Communicating with Confidence and Heart with Chris Graham

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Whether you're studying law in Mumbai or practising in Manhattan, Rev can help you transcribe and analyze all your case materials with verifiablecitations.learnmore@rev.com. Today I have the opportunity to speak with Chris Graham. He has a very interesting career and a very interesting relation to law and how to communication. So I decided to ask him a couple of questions and ask what a twice retired lawyer as he entitles himself, thinks about these things. Thank you so much for joining. Welcome to the podcast, Chris. It's my pleasure, Claudio. Thanks so much for inviting me to be here. I appreciate it. And for those who haven't met you yet, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what's the story behind tell people? Oh wow. Well, I I mean, I guess you took my joke. I am the twice retired as a lawyer. So probably the most retired guy you've ever had on this podcast. I started my career at a law firm in New York City called Sullivan and Cromwell. So I I was at UT law school where you were at and I went straight to New York, which was really fun. Then it took a break for a while in the middle, I left SNC, I went to school in England to read in the humanities just for fun basically. I was at Oxford University for a few years. Then I came back to Toronto and I wrote a novel for a year, drafted a novel. It was awful. I gave it to some friends to read and they said we're not going to be friends with you anymore if you make us read this again, which is totally fine. It's all about the journey. I didn't really expect it to be amazing, but it's so hard to write a good novel in case people are thinking about doing that or under appreciating the authors that they currently like after that. So now we're 2456 years out of law school. I freelance is a bit. I edited legal encyclopedias for years for Halsbury's Laws of Canada. Eventually I was an indigenous rights lawyer at a firm in trial called Pape Salter Taye. I was there for three, 3 1/2 years give or take. And then in 2015 ish I left that job and started my own practice that I currently have that tell people where I teach communication and storytelling to lawyers and other professionals. And I've been doing this for almost 10 years. I can't remember the exact date, but I think 10 years is a fair summary. Yeah. 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Visit Grammatico to get started. If I may ask, what what made you take that turn into entrepreneurship? I mean, writing a novel of that have have definitely something to do with that. But you know what? What really made you take that turn and then maybe even what did you learn about the law and communication? Along the way, well, the answer to your first question, how do I make that turn? I mean, the short answer is I didn't like having a boss. It's something that I did nothing against having a boss and it's certainly not an indictment of any of the places where I was working. But I, yeah, I realized as I was going along where I worked at this Indigenous rights firm, it was pretty small at the time. I think it was 4 guys in a house and they're all partners. And so when they have a partner meeting, I just like sit in the kitchen by myself while they decide the future, which is absolutely the appropriate structure. Like that's how a law firm works. But I was noticing at that time I was like, I don't like this. And it took like it's a finer agement. Lots of people would. I thought, I'm not loving this. And so I thought that was the second time I've been a lawyer. And it was a, you know, small firm and annex of Toronto. And previously I worked at this giant firm SNC. So having tried 2 pretty different fields, I thought I should try something very different next time. And so, you know, starting a business is just one of my good at that people might pay for. And I was pretty into storytelling at this time. There was a big there continues to be a vibrant storytelling community in Toronto, people on stages telling stories. So I've been doing that for quite a while and I thought maybe I'll start a consulting practice or training practice. The startup costs are pretty low. And as any lawyer will tell you, if your adventure fails, you can always go back to being a lawyer. So I always felt like I had the safety net if I needed. It fantastic. I, I saw a little bit about the work you do with today's in Toronto and then I also saw you, you coached over like 15,000 professionals, including many lawyers in that. So maybe what are some common mistakes that you see lawyers making when they try to explain things or connect with people? Well, that's really interesting. I mean, it's hard to talk about common mistakes in a sense, because everybody, everybody's a bit different and everybody's circumstances are a bit different. So I don't really think about it that way. I guess one thing I might say that I, I tend to notice is professionals generally tend to talk a lot about facts and they tend to try to extract their personality from what it is that they're trying to communicate. If that person is giving a, I mean, like a Ted talk would be a good example of this. So a person giving a Ted talk, they will often initially want to just give the information like, here's the idea, here's the evidence, here's the research, etcetera. And missing from all of that would be anything about them. So it's almost like they're like a literal talking head but with no face, no features, nothing. And it's very hard for the person you're talking to to connect with. You know, you mentioned connection. If you're not there, if you're not in what you're saying or present, there's nothing for the audience to connect with. And the way people experience this is typically as boredom is they just zonk out. It's very hard to say super engaged with that. It's really like reading. You know, you're mentioning before we get on