on his commercials, there’s 18-wheelers exploding behind him and he’s the tough, smart lawyer and he’s aggressive. You know exactly I’m talking about.
[3:59] Steve Oh yeah, oh yeah.
[4:02] Brent And what he does works for him, unquestionably. He is a tremendous business person and marketer. But just because you’re a lawyer doesn’t mean you have to act like the tough, smart lawyer, right? You don’t have to pound the table and act like someone you’ve seen in a legal drama if that doesn’t fit your personality. So find out who you are and be true to that because if you’re pretending to be someone else, first off, you know it, right? And if you know it, you better… you better bet someone on the jury is going to realize it too. You can’t fake… fake out 12 people when you’re not being yourself.
And it’s not just oral advocacy, it’s writing too. So we talked last time about the Fifty Shades of Grey case, how we did the storytelling and the 3-act structure and the opening. Our whole presentation with the case… one thing I loved about the petition that case, working with Mike Ferris who was an author slash um attorney, now a full-time author after that case hit, and he told me, “Brent, here’s what I want to do with this petition. We’re going to draft it in a clean, clear and straightforward manner. We’re not going to include legalese. We’re not going to overcomplicate it just for the heck of it to make ourselves feel smarter or fancy, right? I want to have a very clean and straightforward petition so that someone, I don’t know, maybe a journalist with no legal background can read that petition, not have to ask anyone any questions or Google anything, and write an article about it on the front page of the paper.” And that’s exactly what happened. So just because things were done a certain way doesn’t mean you have to do them. It’s important to find your own voice.
[5:27] Steve Yeah, I think that’s a great point because we talk, you know, just with… with attorneys, and we talked on the podcast before about, you know, tips and tricks for young lawyers in that, and a lot of times it does come up about find your personality, find who you are, and then see how it fits. And I think it’s a good point you also bring up about not being a table pounder because when I work with a lot of witnesses, you know, the first question is always, “Well, what’s the attorney like? Is he a table pounder? Is he a nice guy? Is he aggressive? How is it that he approaches it?” And like you said, those are things that are developed over the years that people have found work for them. And the same thing for witnesses. I tell witnesses as well when working with them is, “Here’s kind of the structure of the way you need to answer the question, but at the end of the day, you should answer the question in what’s natural to you, right? Within the parameters of don’t step in it when you’re talking about, you know, topics and say something harmful to the case, but use it in your terms and your… your language so that you do look comfortable and that you do sound genuine.” So I think that’s a very good point.
[6:25] Brent Yes. I love that because for example, we had a case with a patent dispute and we had people who worked on the oil field in Midland, Texas. We don’t want something coming out of their mouth to sound like it’s something I or someone else told me to say. Speak the way you feel comfortable. I love it, that’s great.
[6:41] Steve Great. Okay, the second one you had that you wanted to talk about, this… this is what you referred to as “listen,” right?
[6:47] Brent Yes. And it sounds like, “Duh, Brent, of course you need to listen.” But there’s a lot of traps you can fall into. So first let’s go back to Kanye. His first album had a very unique sound. Again, we’re not going to dissect that today, but it’s called chipmunk soul. It’s really interesting how he created his sounds. Now he had his first album, best album of the year at the Grammys for rap, and um everyone noticed and everyone thought, “I want to do that same thing.” So he listened to what’s going on and heard everything out there now is sounding like Kanye West and his first album. He had two choices, right? First, do the same thing. You know what, I’m Kanye, I’m the best… he’d probably tell us that, right? I’m Kanye, I’m the best, but now I got firepower, I got ammunition, I got label money behind me, I can do it better than anyone else. Or he can listen and think what I want to do next. I was successful because my sound was unique so I’m going to take this path instead and do something different that has not traditionally been done in the genre.
And it’s pretty hilarious when you find out what he did in his second album. He created… he used real instruments. That was the groundbreaking thing he did. It wasn’t just…
[7:51] Steve How dare he.
[7:53] Brent I mean, yeah, it’s crazy right? Yeah. He had… horns, uh, strings, instrumentations, things like that. So he really listened there and adjusted. Now that obviously there’s different situations, you always want to listen, but I want to give a few that are very interesting for me and important. Um, so first is when you’re deposing someone, you’re going to create an outline, bullet point list, something you’re talking about. Young lawyers earlier, a big pitfall there is they create an outline and that outline is their bible, right? But I ask… next one will look down at the sheet of paper and it’s going to tell me and that’s it because that’s what’s in my outline.
