Test Case: Can I Master The Group Legal Presentation?
You have to let go of a lot of control, but it can be beneficial to share the spotlight with someone.
‘Does anyone want to co-present with me? I can offer these engaging hand gestures!’
They say two heads are better than one, but I think it depends on the context. I mean, what if there is only one body involved?
When it comes to formal presentations, I am a lone wolf in sensible heels. It has just been me… and the PowerPoint on which I over-rely. It’s not that I don’t get along with others; it’s just that working with them introduces more variables than a high-school geometry class.
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A couple of months ago, I decided to change things up and bring my circle of lawyer friends to the podium with me. To get started, however, I had to wheedle my way into a luncheon presentation on condominium resale certificates. My industry group—which caters to community associations and the gaggle of businesses that serve them—had assigned the job to another attorney. So I badgered him at a law-conference dinner until he agreed to co-present to shut me up.
Fortunately, I already had a PowerPoint prepared on the topic, loaded with an obscene amount of clip art, as I find joy in Google image searches. Usually I don’t do a ton of preparing for presentations, because by the time I am done adding pictures of gavels and scales of justice, I feel like my work is done. This time, however, we met up to go over our presentation, along with our third co-presenter. This was helpful because the restaurant served nachos and we were able to talk about books we were reading.
The hardest part of presenting for me is often finding the place where I am supposed to speak. This luncheon was no different, even though I had actually presented about board resolutions in that very same room three years earlier. (An event I shudder to even think about, as they couldn’t get my PowerPoint to work, and I was facing having to speak from memory for 50 traumatizing minutes. It was pretty much my worst nightmare, except for some reason my actual worst nightmare is performing at a dance recital without knowing the routine.)
My 20-minute portion of the presentation was pretty much business as usual: afraid of taking too much time, I sped through my portion of the PowerPoint like the guy on the old Micro Machines commercial, reading off the PowerPoint word-for-word, Oscars-presenter style.
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Seeking to improve on my typical mediocrity, a month later I volunteered to speak with my law partner Terry about solutions to typical legal issues faced by community associations. He came up with the outline, and I converted it into yet another clip-art-laced PowerPoint masterpiece. We divided up the content over donuts, after a brief spat over which type of ring-shaped baked goods we should consume (I was Team Bagel).
For the first time pretty much ever, I didn’t put everything I wanted to say on the PowerPoint: I only used key phrases. I would—gasp—rely mostly on hand-written notes. Lo and behold, the connection between my brain and my mouth worked relatively well throughout the presentation. There was only one moment at the beginning when I absolutely forgot where I was and why I was there, introducing my co-presenter as “Terry, who is going to talk about… stuff.”
We also struggled with the microphone hand-off, passing it back and forth like uncoordinated clowns learning to juggle. (Pro tip: Never leave home without your own microphone and sound system.)
For my third and final group act, I signed my other law partner, Stephan, and myself up for a presentation at an industry event creatively called “Law Day.” We were going to talk about the legal aspects of vacation rentals in community associations. I offered to take the laboring oar in prep work, because I wanted to be familiar with the material and am pretty sure Stephan has no idea how to make a PowerPoint.
We split up speaking topics using slide printouts that I (brilliantly) color-coded with pink and blue highlighters. We basically had me talk about everything that Stephan wasn’t familiar with, and he agreed to talk about the murky case law that I knew the audience would grill us on come question time.
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The presentation started off really well, until Stephan started going rogue and addressing subjects out of order, disrespecting the authority of the PowerPoint. He also tried to steal one of my pink slides, which struck me as blatantly anti-feminist. Fortunately, I was able to rein him in by vigorously pointing at the printouts.
This time, I used my notes as a guide rather than a crutch. At one point during the presentation, I even sat back and thought about the fact that I wasn’t panicking, or rushing, or dying inside. (It helped that we didn’t realize we had an hour and fifteen minutes to present, which gave us a good half hour of buffer time for Stephan to verbally meander.)
My takeaway from a flurry of group presenting: you have to let go of a lot of control, but it can be beneficial to share the spotlight with someone. If nothing more, it is a way to get in front of people for marketing purposes without having to fill all the allotted speaking time yourself.
While you can’t always divide the prep and speaking time perfectly, if you are smart about the division of labor, you can maximize the effectiveness of your presentation and the time spent working on it. It is also useful to have an extra brain on hand to present on the issues you don’t want to deal with, or when a question stumps you.
It also helps to know or at least get along with your co-presenter. People totally love witty banter almost as much as the kitten photos I always manage to include in my PowerPoints. And also be ready to be interrupted or dragged along a route you didn’t expect to take; group presenting is the Wild West of public speaking. Take comfort, however, in knowing that if something goes wrong, there is at least one other person involved to blame.
Allison Peryea is a shareholder attorney at Leahy Fjelstad Peryea, a boutique law firm in downtown Seattle that primarily serves community association clients. Her practice focuses on covenant enforcement and dispute resolution. She is a longtime humor writer with a background in journalism and cat ownership. You can reach her by email at Allison.Peryea@leahyps.com.