here, you're studying for the bar hold the bar exam materials are a perfect example of this. They are absolutely not designed to have personality at all. And that's fine. This very like specific use case, but imagine a person like the person equivalent of the bar exam study materials. This is what a lot of professionals seem to aspire to when they talk to groups unintentionally I think, but it is just as hard connect with people acting that way or speaking that way as it is to connect with your bar exam crap materials. Fantastic. Well, in my in my experience in different countries now, it seems like a lot of law students are trained to in some way sound smart. So use a lot of big words, complex arguments, try to, you know, unravel a lot of a a situation when we were explaining something and and what would you say then to someone who is afraid that maybe a simple language might make them sound less credible? Because I want to ask you a question. So you mentioned this in a, in a prep that you sent to me and I was so curious to read that. So why doesn't it? Have you, have you been taught that you have to use big words to sound smart? Is this like an experience that you've had at at law school? I would say that more and more I've been taught the other way around ages since that we should use, you know, playing English and the playing English movement and all of that. But, but I do see more often than not that a lot of colleagues that that do use a lot of big words and, and say things in a complex way seem to, to gather some admiration. So I was very curious to to hear if that has ever been something that you've experienced. That's really interesting. I mean, so you asked, you know, what are some advice or something? And I, I think that the standard advice is simply to just think about the audience. And so if you recognize that the people you're talking to really value, let's call it expensive language. I don't know, for lack of a better term, have edit right. You know, if you're at, if you're in a, when I was in England, there is, there's something that they have in England called Latin camp. So Latin is much taught over in the British school system. And so they have summer camps where you can go and like brush up on your Latin. And so I think it would be totally fine to go to a place like that and use Latin like literal Latin phrases all the time. Or, you know, there's a different reputation in that place. But if you're not in a situation where it seems that people are valuing upscale language or expensive language, or if your goal is really to connect with people, I think it behooves you to think very hard about what is going to make the person I'm talking to feel comfortable, feel like they can engage with me as a peer, and then make a language choices accordingly. You know, as I'm saying this, it strikes me that if you're trying to sound smart, that's mostly you're thinking about yourself and your own image. But I think I personally think when you're talking to an audience or even just another person, surely the goal there is to make the other person feel comfortable, right? To make them feel like a peer or equal or something like this. And to think of your communication as a way that you can serve the person you're talking to. Fantastic. And, and, and going on that. So instead of making a statement here, I'll ask you a question. So have you ever had to speak in a room where people were very skeptical or resistant without even, you know, giving you a chance to come up with your message? Has has that ever been inexperience that you've been on? Sure. That my initial idea is I would do training for lawyers because I had seen Laura training. It seemed like the people have an existing time and an existing budget to buy trading sessions. So I emailed everybody I went to law school with and I said, can you please introduce me to the person at your firm who buys professional development? And so I set up a bunch of meetings and I went down and I said here's what I'm up to. The very first meeting I had with a firm downtown in trial, the person hear my pitch and she was like, amazing, we'd love to work with you. The very next day, I gave my second ever pitch to a different firm, and this time the person said, you've made a mistake starting your business. Yeah, which is the hardest note I've ever experienced. I think that's also the most skepticism I have ever encountered in an actual person. So yes, I have experienced what you described. Alright, And taking that into consideration and thinking about the audience and the other person, do you have any any tips or leads for when people find such a skeptical or resistant audience? Is there any way to ring people over? So my question to you would be if you pitched me, let's say you pitched me on this podcast and I said, I think audio you've made a mistake with your life creating this podcast in mini. Now somebody you actually want to win over. Do you really want to have a people can't see you shaking your head. You have to say you're. Absolutely not. Yeah, so I think that maybe is part of the answer to the question. Another of a less sort of cynical or pointed way to make this point is, and how I've come to think of it is you don't have to convince everyone in order to be successful. So the real punchline from that story is not that the lady or the person was really didn't like the idea. It's that neither of those pitches have ever yielded business. So not only the person who hated it never called me, the person who told me they loved it has also never called me. And yet here I am sufficiently successful be on your podcast. So you don't need to giving everyone in order to be successful is maybe the way I would think about that. The other thing I might say is if you're, if you're looking for, if you're looking outside of yourself to feel good about your communication and your ideas, that's a dangerous place to look. All you really control is how you feel about