The lawyer who prepares hardest is not always the lawyer the jury believes. Heather Rogers, the first public defender of Santa Cruz County, California, has spent more than 20 years learning that a trial is won by the story jurors repeat to each other in the deliberation room, not by the perfect binder. With host Kevin Morrison, Heather walks through her three trial tips: preparation is power, connection over perfection, and be yourself. She explains why the theory of the case works as a North Star, why rest counts as preparation, why the jury is watching from the moment you park, and what she means when she tells young attorneys to protect their "muchness."

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Great trial lawyers are made, not

born. Welcome to Verdict Academy,

preserving trial wisdom for trial

lawyers. Join host Kevin Morrison,

trial attorney in San Francisco,

as he recreates those invaluable hallway

conversations that remote work has made

rare.

Candid insights and hard won lessons

from America's most accomplished trial

lawyers, produced and powered by LawPods.

Welcome to another episode

of Verdict Academy,

where we bring you the best trial

lawyers in the country to share their top

three trial tips. Many of our

guests practice civil trial law,

but today we have a real treat,

a trial lawyer who has exclusively

practiced criminal law and specifically

criminal defense, and who has reached

the highest level of her profession.

Our guest today, Heather Rogers, is the

public defender of Santa Cruz County,

California. Not only is Heather

the public defender of Santa Cruz,

but she's the first one.

She has been and continues to build a

team of dedicated advocates serving some

of the most vulnerable of her community.

Heather is a Santa Cruz native,

graduated from the University

of Chicago undergraduate,

and a law degree from Stanford.

She clerked at the Ninth Circuit,

worked public defense in San

Diego and Monterey Counties,

and then for the Northern District of

California before coming home to Santa

Cruz. Heather has handled cases at

every stage of criminal litigation from

arraignments through trial and appeal.

She has defended clients who have been

charged with a wide variety of offenses

from delinquency to homicide.

In addition to practicing law,

she teaches and mentors others in trial

techniques and is taught at the National

Criminal Defense College and

various law schools. Heather Rogers,

welcome to Verdict Academy.

Thank you so much, Kevin, and

for that very nice introduction.

It's a pleasure to have you. I'm

excited. You've tried so many cases.

You have so much wisdom to

impart on our listeners.

I do want to ask you a question generally.

I know you were interested

in environmental law

initially and water rights

particularly.

How did you come to learn that the

courtroom was the place for you?

It was completely random,

Kevin, to be honest with you.

It was my third year at Stanford. I

was living in Santa Cruz and commuting,

and I saw on the job board an internship

at the law firm that used to do public

defense in Santa Cruz County.

And I thought public defense barely knew

what it was, but it sounded exciting.

It was close to home. And within

two weeks of this internship,

I knew I had found my calling and

everything I had learned about water law

became a cocktail story.

And I launched into this,

which I've been doing for over 20 years.

So it was the connection with

individual clients and their stories.

Was that part of it?

It was just everything.

I walked into that office and just

the energy of the trial teams there,

the clients, the human life,

the stories, the courtroom,

this idea that you could learn skills,

take them into a courtroom with serving

some of the most vulnerable people and

change lives.

Watching people get out of custody because

you've made an argument that really

let them walk out the back door rather

than back into a cage just thrilled me.

So I never looked back.

I know a lot about the Clean Water

Act that is absolutely useless to me.

Yeah. Well, not a lot of trials

going on in water law, I don't think.

Not so much. Yeah.

Obviously you found your passion and

that's always a great thing for everybody.

Let's get it right into it then.

Your top three trial tips generally

for trial lawyers in 30 minutes.

That's the format of our show.

One is preparation is power.

Two is connection over perfection,

and three is be yourself. So let's

talk about preparation is power,

Heather. What do you mean by that?

First of all, it was really hard to

come up with three. I love this format.

I struggle. This is what I came up with,

but there's so many cool things I wanted

to share. So preparation is power.

I mean, I'm sure your listeners

are preparing their trials, right?

