Lawyers and more..

Spent a good part of the day yesterday with some top shot lawyers dealing with a class action lawsuit. We were in a room with video and audio feeds from a second room which had a mock jury.

I was a bit amused initially by the lack of tech-savviness amongst the lawyers. Two things stuck:

• Lawyers do not understand computers, powerpoint and projectors
• Lawyers do not understand math - I saw 3 attorneys pulled their calculators to multiply 15000 with $3000 in claims to get a total of $45 million.

However, my notions regarding their stupidity vanished as soon as they started speaking in front of the Jury. Man, they are good. This one guy who was "pretending" to be a plaintiff attorney was so convincing that even I believed his case. His arguments were solid and his style of delivery was very powerful. Then the next guy came on stage and believe me, I changed my mind once again.

At the end, I realized: We engineers and scientists do experiments with inanimate objects, while lawyers experiment with humans. It is very challenging and very difficult job to do. Of course, that's why some of the hot shots have egos to boot..but thats another story!

P.S: I have decided to enrol myself in a public speaking course. I was reminded of my acute deficiency in public speaking.