your stuff. And it's obviously great when people recognize it and they engage with you and it's validating and so on. And they have to at some point for you to get on in the world. But if I could go back in time and retake both of those meetings, I think I would spend much more time feeling good myself about my pitch. Like, yes, this is what I want to communicate. I feel good about this. I believe in it. And then I would be much, I would have much, much less attachment to whatever the response is. And in the second one, well, in the first one, it was really positive. I wouldn't have been so anxious to receive work from them. So I was like kind of bummed for months that they never called me. And then the other one, I was totally flustered as soon as this lady gave me such difficult feedback and we were in this tiny conference room in this like way up in the building. She had to escort me out because they, you know, they, they have key cards. So we just like walk like we're pals after this terrible meeting. But if I had gone into that meeting feeling like very secure in my ideas, then it would have been much less debilitating to hear this feedback. Could have just it would have just been like, Oh, this doesn't resonate with you. That's OK. Maybe we could have had a more interesting conversation about why it didn't resonate, because all I was able to contribute was like, sorry. Very enough, fair enough. I love that I've I actually just had a podcast that that came out this week and we were talking about the recruitment process and articling and all of that and one of the topics that we spoke on was specifically finding validation outside yourself right. If if it's not based on you, that becomes a lot harder. So I'm finding it fascinating that this topic has come up again. You were you were saying something very interesting, but I'm thinking about, you know, an advocate, a lawyer who actually is trying to convince either a jury or a judge. And then those are very specific cases in audiences. How about in those cases that you know, even though you cannot predict results, you do want to please your audience. You do want to make sure that you are well understood, but as you said, there's only so much you can control. But but how do you prepare for that kind of situation then differently than you would for a business speech where maybe not as much as at risk? Does that make any? Sense I think so I guess my initial thought here is I've never been to court. So I like I mooted a lot in law school, but I so I don't have anything really specific to say about preparing for advocacy except to say you know you you prepare in the way that you know well support yourself the best, which presumably you have learned from your mentors or the people you work with at your firm where you litigate and so on. But the thing about being nervous is that and feeling like the outcome really matters is that it, it tends, in my experience at least, it makes people forget themselves. So we have this, we have this profit law school. I don't think he's there anymore. He was a retired criminal defence attorney, very famous Michael Code. And this is, this is not a mean story. It's a great story. So he was there, very famous, very successful attorney. And then he was teaching at the law school. Honestly, like fantastic teacher. I think he was the voted best teacher multiple years when he was there. And he said once that he never felt like he made his best arguments in court. They always seem to come to him later that night when he was brushing his teeth. And like, on the one hand, first of all, of course, this makes sense. And we all everybody was like, you know, yes, even for this storied advocate, of course, that that would be the case. And you'll partly you get a bit more time to think, right? But mostly I think the difference is there's no pressure when you're brushing your teeth. There's no judge. The other side is not there. There's no gallery. Actually went down to watch him once, which was very cool. But there's yeah, there's like strangers in the audience, the papers there sometimes. So when people are having this pressure, you completely forget that you know what to do, that you have prepared. This guy knows how to advocate It's. And even he under all the pressure can sometimes feel like I actually don't have great access to my preparation or I forget some of how I've done this before and so on. And so you know circling back to in, in practice, I suppose it is true that there is maybe more at stake in a TRU, certainly a criminal trial right versus a business negotiation or like me pitching this business. But I'm not sure thinking about it as higher stakes actually contributes to better performance is maybe where I would come out on that. That makes a lot of sense. I really appreciate that. And I guess the same applies to anything to, to an interview or, or any of those very communication based experiences. I've also seen some of the things you wrote before saying that communication is not a gift, but it's a skill. And I'd love to hear a little bit about maybe things that law students or young lawyers can start doing right now to get better at speaking clearly, speaking with confidence, regardless of the audience. You know, as we've been hearing from lawyers around the world on this show, one thing that's universal is the challenge of managing massive amounts of case materials. Whether you're dealing with witness statements in Sydney or reviewing contracts in Chicago, the volume can be overwhelming. That's why I wanted to tell you about Rev. Instead of analyzing documents one at a time, you upload everything to 1 workspace PDF's, audio recordings, video depositions, transcripts, Revs. AI analyzes them altogether and spots connections you'd never catch working file by file. Every insight comes with clickable citations that take you right back to the source. So when the AI finds a contradiction between witness statements, you