Jennifer Gardner:
Power is getting people to do things that you want them to do. Influence is the definition of power, and it means impacting the decision-making process. And that's why I see persuasion, which is a tool for impacting the decision-making process as part and parcel of influence and power.
Sonya Palmer:
Power is a word we all know, but rarely question, especially in the world of law. We think of power as something external, a title, a corner office, a big verdict. But what if power isn't given and it isn't something you take?
Jennifer Gardner:
Being powerful is a combination of many different things. It's having emotional intelligence, it's being charismatic, it's being magnetic. It's understanding the tools of persuasion, and it's getting over your foundational fear or limiting belief or upper limits problem of thinking that you're powerful in the first place.
Sonya Palmer:
What if power is something you cultivate inside yourself?
Jennifer Gardner:
I don't think that lawyers see themselves as having power or having access to power.
Sonya Palmer:
That's Jennifer Gardner, an LA trial lawyer with over 35 years of experience. She defies expectations about what it takes to be a strong litigator. In a profession that prides itself on intellect, logic, and rationality, Jennifer discovered that true power emerges when you embrace your very human vulnerabilities.
Jennifer Gardner:
And I think that this suspicion of people with power is culturally, deeply ingrained, deeply ingrained. Women, they're in a double bind, and what I mean by that is they're criticized for not being powerful and not acting powerfully. Yet when they do, they're held to an incredibly harsh double standard. They're judged very harshly. And because of our also ingrained fear of being visible, fear of being judged, fear of being excommunicated from the tribe that's in our DNA, if we did something wrong or we said the wrong thing, we could be kicked out of the cave and we couldn't survive without our tribe. So we are really wired to fear that.
Sonya Palmer:
Women lawyers still face consistent bias around leadership and power. Jennifer's solution goes beyond acting more powerful. It involves discovering our capacity for vulnerability and emotional intelligence. Let's listen to how she reframes power, not as something to seize or inherit, but something you cultivate through authenticity and connection.
Jennifer Gardner:
Learning how to be bold when you're facing criticism, when you're being judged, when you're in a high consequence situation and communicating is a learned skill.
Sonya Palmer:
Welcome to Lawher, where we talk to the boldest and brightest women in law about how to own power faster and keep it longer. I am your host and SVP of operations at Rankings, Sonja Palmer. Power that we explore today is one that makes you more persuasive in the courtroom, more influential in everyday life, and ultimately more at peace with yourself.
Jennifer Gardner:
When you learn what it takes, you can do it too. Every single skill that is a power skill is a skill you can learn or train yourself to do. It just takes opening up your eyes, educating yourself, but that's why I am doing the work that I'm doing now, is to basically give people that knowledge.
Sonya Palmer:
So stay with us as we dig into the neuroscience behind influence, the messy journey of building confidence and the simple somatic practices that can help you navigate high-stakes situations from the courtroom to your personal life.
Jennifer Gardner:
I don't even say I'm empowering you to be powerful because you already are. As a human being, you have everything you need. It's just a question of going "Aha." Because if it wasn't modeled for you, you're going to have no idea. I had no idea. I was successful and I went back and I deconstructed what the hell I was doing. We can be bold and be confident and stand our ground and have at the end of the day a lot less stress because the stress will kill you.
Sonya Palmer:
Neuroscientist Antonio DiMazio found that when our emotional centers are compromised, we can't even decide what to eat for lunch, let alone make high-stakes legal decisions. In other words, logic alone just isn't enough. We need emotion to guide us.
Jennifer Gardner:
The stress will not only kill you physiologically, it will not just kill your body and your mental health, but it will kill your performance. It will kill your results. It will kill your ability to be innovative. You can read the data, you can see the studies, and you can go, "Aha. All right, I have some work to do."
Let's go back to my very first law school experience. I was told I was not a legal genius and that unless I was willing to work 17 hours a day, every day, I would be considered a hack. And I had a miserable experience as an associate in a male-dominated law firm. Went to another firm, the firm imploded, and then I needed another job, and someone that I had opposed on a case ended up recommending me to a law firm. And I wish that I had stayed at that law firm longer. They were a fantastic group of people and there's so much more I could have learned.
But what stuck with me was that I wasn't a legal genius. That really hurt, that really stung because I was still struggling at that time in my life to understand a lot of complex legal concepts. I was literally going into a windowless library for hours every day, researching arcane legal theories in these giant stacks of dusty books. I mean, it was grueling, it was grueling. It was demoralizing to work so hard and be told you're never going to go anywhere. You don't work hard enough and you're not smart enough. But after five years of that, and then watching my father die and ultimately pass away of cancer, I'd had enough. I needed a break. But then a funny thing happened, which is I started my own practice.
