In today's Law section of The Daily Telegraph, Legal Editor, Joshua Rosenberg, interviews new chairman of the English and Welsh Bar, Geoffrey Vos Q.C..

Vos provides a few great paragraphs about what constitutes good advocacy.  The parallels, whenever any of us have to get up and open our mouth to speak, cannot but be helpful.

“Take the example of the opening speech - either to the jury in a criminal case, or to the judge.  You can either do it in a rambling, unstructured way that's impossible to understand, or you can identify a way of explaining it to somebody who is less well-informed than you are, by using your legal knowledge, your intellect and your own ability to explain an issue clearly.

That is a great skill.  If you are telling a story about a series of events, you can either tell it in a way that is completely clear, leaving the listener thinking it is obvious what has happened, or you can tell it in such a way that the listener does not know what issues they have to decide.

If you do it in the former way, you leave the decision-maker with a far easier and quicker task, and the case is likely to be far more justly resolved.”

Vos goes on to answer the question “but how do you do this?”  His many years of experience has led him to a simple truth.  “You normally start to the beginning, go through to the middle and end at the end.”  He adds that the biggest skill is “knowing what to leave out”.  “You need to identify the real issues” and sometimes advocates can be persuaded by clients that the real issue is X when, in fact, it is Y.  Vos concludes by saying that an advocate “needs to bring independent judgment to the presentation of the facts and the law.”

In this first week of January, when many of us are thinking about areas in which to improve our own personal performance, I found this interview to be a timely reminder how to keep things simple when engaging in conversation for whatever purpose:

1. Understand first what you want to say.

2. Resolve to stick to the issue.

3. Say it clearly with a beginning, middle and end.

4. Do it in a way which your listener can understand.