can verify it instantly. Whether you're a law student or practicing attorney building your international career, Rev Insights gives you that edge our guests always talk about. Check it out at rev.com. Oh gosh, I mean, it's hard to you're asking me to think about 20 years ago in my life, Claudio. So I'm trying to, I have to sort of try to remember back to what it was like for me being a law student, although I coach a lot of law students at UT. So I'm a little bit in touch with this. You know, one of the things that's a very law school specific thing would be to moot. And I know, like again, I, I guess, I'm sure people beyond UFT listen to this, but I at least at UT law school, it's there's a mandatory mood experience at least once in the course of your time there and many, many other opportunities to do moving. You know, answering questions in a mood is very similar to answering questions in class feels like more pressure. Although lots of first year law students I talked to experience like the pressure first here. I definitely remember how much pressure it felt to answer questions. But there's a huge opportunity there to practice answering questions on the fly from other very smart people. And it like it doesn't, it literally doesn't matter. There's no nobody who cares about your moving results as soon as you leave law school. So there's this huge, there's almost like this great gym that you can go to and work out your mind and you're speaking. And it's, it can be nerve wracking at first, But I mean, I still think about mood practice 20 years later as part of my communication training and how I try to engage with people. So that might be something I would say that is uniquely available to law students where you can definitely advance your communication abilities in a way that is not widely available. Elsewhere, fantastic. A lot of my audience here is speaking about the podcast, our internationally trained lawyers building a career in Canada primarily, but also in in the US or the UK. And I'm wondering if there's a few habits that you think that could help disguise lawyers who are, you know, showing themselves in a second language now and speaking specifically about communication, basically a lawyer's only Garmin, such as, say, are there a few things you see that might help these these internationally trained lawyers or maybe just lawyers in general to either stand out or maybe that would hold them back? That's interesting. I mean, it's hard sometimes to to give advice into the abstract. One thing that's coming to mind is this is going to make perhaps going to sound even too simple. But so when somebody asks you a question and it's an open-ended question and you feel like you have lots to say rather than just jumping into the answer. So I feel like when people are asked the question, they often feel like they have to immediately respond, which is just a way of reducing the uncertainty that exists before the question is answered. And uncertainty can be a cause of stress. So rather than jumping into the answer and starting to talk and ultimately like, like you ramble or it's confusing because you guys start talking before you know where you're going to finish. It's often helpful to just take a beat and say, that's an interesting question. I think I have three things to say about that and then say the exact same thing. So even just announcing the number of points that you're about to make in a really long answer, this one makes it much easier for the audience to follow along because you've told them in advance. There are three things coming. But two, perhaps more important, it gives you permission to stop talking at the end of the Third Point in this example. And especially when you are talking to somebody, even like we're talking on a Zoom call here, But if you're talking and you don't quite know when you're finished and you're a bit nervous, you're waiting for the other person to make a, some sort of face that indicates that they're ready to talk, intervene. And my experience is that's not what most people do. And so you just go on and on and on and on. And, and then the longer you talk, the more anxious you feel and it kind of spirals. So if you can use this sort of simple Rd. Mapping strategy. This is something I think that can help you feel a bit more in control of your communication in situations where you feel a little bit anxious. That's fantastic. What a great piece of advice. I found myself in a hearing yesterday and because of the I think it has a lot to do with the personality of the person presiding the the hearing. At the end of each submission she would double check with the council and say are are you done just checking just in case. I know some people like to have a pause and as I heard you, I was just thinking if you know that was the case, if people actually do that road mapping and say I have three points 123 by the end of it, there's no question that they've finished their submissions. So I, I really appreciate that and I see how that's so applicable. Maybe you've just done it yourself. I love it. You know, you mentioned submissions and so in in very formal communication, formal writing, of course you would include these Rd. maps all over the place. This is a very common thing. What I have found is people are a bit surprised to know that they can incorporate these essentially writing tools into their more casual or real time communication. And you can, my experience has been that lots of professionals are way more comfortable writing than they are speaking. And I'm sure that's even more so the case for people whose first language is in English. Extemporaneous speech is the most challenging. And so look for ways to leverage what you're good at. So you're already really good at writing. You're good at organizing your thoughts. You can incorporate some of these into speech. Another, another trick is that when people are talking to you, you should write down what they're