Sonya Palmer:
Jennifer discovered that she loved running a business.
Jennifer Gardner:
I wasn't being judged by billable hours. I wasn't having to work every night and every weekend unless I really had an emergency like a trial. And I found out that I was very entrepreneurial and I loved the freedom to explore and pursue my curiosities. I got all the lousy cases that no sane lawyer would take. I took them because I was hungry. I needed to work. I had a lot of debt, I had bills to pay. I was very excited because I thought, "Oh wow, this is what I've been training for for so many years. I get to be a real trial lawyer now."
The problem was I didn't know how to try a case. No one had taught me, no one had mentored me, nobody had trained me. I was told I wasn't intellectually smart enough to do it. That was a lot of baggage to go into a trial with, a lot of baggage. I look back and I look at how terrified I was every single day, but I dug in and I did what I knew how to do my whole life, which was how to connect with people through telling my truth, my client's truth through story. Literally. Like I had to tell a story of what happened.
The very first jury trial that I had, I was still struggling to figure it out. Like I'd had some court cases that I tried before a judge and got amazing, surprising results. But I'd never had a jury trial, and I still didn't feel like I was competent. But here I was doing it, State Bar of California seemed to think I was. I graduated from an accredited law school. They seemed to think I was, and I was getting clients, doing business and getting great results. So into trial, I went and I realized when I was preparing for trial that in a law that was really tough, but it was a fraud and a breach of contract case, and my client's intellectual property was stolen. And I was just puzzled by the whole thing. How could these people who were once such great business partners and friends with this relationship and friendship of stretching back weeks and months, how could this fall apart? And I realized that just the failure to perform was the tip of the iceberg.
Sonya Palmer:
Jennifer wanted to go deeper. She spent hours upon hours and late nights with her clients to really understand what went wrong, who disappointed who, and the dynamics at the core of the conflict.
Jennifer Gardner:
And I put that together in a way that he hadn't even thought of it before. I really teased it out of him. And he was like, "That's exactly it. That's exactly it." And that's exactly the story that I told the jury and I received the unanimous jury verdict in a fraud case, which is almost unheard of.
It's the messy, dirty, ugly parts that nobody wants to give voice to. It's like a massive therapy session in a courtroom. It's having the courage to say and identify and call out the things that people are thinking, but they're afraid to say out loud. And that is the basis of all great art. And I would say that trial is the ultimate theater. It's the ultimate art form. I mean, every narrative of what happened, every factual statement is a story. It's an opportunity. Every single word you have to develop a compelling narrative that will hook people. And I had a gift for that.
So even though I wasn't a legal genius, I ended up winning my cases to everybody's surprise, everybody's surprise. I was successful. And I went back and I deconstructed what the hell I was doing. I dove deep into neuroscience. And now the science is proving what those of us who are familiar with these concepts have suspected all along. So you can hack your performance, you can hack your close rate, you can hack your results in negotiations and in trials. You can do better. You can use that information to improve. You now know what the skillset is that you really must possess in order to deliver outstanding results and outcomes. And we are a result and outcome-based profession.
People hire us not to mess around, but to actually solve a problem, to get them a result that the client feels that they've had an emotionally satisfying experience and that they've been held and nurtured and accompanied through a very scary process where they are experiencing loss of control, loss of their livelihood, loss of family, loss of property. I mean, it doesn't get more real than that. If you can make them feel seen, heard, and understood through that by resonating with them, by deeply connecting with them, you have the keys to the kingdom. So emotion really is the key to all of it.
Basically what neuroscience is doing is why do humans behave the way they do? So we're doing this already, and the neuroscience basically substantiates and explains what's happening in our brains when we're doing this. So then we can be more intentional about it, how to be more powerful and persuasive, how to hack our brains in order to do that, in order to get higher performance, better results for our clients, better outcomes for everyone, including ourselves, for our law firms, for our own personal businesses, for our families. I mean, really, when you can do this, the results trickle down. They affect everything in your life.
And studying the neuroscience also helped me become more accurate in how I describe these concepts. And I can give you an example. Scientists have since confirmed that there are complex neural circuitry crossing over and on both sides of the brain when emotions are firing or when we are reasoning. But it was back in the day that system one referred to one type of reasoning, and it was associated only with the right brain. And system two was associated with logic and reasoning and slower decision-making. Those generalities still apply to describe what's happening in our brains, but it's no longer just left and right.
But it really comes down to this. When we look at how people make decisions, emotions are much more weighty than facts. You need both, you need the data and you need the emotion clearly for your credibility, for your authority. However, it's emotion that's always going to carry the day. So when it comes to marketing, the same idea applies. We want to be able to make an emotional connection with our prospective clients. And how do you do that? You need to understand what it takes in order to do that, because I can tell you, if they feel an emotional connection and a resonance with you, they're going to hire you and you'll keep the client.
