We challenge the habit of late-stage theme building and show why persuasion in civil trials starts six to twelve months out. Using cognitive science, psychometrics, and language framing, we map a path to a single, coherent story that jurors accept with confidence.

• why jurors construct stories rather than tally facts
• the risk of inferred events and causal gaps
• the four pillars of story acceptance coverage, coherence, completeness, uniqueness
• mapping narrative features to legal elements
• early theme testing as leverage and risk mitigation
• iterative focus groups, simulations, and psychometric modeling
• identifying and neutralising venue-specific cognitive traps
• language ownership to place blame where it belongs
• enveloping strategy, primacy and recency, and thematic anchoring
• nonverbal dominance, rapport, and channel matching
• rule of three, parallel structure, and powerful short words
• shifting from conservative online judgments to decisive global judgments

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https://scienceofjustice.com/