You have a discovery index, a witness

index, your binders, your digital files,

your exhibits, but I'm talking about

something a little bit different,

a little less intuitive. I'm talking about

preparing to tell a compelling story.

And for me, all that

background prep that we do,

all the binders that you could see, if

you could see my bookshelf right now,

it is really just the fodder for that

story we have to tell to win a case.

And that story for me centers

around the theory of the case,

which at NCDC we describe as a

short common sense persuasive story

that ties together the key facts,

including those facts beyond change,

the legal defense,

and the dominant emotion of the case.

And the way I think of it is if my jurors

are telling each other this

story in the deliberation room,

I win and my client goes home. So for me,

everything flows from that.

My theory of the case centers

my theory of each witness.

Each theory of the witness builds on that

theory of the case so that by the end

of the trial,

my jurors are telling each other the story

that I've been telling as I prepared.

So that's a really, really

big piece of it for me.

The other thing that I want to share

is that rest and relaxation are

preparation. Terrible at this,

but the truth is, people,

is that working 80 hours a week is not

going to serve you when you walk into the

courtroom. You're going to be blurry-eyed,

you're going to be on your notes,

you're going to be reaching for another

cup of coffee like Kevin and I are doing

today, and you're not going to be

doing that thing that you need to do,

which is really be present in your body

telling a powerful and a persuasive

story.

So an example, a recent gang case I tried,

I organized storytelling around this

idea that my client was being forced to

walk a tightrope between two worlds.

On one side was the life he

wanted as a father, as a roofer,

as somebody who was contributing to

society and earning the American dream.

And on the other was this tangle that

followed him from his home country of gang

life. And so with every witness, every

exhibit, every image, everything I said,

I'm painting this picture for the

jury of that tightrope, right?

And that becomes what I want the jurors

to see when they go back to deliberate.

If they can walk that tightrope with

my client, I'm going to win that case.

Just a way to think about it.

Then one more thing on

preparation I want to tell people,

because I was really guilty of

this for years as a trial lawyer,

is preparation is not paralysis.

You could prepare a single

case for the rest of your life and

there would still be more to do.

When you know your theory,

when you've got your binders,

when you know where to

find the key evidence,

when you can capsulize in a sentence

what you need from every witness,

your parachute is packed and it's

time to jump out of the plane.

So much in there I love, and it resonates

with me and I'm sure our audience too.

Let me break some of that down. Do you

still actively take on individual cases?

You try cases you're still,

or are you in the management role

where you're kind of beyond that?

When I took on this role,

I had three homicide cases that I

negotiated to bring with me to the role of

public defender. And I just tried

the last one at the end of last year,

but I really am going to keep taking

cases. I'm looking for the right one.

My last one was a five-month trial,

and it turned out that was too much to

keep the public defender's office afloat,

but I'm definitely going

to keep trying cases.

I have my eye out now for kind of that

sweet spot where maybe I can work with a

less experienced attorney

on a real serious case,

which if I love those cases

that first feel intractable.

There's just no way through

this and you find the way.

I love doing that so soon.

The best trial lawyers know

that story, the power of story,

and it's got to be story over everything.

There must be an incredible challenge

when my guess is that you've got

a lot of clients to represent

and time is at a premium.

How do you teach your fellow

defenders and how yourself,

how do you juggle the importance

of making the story of the

case the forefront of how you try the

evidence, the witnesses, et cetera,

versus, oh my gosh,

I can't spend five hours with every

client figuring the story out of the case

out because I'll never get my stuff

done. How do you balance that?

Yeah. Well, we have what we

call vertical representation,

which means that our lawyers stay with

their clients from their very first court

date to the end.

And so we really emphasize developing

pretty deep human relationships with

everybody that we represent.

And the stories flow naturally from that

because the story we're telling is not

made up.

It's the story of this actual human

being who we've walked this journey with,

we've really gotten to know.

I also think that story is a real shortcut

because if you spend all of your time

just dissecting every fact,

every exhibit, every image,

every body-worn camera,

trying to memorize it,

internalize it without

an organizing principle,

not only are you putting too much

information in your brain that you're not

going to make sense of, but

you can really get lost.