That’s so dangerous. I’m gonna give you an example. We had a case a couple years ago, was another patent litigation suit uh pending in the Western District of Texas, and we were deposing CEO, President, some officer uh from the plaintiff. We’re asking questions about their business arrangements, business dealings, and he’s answering the questions, but just reading body language you can tell he’s not telling the whole story, right? So do we just go on to the next question on the outline? We could have done that. We started probe a little deeper, asking, you know, additional questions, going down different rabbit holes, and lo and behold, we find out something really important. We find out that he actually assigned… his company assigned the patents in suit during the litigation. Now why is that… that’s important? Because that… that just destroyed a large portion of damages model. You don’t get futures on that, right?
[9:14] Steve Right, yeah.
[9:16] Brent So if we would have stayed on outline we would never know that. Also if they would have complied with their discovery requirements we would have known that already, but that didn’t always happen in cases. Now it’s not just when you are dealing with the hostile or adverse witness or the other party, it’s your own client as well. We had a case, a federal case in the Eastern District of Texas where I was preparing our… our main corporate rep for testimony. He’d been deposed before, never testified in a case definitely in front of jurors, right? And so we’re practicing the night before and man we’re on the same wavelength. Man I know where he’s going, he knows where I’m going, we’re on the same page. He gets up on the stand the next day and he gets… gets the jitters, right? And he’s answering the questions differently than he did the night before. He’s being honest, he’s telling the truth, but here’s the problem: the way he’s answering questions did not allow us to tell our most persuasive story. So what I do… I can’t just move on to the next question I direct that he just nailed the night before. Gotta listen to what he said, readjust and bring him back to where we need to go to tell our most persuasive story to the jury.
[10:19] Steve That’s excellent. And I think it goes to show that attorneys are very good listeners. And once again to go back this is what I talk about witnesses with is that when they’re giving responses they need to be short and concise with their responses and not give these long rambling answers. Because as you said, you guys are very good at listening, and even if you’re looking down and you’re writing and you’re writing and you’re writing, it looks like you’re not paying attention. You’re paying attention and if someone says something, you know, more than what they needed to, then they’re going to open doors like you said and go down rabbit holes. I think like you said, listening because…
[10:53] Brent I love when you have those over-sharing deponents, right? You don’t have to ask a follow up question, you can just kind of lean in and have an awkward pause and see if they want to fill the space with more information than their attorney wants them to say. It’s great.
[11:03] Steve That’s great. Exactly. And my… my recommendation for witnesses is don’t do that. Don’t fall for Brent’s long pause.
[11:12] Brent Don’t do it… do it if I’m in the case, but yeah.
[11:15] Steve But yeah. All right, so number three. So we have “find your voice,” “listen,” what’s number three?
[11:22] Brent Number three is use the right strategy. This is important when you’re communicating to people. Uh, so the… going back to Kanye’s life, his second album was successful and he’s going in between the second and third album, he goes on this monster tour opening for U2. He’s at these crazy football stadiums and arenas, massive crowds. First thought is I bet you a bunch of U2 fans did not sign up to see Kanye run around the stage and rap. But… but they got that. And he got a lot from that experience. He’d never played in venues before like that and he’d never really, I don’t think, examined and studied uh acts in different genres like U2.
One thing he loved that Bono would do is um they had these songs with um kind of sparse lyrics in the chorus, the bridge or wherever, and then have kind of a call-response where Bono says something, then holds his mic to the crowd and they scream it back. And Kanye was like, “This is amazing, we had this interactive experience you can’t get anywhere else other than in person, right?” And so he really took that. His next album, structured his communications to his audience different. He structured where there were less words, it was less verbose, and it wasn’t just less words but it was strategic. He’d make sure these phrases right before those breaks were um very… they weren’t complicated phrases, they were easy words to remember and repeat. And really he was thoughtful about how he communicated with his audience and we need to do that as attorneys too.
Um, for example when we parachute in and get on a case maybe a couple months before trial, ready to get it going, first thing I want to know is: is this a trial by court with the judge or is this a jury trial? You are very, very aware of this and how important that is, right? So if you have… he or she will have attended law school, if you’re not in JP court, right, uh attended law school, they’ll know the common elements of causes of action or affirmative defenses most of the time. Doesn’t happen all the time, but for the most part you’re going to have a legally educated person making these decisions as a fact finder. Now it’s a little different sometimes with the jury depending on where you are. You may have a pretty educated jury and um but most time they won’t be legally educated, they will not be lawyers.
Now there’s an exception there. I had another case up in the Eastern District in Texas, Texarkana, where I intentionally did not strike an attorney um who ended up being the foreperson. Shocker, right? That happened a lot of time. And the reason why I wanted to keep him on the panel, at least alive if the other side didn’t strike him, was he had a background in tax law and I knew that he was going to destroy the other side when it came to their damages. Again, we’re on the defense side in that case. And I talked to him after the case. He’s like, “Well, I saw it two ways, you know. We either were going to find that your client was not liable,” which is what happened, “but then,” he said, “even if we did find your client liable, the other side didn’t meet their burden when it comes to damages.” So, you know, that was how we were going to decide. So, I digress back to the point. Generally your jurors are not going to have a legal background, legal education, so you need to simplify things for them, right? And I think… oh go ahead, go ahead. One thing I did not say is “dumb it down” for them. Go ahead, Steve.