saying. So even in this conversation, like I have a patient in pain in front of me and I write down Claudio's questions so that I can track down all of my responses and I can keep myself organized even if the responses are a bit longer. And which is also, we're talking a lot about UFT here, but this is something I learned from a professor. I had a UFT, He would do this thing. It was business organizations. And he would lecture from memory, but he always have like a piece of paper with him. And he'd done the class many years. Claudio, it was, you're still very impressive, very lucid. And then, you know, people ask questions. And I'm sure you remember the questions people tend to ask at law school. They're basically thinking out loud, like it's just this huge rambling thing. And and this is fine. But as soon as people start asking questions, he would get out his piece of paper and he would make notes. And then when the person finished talking, which would be like 90 seconds after they started, he would just look at his page and he would say, OK, so I think I actually heard four questions there. Let me take them in turn. So the first thing he said was this. Here's what I think about that second thing of this. And it was sounded so impressive. But also it is not at all difficult to look at the page of questions that you wrote down and say, you said this first thing. Here's what I think. Like it's actually very, very easy. So that's another that's sort of like the reverse of using the using the road mapping trick, but again, it's available and in a more formal setting, like if you were in a professional meeting, of course you would take notes and you would follow it along. But you can just do this in regular conversation. I mean, I guess it would be weird if you were like at the pub with your friends and you started taking notes on their updates. But like, you know, in in more sort of spontaneous work type interactions, I think, or podcast. If you're being interviewed by Claudio, I recommend keeping a pen and pencil. Amazing. Well, all of that being said, tell me a little bit about how and what kind of clients you, you tend to. If people are interested in chatting further with you and improving their communication skills, how how do we know if it's a feat and how do they how can they reach out to you? So you can find out all about me at Tell People CA I'm sure this will be in the show notes. And then I'm on LinkedIn that that's the only, those are the only two places you can find me. I take a limited number of one-on-one coaching clients every year. It's mostly for like talk developments. So I used to, you mentioned earlier that I used to be a speaker coach at TEDx Toronto. So I'm not TEDx Toronto doesn't exist anymore, but that sort of I have a significant talk. I want to be really engaging. So this is kind of the stuff that I worked together with people on. But again, it's a I'm pretty selective about that. The rest of the work is speaking and training and conferences or retreats or going into organizations. So I I'll go down to a lot of law firms and, and do a session in the evening or at lunch for them or like partner retreats for firm retreats, things like this. I've been doing more conferences this year, always for professional services. So I did some like government finance officers earlier this year, things like this. Yeah. So that's the sort of work that I have been doing with people. But all of this is on the on the website. Yeah, fantastic. OK. Well, wrapping up today's episode, if you, you know, could give your younger self, you know, maybe one or two pieces of advice to, you know, go forward, whether it is building a better communication style or communicating yourself better in a more clear manner, what would you tell yourself about that? To be honest, I would I would tell myself to meditate more and sooner. So I, I went all the way through law school and working in New York City without ever having any sort of like meditation, mindfulness practice. And to be fair, that sort of stuff is way more in the culture now than it was 20 years ago. But I personally think the ability to communicate meaningfully with other people requires a great deal of presence and focus and centeredness. So I can be here fully present with you, Claudio, or with whoever else I'm talking to. And for me, I spent the last 20 years sort of meditating and having a meditation and mindfulness practice that has made it a lot easier for me to be present with people and communicate, feel like I can communicate in the ways that I want to communicate. Like I can engage in the way that I want as opposed to being reacted and having my style of engagement being dependent on whatever energy comes at me. And, you know, circling back, we were talking about my criminal law professor and how he was feeling pressured to communicate in court and so on. That's just a particular instance of if you are very like mindful and centred and presence, the stuff that's happening around you, like outside of you is much less influential on how you are coming into the interaction. And so I don't I, I imagine you were hoping for some more tactical advice, but that's a very, that's maybe like the water as opposed to the boat. So I would, I would meditate. I wish I had started meditating 20 years earlier than I did. No, that's amazing. I love that we were here to talk about communication, but we came into very deep topics about, you know, finding your value in what other people react to and meditation. And I just really liked this approach that that people were not just, you know, one thing, but there's just so many things that are related. And I really appreciate you taking the time for being in the podcast today. Thank you all for tuning. In thanks so much, Claudio. It's been a real pleasure and thank you for doing the podcast. I mean, you're making all these voices audible to so many people. So thanks for the work that you're doing. Thank you.