You have an opportunity to give a presentation to attorneys. How can you craft interactive presentations for attorneys? A lot of presentations made by attorneys are presented as lectures. I’ve heard so many attorneys complain that these presentations are boring.
Interactive Presentations for Attorneys are More than Questions and Answers
Interactive presentations are much more interesting as they engage the audience. There are so many things that you can do to make a presentation interactive. The baseline that most people think about is just simply having a Q&A session, being willing to entertain questions from your audience. You’d take questions, but also comments. Attorneys may not have a question, but they may have something they want to share or state or comment on something that you told them.
After you decide you’re going to have a Q&A session, determine whether you’re going to integrate it as part of your talk or save it for a particular segment of your talk.
Anytime you plan interactive presentations for attorneys, you’re looking for a level of engagement. You want attorneys to get emotionally engaged with what you’re saying. Signal your desire to have interactivity by being willing to look at them in the eye with a pleasant look on your face.
Suppose you’re doing a Q&A session and you say, “I’ll love to entertain some questions or comments that you may have.” You need to look out at people. If you drop your eyes even for a second, people think you are insincere and they will not step up and ask. You must do that to encourage engagement or interactivity – that’s absolutely required.
Interactive Activities
1. Do a role play. Reenact a section of a deposition. Point out the implications of what the person said.
2. Give colored dots to people who ask questions. At the end of the session depending on the number of dots there may be an award they get for it or some kind of a giveaway. It’s amazing how adults love to be competitive about how many dots that they’re going to collect.
3. Divide the group into groups. Give people an assignment and say, “Just turn to the right, talk to the person next to you” and give them a question to share among themselves. It can be a Q&A where just one person stands up and asks questions or makes a comment. It can be even small group work where you ask people to turn to the neighbor or get in groups of three and give them something to do like answer a question or generate some thoughts about a particular topic.
There are so many techniques for creating interactive presentations for attorneys. These are just a few to get you thinking.
Pat Iyer and Stephanie Scotti explored this topic in Pat’s podcast: Episode 2: Powerful Professional Presentations. Listen to the presentation at this site.