So what I challenge my attorneys to do

is to find that theory of the case early

and organize everything around it.

It's like the North Star and it's simple.

It's something that you can say to your

friend at a coffee shop or on a bar

stool over drinks. This

is why I should win.

It's a simple little human

thing. I think as lawyers,

we just get lost in the minutia.

We get lost in the legalese,

lost in all these things that mean

nothing to our jurors and never will.

And so for me, really,

theory is a shortcut and everything we

do here is trained around storytelling.

It's so easy, especially in civil law,

to get bogged down in what I call the

minutiae. There's always the motions,

the flurry of frankly,

worthless discovery.

And it's so hard to see

the forest for the trees.

It's so important to make sure that

you've got the theory of the case or the

story of the case forefront.

It's always about that story,

and you have to cut through that minutia

and have the confidence to know you

can't go down every rabbit hole.

That's what the other side wants you.

At least on our side, the other side

wants you down these rabbit holes.

But it takes a lot of self-discipline

and some confidence in yourself to say,

"Don't go down those rabbit

holes. Stick with a theory.".

Totally. So Kevin, I

follow you on social media,

and I know you were

doing a trial recently,

and one of your posts really hit home

for me. It was this less is more idea,

right? You were troubling

over the evidence, which

is a few days before trial.

It felt to me like you had

had that cathartic moment of,

"I don't have to worry about all of

this. I knew my story a month ago,

two months ago, a year ago. My

client understands our story.

We all understand the story,

and we're going to stick with story."

I thought it was a really profound post

and it resonated, and it's exactly

what I'm talking about here.

You know when you're ready and

trust yourself, trust the process.

You got to leap.

Got to leap. And one of the points of

that post is even I'm three decades in,

I still fall for it sometimes. I

still go down these rabbit holes.

It's so inviting and you

want to fight everything,

and at some point you just got

to wake up. And I would tell you,

and I realized this, to your point about

rest and relaxation or preparation,

I realized this when I was

going for a swim. I'm a swimmer.

I was going for a long swim,

and I kind of get in that zen state

in the middle of my swim and said,

"You know what? This is what's

happening. I just kind of realized it,

and you need to step away from

the desk, go for whatever it is,

go for a walk, go for a run, go for a

hike, go for a swim, go for a bike ride,

whatever it is to get the endorphins.

I always learn or have an

aha moment where on those times

when you're resting your brain and

something will come to you

naturally. So important to do that.

That is exactly it. That swim was

work. You probably can't bill it,

but in my mind, that is

where the real work happens.

It happens when we just really

let ourselves absorb all that

preparation, release

it to a certain extent,

and find that core piece of it

that's going to connect with people,

which kind of brings us to my next tip.

Yeah. Awesome. Connection over perfection.

This one took a long time for me

to internalize Kevin's. So I mean,

I was that student who was

neurotically prepared. I mean,

my law school outlines

are things of beauty.

I feel like there should be a

special library for tortured people

where they feature prominently.

But here's the thing, Kevin,

is that quest for perfection,

that quest to be perfect made me scripted.

It made me cold, stilted, and

scripted from my first few trials.

And it was so awkward and

so uncomfortable, so as

my teenager would say,

cringey,

that it is a wonder the jurors didn't

rotten tomato me out of the room.

That was not working and it

will never work. And so for me,

I was really lucky to benefit from

starting my career at Federal Defender San

Diego, which had this amazing

training program, amazing mentors,

many of whom we both know now who were

just these, not just powerhouse lawyers,

but really real down-to-earth people

who taught me so much. And two quotes I

learned stick with me. The first was

Maya Angelou. I know we've all heard it,

but it's in my trial bag. I've learned

that people will forget what you said.

People will forget what you did,

but people will never forget how you

made them feel. Feeling is connection.

If we are not connecting and our jurors

aren't feeling, we're not winning.

And then the other one, this is

kind of dark, it comes from PSYOPS,

from the American military,

the way that we psychological warfare

at certain points in our history,

not the points that are the

best points, but it happened.