Sonya Palmer:
According to the Harvard Business Review, up to 90% of top performing leaders also have high emotional intelligence. That means they recognize and manage their own emotions and those of the people around them. Jennifer's deep dive into neuroscience revealed something many lawyers miss. The rational and emotional parts of our brains work together in decision-making rather than in opposition.
Jennifer Gardner:
Most leaders of Fortune 500 and 1,000 corporations have been tested. They participate in these studies many times and they've been rated very highly, higher in EQ than in IQ. Why? Because they're able to inspire their teams, they're able to tap into emotion in order to do that. They're able to self-regulate, they're able to self-motivate. For example, so it's more than just intelligence, it's emotional intelligence. And the good news is about that, is that emotional intelligence can be learned every single one of those skills.
So EQ is emotional intelligence, and it's the ability, I think the two most important factors are the ability to tap into the emotions and the ability to regulate yourself and actually as self-regulation, I think using emotion strategically is part of that, in order to influence the outcome. And believe it or not, there are cognitive scientists and neurobiologists out there who are researching the use of emotion in negotiation. What happens when you press certain buttons, when you do certain things? I mean, emotion really is the central through line that you need to be able to tap into. And that's why I think so many people don't like lawyers because they see them as being really super arrogant and cut off from their feelings and not like them, above them, different from them, speaking in this lofty legalese. That's not how you're going to connect. That's not how you're going to be powerful.
If we're not able to quiet ourselves and regulate ourselves in high stress, high conflict, high consequence situations, which almost every legal case involves in multiple times throughout the case, before you wind up in a mediation or before you negotiate the deal or before you go to a trial. We have to be able to regulate our emotional state throughout. We also, in order to connect emotionally with the other side, our adversary, with a jury, if we're before a jury, with a decision maker, with our clients, with the opposing witnesses, we need to first tune into ourselves so we can understand how we feel, and then put ourselves in the shoes, in their shoes so that we can understand how they feel.
Sonya Palmer:
Research in social neuroscience reveals something powerful. Vulnerability creates connection. Our brains contain specialized mirror neurons that activate when we perceive emotions in others, essentially allowing us to experience what they're feeling. This is why authentic communication resonates so deeply in high-stakes environments like courtrooms and negotiations. Jennifer recently earned her certification from the Wharton School of Business in Neuroscience and Business Strategy, building on her lifelong study of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell's work. This unique combination allows her to understand how shared emotional experiences and authentic storytelling generate influence in ways that technical legal arguments alone simply cannot.
Jennifer Gardner:
Once people can feel us, they're more likely to decide how we want them to. I actually feel that mastery of this is a requirement and there's a few different reasons. But yes, you can master it by doing certain somatic practices. And they're very simple. They basically involve breathing and slowing down your heart rate so you can get oxygen to your brain and calm down and then tune in. I certainly can't describe it all in 30 seconds or less, but these are very simple, beautifully elegant somatic practices that I teach my clients and help them use, and that I use myself.
Sitting in a chair when I'm terrified before ever hearing, which I usually am. Accepting that the fear is normal alchemizes it. Owning the fear. First of all, fear is a very powerful emotion. Just connecting with your own fear and what it is that frightens you about your case is oftentimes the key to winning your case. What is it that's scaring the out of you? Let's go there. And that can really unlock the secret to winning a terrible case. What frightens you? And I think you have to own what frightens you.
But then let's talk about breathing through it in the moment, which is something that I do all the time. I have forced myself to learn these skills and to get this education because I struggled and there was no one to help me. And now I feel like I have a duty and a calling to share this information, especially with lawyers, because our role has never been more important as it is right now.
Sonya Palmer:
Power can be cultivated by embracing our fears, understanding our emotions, and connecting deeply with others. Power isn't something bestowed by a title or rank. It's grown from self-awareness and vulnerability, the very qualities that make us human. Thank you for joining us on Lawher. If you found today's conversation insightful, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and share this with a friend or colleague who needs to hear that real power begins within. I am Sonia Palmer, and we'll see you next time.
Jennifer Gardner:
And if we don't see ourselves as powerful, are we upholding the Constitution? I would say no. I learned this because nobody taught me and I had to figure it out myself the hard way. Yes, I got training, I did graduate from the Trial Lawyers College, and that was a really fine experience being in that community. But I've gone much deeper and much wider in my approach to how we can form this connection with other humans, because that's what it's going to take to solve our biggest problems. And we need to take breaks because we can only process so much. And the law firm culture, the traditional law firm culture that I was raised in, 17 hour days are mandatory, five to seven days a week or you're never going to be a success. Okay, well that's a joke.