[14:23] Steve I think that’s… that’s an important point that… that we… we talked about the other day when I was talking about inter… uh intellectual property cases is that especially those cases as you brought up is that those are the cases where you really don’t want to dumb them down and and when you do, jurors will realize that you’re dumbing it down and actually get angry at you because then they think that you’re talking down to them. That somehow you don’t think that they’re intelligent enough to be able to follow what you’re saying.
[14:49] Brent Exactly, and I can… I can give you an example of when that happened in my opinion if you want to hear it.
[14:54] Steve Yeah.
[14:54] Brent So we’re in that case again in Texarkana, and opposing counsel is in his opening statement, his opening presentation, and the point he’s trying to get across is that my client did not call his client back. That’s it. So that then it goes, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client called defendant over there across the room several times over several weeks. Do you know what that response was?” Clips the next slide: crickets. And then there’s this just cheesy, cheesy clip art of a cricket. And in my opinion that did not resonate. He got us… he got his point across, right? I thought he was treating them like elementary students. I think he didn’t give the jury the respect they deserved and it didn’t resonate. Again, I’m biased, I’m on the other side, right? But that’s just how it played out in my mind.
[15:40] Steve Well I think that goes to one of the reasons why you know we conduct mock trials and focus groups in that is because you need to know your correct strategy. And there’s a lot of times when we go in, we see that a lot of attorneys believe that these certain points are going to be the strongest pieces of evidence that they’re going to focus a lot on throughout the case, and then they find out when talking to the jury that those are not even things that are really even considered at all, right? And it’s these other pieces that they latched on to that end up being the linchpins of the case that you wouldn’t have known before doing these mock trials. And if you didn’t do it or didn’t have a sense for kind of what the jury thinks and what the jury is latching on to or buying into or what their thought processes are, then you could very well go in there and put up a… a PowerPoint presentation of a cricket, you know? And they had you done some… any sort of research, you probably would have found out exactly what you said, that people would have rolled their eyes at it and said, “Come on man, you know this… you’re treating us like children here,” like you said. So using the right strategy I think is very important because you don’t want to find out after the fact you use the wrong strategy, right? I don’t think that attorney wants to know after the fact that jurors felt talked down to once they saw that cricket slide. So that’s… that’s after the fact and it’s way too late.
[16:50] Brent So and what you say about um mock trials and… and jury something, I love it. So we had a case several, several years ago where uh we were pushing hard for fraud and punitives. We thought defendant was a bad, bad woman. Um, and I still believe that today. But in the mock trial, the jurors… abbreviated mock trial, they did not agree with us, you know? They gave her kind of the benefit of the doubt, which you know, for better or worse, it really helped us to modify our strategy and going forward to focus less on going after punitives because it really hurt our credibility with the jurors. Even though, again, I believe to this day they were warranted, but you still want to make, you know, the most persuasive presentation for your client.
[17:32] Steve Excellent. All right, wrap us up with number four. What do you got for number four?
[17:37] Brent Number four is push the envelope. So later in Kanye’s years, uh his career, there’s this divergence. So at the beginning he was loved by the masses, the mainstream, super popular, right? And the critics… whatever, he’s a pop artist, he’s a rapper. There’s this point where that flip-flops and the critics love him but the mainstream not as much. And that’s where Kanye is trying to become an artist in his mind, a capital-A Artist. We’re talking fine art. He’s delving into fashion and all kinds of design and things like that. And he makes this album… because Kanye is polarizing, right?
[18:14] Steve To say the least. Yeah.
[18:16] Brent This album was called Yeezus, so he’s just feeding into it.
[18:19] Steve Yeah.
[18:20] Brent Yeah, and he made uh music that he in his own words wanted to make challenging for his audience. Now that’s not the takeaway, we do not want to do that in the case, but he wanted to do that because he wanted to be seen as an artist. He created… “I created this, this could be categorized a genre,” I’ve heard it called gothic rap, which is rap lyrics, lots of heavy electronic noises, modulated screaming, things like that. Again, not for the mainstream. What he was doing there was for a reason: pushing the envelope. And that’s really… we push the envelope, push limits to advocate for our clients.