And the quote that comes out of PSYOPS is,

"Capture their hearts and their minds

will follow." That can be dark or it can

be beautiful. It can be what sets my

clients free here at Public Defenders.

And so I really,

really think that rather than

making these perfect outlines,

these gorgeous binders, we need to

think about how to use this instrument,

our eyes, our body, our hands, the space,

and most importantly,

our real life experiences as human

beings to connect with our jurors.

We have to be in our bodies.

We have to be grounded,

have to take the time to connect.

Yeah. No, there's nothing more important.

I think it takes a lot of

experience, at least it did for me.

It took a lot of time to get there

because we're perfectionists.

We want to say every word the

right way. We've got, let's say,

you're giving an opening statement.

You want to make sure that you say

the right words, the right evidence,

that you're all in your head

initially. Am I saying this right?

Does my tie look okay?

Will I get non-suited if I

don't say the right words here?

Did I pronounce the doctor's

name right? And oh my gosh,

where am I on this outline? And that

juror doesn't look like he likes me.

All that's going on in your head.

It took me a long time

to get out of my head and

just forget about the outline.

The outline's important.

I have to have the outline

initially, but lose the notes,

get in front of the jury. You know

the case. You know it really well.

You know it better than anybody.

Get out of your head and get in front

of them and just tell it like you're

telling your neighbor or

something. It took me a long time.

It took you a long time to get there.

It's still hard for me, Kevin.

It is the hardest thing because in some

ways I'm worrying against a little bit

of my natural personality, which I'm

just a preparer. When we go on vacation,

I have a 25-page itinerary.

This is part of my inner battle always

is to remember those parts of my

own personality and myself that

love people, that love stories.

I'm genuinely curious about these jurors.

I'm genuinely curious about the clerk,

the judge, the bailiff.

And so just kind of amplifying

those pieces of me to drown out my

tendency to prepare myself

to death and to try to be

perfect. You're never going to be perfect.

And I find too that actually once

you relax and you let perfection go,

that's when you do your most polished

work. Counterintuitive, but it's true.

Right? When you're the most comfortable,

it just kind of all of a sudden just

starts to flow. You know the facts,

but you know how to say

them in a certain way,

in a natural way that does connect with

a jury because I love that, Maya Angelo.

I was going to use that in my response.

Of course you went right there,

but it's so true. I mean,

anytime you listen to a speech,

a presentation where we do this for a

living and we walk out of there, I'm like,

"What were the points that

he or she made?" I'm like,

"I just remember that person made

me feel this way or that way,

and that was a really

well-received speech.

Was it because of the points

that they made? No, really.

It was because of how they made me feel

and how I felt about the topic and their

passion or lack thereof.

That's kind of where it all comes down.

And you got to think when

you're the presenter,

they're not going to remember Dr. Jones

said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

They're going to remember certain things

that overall themes and how you made

them feel about that particular

witness or that case. So important.

Totally. And finding a theory of the case,

finding a theme that's human and that

you can really believe in kind of joins

that last point I made into this point.

It makes it so much easier to not

just connect as a human being,

but to connect what you're doing

in the courtroom to your theory.

If you really believe what you're

selling, by the time we get in trial,

we have to have created a theory that

resonates for us because if it doesn't,

it's probably not going

to work for our jurors.

I know one of the points you want to

make in this area too is how the jury's

watching you, how you interact with

your own team, how you interact with,

in your case, the DA's office,

how you interact with clerk,

how you interact with a judge.

What are your words of wisdom for how to

behave to others in the courtroom when

the jury's present?

The jury is watching everything

you do. I tell my lawyers,

from the moment you park in the parking

lot, you are on trial. You are on trial,

and everything you do from that moment

forward is being watched, evaluated,

and creating the impressions that might

keep your client in a cage or set them

free. It really has to be very,

very intentional. And so for me,

it's just don't be rude,

don't be sarcastic,

don't be cute with opposing counsel.

Greet the clerk, greet the bailiff,

be respectful to the judge,

look people in the eye,

find some warmth in that moment of

stress and tension. Remember to be warm.

