Ethos Foundations
The core Ethos experience, examining the human dimensions of advocacy through experiential work and continuing the Institute’s original inquiry into the advocate.
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Training Built for the Work of Advocacy
Ethos programs are designed for lawyers who want to develop their craft through serious, experiential work. Our programs range from foundational trial advocacy to advanced and specialized training. What connects them is not a single technique or style. It is the way we teach.
A Letter from Rick Friedman, Founder
What Stands in the Way?
What stands in the way of you being the trial lawyer you wish to be? That is what we are going to explore at Ethos.
Aristotle famously said that there are three means of persuasion available to a speaker: those grounded in reasoning or logic (logos), those grounded in the emotions and psychology of the audience (pathos) and those grounded in the credibility of the speaker (ethos).
In law school—if not before—we are taught to use logos. We trial lawyers love logos. If only the courtroom were a place where logos always prevailed. Through hard, grinding work and perseverance, we could guarantee that the good guys always won; or, we could figure out the logical defects in our case and know when it is time to settle. We would be in full control of the process. Logos is not only within our comfort zone, it is our preferred playground.
Alas, there is our audience: the jurors and the judges. The messy emotions and psychology of these decisionmakers often resists our beautiful, logical constructs. We are taught very little about this in law school, but in recent years, there has been an avalanche of books, speakers, and seminars purporting to teach us how to use pathos to persuade, by addressing the emotions and psychology of our audience. This too is well within our comfort zone. We look outward for the techniques that will persuade (manipulate?) our jurors.
But what of ethos, the credibility of the speaker; the aspect of persuasion Aristotle said was the most important? Most advocacy texts and teachers acknowledge its importance. We hear and read things like: “trial is a battle for credibility,” or “never do anything that will hurt your credibility.” We are told that to have credibility, we must be prepared, respectful and scrupulously honest. We are told to never overstate our case in opening. And that is pretty much the end of it.
But there is much more to ethos, much more to being an effective courtroom leader.
So, what stands in the way of you being the trial lawyer you want to be?Richard H. Friedman
Ethos Programs
Three Program Levels
No programs are currently scheduled. Future program dates are TBD.
Ethos Advanced
Deeper work for participants who share the Foundations experience and language, emphasizing integration, continued growth, and what the advocate is capable of becoming.
View ProgramEthos Specialty Programs
Experiential programs concentrating on a particular skill, area of advocacy, or group while keeping technique connected to the person using it.
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Ethos Foundations
Ethos began with a question traditional trial training rarely asked: What if the greatest obstacles to a lawyer’s effectiveness are not always deficiencies in legal knowledge or trial technique, but the things happening within the lawyer who must use them?
Ethos Foundations is where that inquiry begins. It is the core Ethos experience and the foundation for everything that follows. Participants examine the human dimensions of advocacy that conventional legal education often leaves untouched: how we respond to pressure, uncertainty, conflict, failure, success, power, responsibility, fear, and the enormous demands of representing another human being.
The program is experiential by design. Participants do not simply listen to presentations about becoming better advocates. They work. Through action methods, storytelling, psychodrama, group exercises, reflection, performance, and other unconventional approaches developed and refined through years of Ethos programs, lawyers have opportunities to discover how they actually function as advocates, not merely how they believe they function.
The purpose is not to create a particular kind of trial lawyer. It is to help each lawyer understand what strengthens their advocacy, what interferes with it, and how to bring more of their full capacity into the courtroom and the practice of law.
Rick Friedman originally described the forces that interfere with our best advocacy as the “demons” that consume energy we could otherwise devote to our clients and our cases. Ethos Foundations continues that original experiment while expanding the inquiry. How do we become advocates with greater skill, resilience, freedom, integrity, and humanity, and build a professional life in which we can remain whole while doing difficult work?
Ethos Foundations is where that work begins.
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Ethos Advanced
Ethos Advanced begins where Foundations leaves off.
Once lawyers have experienced the core Ethos work, a different kind of training becomes possible. Participants return with a shared language, a willingness to work experientially, and greater awareness of how their own character, history, habits, strengths, and obstacles enter the practice of advocacy. Advanced programs allow us to go further.
These programs explore more deeply the relationship between who the lawyer is and how the lawyer advocates. Participants may work with more complex questions of leadership, judgment, courage, creativity, courtroom presence, relationships, professional identity, resilience, or the particular challenges that emerge over the course of a life in trial practice. The emphasis is not simply on acquiring additional techniques. It is on integration, taking what has been discovered and making it increasingly available when the stakes and pressures are real.
Advanced work also honors one of the lessons of the original Ethos experiment: growth does not end because a lawyer has become accomplished. Experience can create wisdom, but it can also create habits. Success can expand us, but it can also make us rigid. The roles and strategies that carried us through one stage of our careers may not be the ones we need for the next.
Ethos Advanced creates a place for experienced advocates to continue examining, testing, stretching, and developing themselves. The methods remain experiential. The work becomes deeper because participants are no longer encountering Ethos for the first time.
Foundations asks us to discover how we show up as advocates. Advanced asks what else we are capable of becoming.
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Ethos Specialty Programs
Some advocacy challenges deserve concentrated attention.
Ethos Specialty Programs bring the Ethos approach to a particular skill set, area of advocacy, or specialized group of lawyers. Rather than attempting to cover the full range of the foundational Ethos experience, each Specialty Program is built around a defined purpose and designed for the people who need that particular work.
A Specialty Program might concentrate on a specific advocacy skill, such as storytelling, listening, voir dire, courtroom presence, witness work, communication, leadership, or another area in which the lawyer’s human capacities and technical abilities must work together. Other programs may be designed around the distinctive challenges faced by a particular group of advocates whose work, clients, practice setting, or professional responsibilities create needs best addressed together.
What makes these programs Ethos is not simply the subject matter. It is how the subject is taught.
Ethos Specialty Programs remain experiential. Participants are expected to engage, experiment, practice, encounter one another, and discover what happens when ideas are put into action. We draw from the unconventional methods that have defined Ethos from the beginning while continuing to introduce new approaches when they can help lawyers grow.
Specialization does not mean separating technique from the person using it. It means examining a particular area closely enough to understand the relationship between the two.
A lawyer does not become a better listener merely by learning questions to ask. A lawyer does not become more effective in the courtroom merely by learning performance techniques. A lawyer does not become a better storyteller merely by learning story structure. Every skill ultimately has to pass through the human being using it.
That principle began the Ethos experiment in 2017. It remains at the center of every Ethos Specialty Program.
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