And I want to tell you just one way I did that and I was kind of surprised but it really set the tone going forward for a case. It was late in the case admittedly where I am had a very long direct examination with an expert witness. Several hours, we were getting all into the minutia, dollars and cents, all these very technical things, right? Some people it’s boring. There’s other things I did liven it up, we don’t talk about them today, but I did other things to liven up the presentation. But I noticed about an hour and a half into that presentation, opposing counsel looks like he’s ready to sleep. You know, we’re obviously late into a trial, it’s after lunch, he’s looking sleepy. And this is again something’s not outlined, but I thought, “I’m just going to try this and see if, you know, the judge or the other side slaps my hand. We’ll see what happens.”
So I said, and you got the expert there, “Dr. So-and-so, did you read all the transcripts in this case?” “Yes sir I did.” “So you read plaintiff’s corporate representative’s transcript correct?” “Yes sir I did.” “Okay well I’m going to read you a couple lines from that examination. I have a question for you. Okay just wait one second.”
So I get the sheet of paper, I put it up on the Elmo. We’re in the old school Elmo there, yeah. And I read what I have… what I found, what I believe is the most damning admission anyone’s made in the case. And I read through it slowly. It’s like six lines. I’m highlighting it on the Elmo on a clean white sheet of paper. So I read them and then here’s my amazing question, you ready? “Did I read that correctly?” “Yes sir you did.”
Okay, fold it up, put it over there, move on. And so I’m thinking this whole time opposing counsel, whether for strategic reason or not, just allowed me to read hearsay into the record. So we get a break and I whisper to my paralegal, I said, “Pull this other expert real quick and I’ll put it up there.” So, “Did you read, I don’t know, this other employee’s deposition transcript?” “Yes sir I did.” Same song and dance. Slowly read them, not dramatically but slowly to make sure you can read them all, highlight them, they can see it. And then the same question: “Did I read that correctly?” “Yes sir you did.”
That’s it. Put it away. Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Didn’t want to push it anymore. But the point is, here, here’s what I did. I got unquestioned into the record… the jury heard me read it, they saw it on the screen, highlighted, and moved slowly so they thought they were supposed to pay more attention to it. I heard my expert up there, you know, the court said he’s an expert. He’s also confirmed that all these things were said uh and so that was really something that was fun because opposing counsel didn’t object. You know, something’s objectionable, that’s fine, but if no one objects, it’s in the record. Way to push the limit.
[21:26] Steve Yeah, I love that. Because I’ve had conversations before and we’ve had other podcasts where we talk about how the defense bar is not quite caught up to the aggressiveness of the plaintiff bar. And that really the plaintiff bar is always trying to push it right up to that proverbial line, and then sometimes they’ll even step over. But the defense is a lot more conservative and doesn’t want to get to that point for fear of pissing off the jury or making the judge mad or looking bad or anything like that. But you know, the idea is that sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. And a lot of these attorneys are coming out… these plaintiff attorneys are going to come out of COVID—and I’ve heard him talk already—they’re going to come out swinging. And they’re going to come out… they’re going to come out not taking settlements, they’re going to come out pushing the limit, they’re going to come out like you said, trying to… to go for the big wins. And the defense needs to be able to make sure that they step up and use the same approach and push it to the limit as well. So I think that’s… that’s a perfect thought to have, and I wish more defense bar attorneys would have that approach that you have.
I mean, Bill, Dr. Kanasky and I—who you know is on the podcast often as well—we’ve been talking about that and harping on that about, you know, these defense attorneys just need to get more aggressive. You need to get more aggressive and like you said, push it to the limit. So that’s great.
[22:42] Brent And you know too, but it’s important to test those limits early in a trial too, because then you can really adjust your approach going forward for the next how many days or weeks you’re going to be in the courtroom.
[22:50] Steve Exactly. All right Brent, well I love talking to you man. I wish I… I wish I had more time to go through your presentation, but you do have this as a more formal presentation, right? That is CLE accredited that you give to organizations?
[23:05] Brent Oh definitely, all across the country and the same for litigation sections at law firms. And we make sure, depending on the state, that we have… we’ve had states give up to half an hour of ethics credit as well because we know that’s hard to come by.
[23:16] Steve Okay, so if someone wanted to get ahold of you to talk to you more about getting the CLE or just having questions for you, how do they get ahold of you?
[23:24] Brent Definitely, I’m available at bturman@bellnunnally.com. Again, my law firm I work with and my partner at is Bell Nunnally and Martin in Dallas, Texas. And I’m also… you can find me on LinkedIn. I’m on the Clubhouse app, having fun every now and then, so you know where to find me.
[23:38] Steve All right, great. And if you need anything from me, I can be found at swood@courtroomsciences. Our website’s courtroomsciences.com. This has now been another edition of the Litigation Psychology Podcast. Once again Brent, thanks for being on and uh we’ll talk soon.
[23:53] Brent Thanks Steve.
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