One thing that really helps me with this

is if I'm going up to the clerk to get

an exhibit marked, for example,

we don't always pre-mark because sometimes

things come up in criminal trials,

I will make an effort to look the clerk

in the eye and speak to her like a human

being. It helps me get back in

my body. I know the clerk, right?

It relaxes me a little bit.

And also the jury is seeing what it

looks like for me on an everyday level in

the courtroom. I know these people,

they like me, they respect me.

We're in this repeat player environment,

but every little thing that

you do like that, first of all,

helps you get back in

your body and connect,

but it also shows these jurors

that you are trustworthy, credible,

and somebody that other people in this

courtroom look up to so that they will

look up to you too.

Someone told me once that trial's

about three things, credibility,

credibility and credibility.

You have to have credibility

because the jury looks to you.

As a plaintiff's lawyer, they're

already thinking that we're scumbag,

ambulance chaser, billboard lawyers.

I'm sure as a public defender,

they're not thinking great things.

What is this guy guilty of?

He must be guilty of something.

He wouldn't be here for a reason.

He did something.

And so I think in some ways from the

criminal practice on your side and the

civil practice on my side,

we kind of have to overcome

that initial bias against us.

And the way you do that is to be a real

human being and be polite and credible.

That means treating the

other side with respect,

treating the clerk with respect, and

everybody in the courtroom, your team,

roll your eyes when you hear testimony

that you don't agree with. Sarcasm is as

much as I love it in my personal life,

I have to bite my tongue and

not be sarcastic as juries

do not appreciate that.

Be a real human. That's part

of being credible, right?

That's exactly it, really. And all

three of these points are credibility,

credibility, credibility. You nailed it.

Yeah, so important. All right. And then

the last point then is just be yourself.

Tell me about that.

This one is so hard, Kevin. So

I'm really old and I grew up -.

If you're really old, that makes me

ancient. So please don't go there.

No, no. I've been doing this for

over 20 years, 23 years, I think now.

I came up in a system where the public

defenders that we looked up to were very

well established white men. That was

criminal defense. That was what it was.

And these were people who were

incredibly charismatic, bright.

They had loud booming voices.

When they would walk into a room,

they would fill the room, that

classic just cults of personality.

And I spent far too long trying

to be a charismatic white man,

which was just never going to work for

me. I did not pull that off, Kevin.

Even with my type A perfectionist drive,

I wasn't able to reach what I thought

was that pinnacle of what a trial lawyer

was supposed to look like. And there was

just a moment, maybe it was exhaustion,

where I just started to

be myself and my results

transformed. Suddenly I was

connecting. I was loving the work.

Suddenly I was winning cases,

and it was because I had

found my superpowers as a

person that I could bring to

the courtroom and win cases.

So talking to maybe less

experienced lawyers out there

in Verdict Academy world,

I would say spend some time to journal

or think about what drew you to this

work, what keeps you in it?

What are your natural strengths that

you can draw on to persuade others?

Nurture those things. Don't let

anybody train it out of you.

Don't let anybody tell you that you have

to be Kevin Morrison or you have to be

Heather Rogers because what you

have to be to win is yourself.

Absolutely true. And again,

that takes a lot of confidence

because when you're less experienced,

you don't know what to do.

You've never been a trial lawyer

before your first trial, what do I do?

So you think, oh, I'll mimic myself.

A trial lawyer is ex-Heather Rogers.

I'll be Heather Rogers today. And

you start mimicking Heather Rogers.

And of course, I'll be a poor

imitator of Heather Rogers.

Heather Rogers is great at being herself,

but I am not good at

imitating Heather Rogers.

And when I was a younger attorney,

one of my mentors, Tom Caselli,

tragically passed away of brain

cancer at a young age. When he passed,

I tried to be Tom Castelli. I just

tried to be him, and it did not go well.

It did not go well. I'm not Tom,

I'm myself, but it takes a while.

It takes some confidence to understand

that credibility is authenticity and

authenticity is being you, not copying.

Now, I'm not suggesting that,

I'm sure you're not either, that

you can learn and adapt or steal,

as I like to say, ideas or

things that work for you,

but they have to resonate with you,

the techniques or the skills or the

tactics really that you can borrow

from others. You could adopt

as your own. You can do that,

and I've done that successfully,

but it has to be because it resonates

with you and it works with you.

Oh, for sure. Oh, yeah. As public

defenders, we're magpies. I mean, we beg,

borrow, and steal everything, right?

If the caseloads are too

big to do anything else,

you have to take it and make

it your own in some way.

So as I was thinking about this

today, I was remembering this scene.

I don't know if you've seen Johnny Depp's

Alice in Wonderland. It's a good one.

There's a scene where he tells Alice

that she's losing her muchness.

Sometimes I explain it this way to newer

attorneys who are in there trying to be

me or trying to be someone else

in this office. I tell them,

"You have to protect your muchness.

You have to find your muchness back." We

lose our muchness in law school, right?

You're not allowed to be quirky.

You're not allowed to be funny,

to do things different, to

come up with a wild idea,

to really just embody who you really are.

They train us to be this certain way,

and we lose our muchness. And so

you got to bring some of that back.

You got to bring some of it back.

For me, part of my muchness,

I don't do this on purpose,

but it's turned out to be a

real effective trial technique,

is there's always a point in a

trial where I spill the water,

like my arms and my hands and

I'm reaching and I'm moving.

And at first I was mortified and I

would just stay up at night worried.

I spilled. This is why I

lost. I spilled the water.

And then you realized as a human being,

what's actually happening is

the jurors want to help me.

Water spiller, huh?

All they can do to not

jump out of their seat,

come over to counsel table where I am

sitting with someone accused of a homicide

and help us. They want to clean

him up. They want to clean me up.

They want to put the table back

in order. That is gold, right?

If you can get the jurors

picturing themselves cleaning

up your suit and helping

your client, you are winning.

And so whatever your muchness is,

if you're a water spiller, if you're

a little bit cultish in the courtroom,

a little bit awkward,

if you trip now and then or you stutter

or don't say just the right thing or use

the wrong word, it's

charming and it's fine.

And people love other people, real people.

They don't want an AI robot

in there trying this case.

They want you, so be you.

That's my biggest piece of advice.

Yeah, 12 people, the total IQ, they're

so smart. They're so perceptive.

To your point, they don't miss a thing.

They can sense a faker or someone who's

trying to be someone they're not in a

second. It's just so obvious.

And you think you're using

these big lawyer legalese

words and this and that and

the other thing, and it just doesn't

work. That's another thing I tell people,

shed the legalese. When's

the last time you said it?

And he extricated himself from the

vehicle. I'm like, whoever says that?

And you got out of the

car, is that what you mean?

And so you got to learn how to shed

yourself with those legal terms that law

school stuff down your throat too.

And you kind of untrain these law

students or recently graduated

lawyers because they train them to think

in the lawyer way and say lawyer words,

and that's just not the way that jurors

hear people or listen to people. Well,

I knew the time would fly by,

but I want to give you one last chance

to impart any final words of wisdom,

Heather, to our audience

before we sign off here.

100%. Yeah. Well, this has been great.

And here's my final words of wisdom.

Have fun, right?

What an amazing gift it is to

be able to do this work where we

get to grow and learn every single day,

where we get to tell

other people's stories,

real human stories that not

only might change their life,

but depending on the kind of cases you

try, it might change the world, right?

Sky's the limit. And the work

is just a gift. Enjoy it, right?

Get back into your body, take

a deep breath, have a snack,

and just truly believe that you are

doing the most joyful and fun work in the

world, and you won't work

another day in your life.

That's exactly right. You only get one

life, at least that's my philosophy.

Yo might as well enjoy it and you spend

so much time at work and you might as

well and just love every second of

it, which I know you do with trial on.

I do too. Thanks for being a guest on

Verdict Academy, Heather. I appreciate it.

It was an honor. Thank you, Kevin.

Thank you for listening

to Verdict Academy.

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