Continuing Legal Education
Matt Lafargue is an experienced and highly regarded legal educator. Below are the Continuing Legal Education courses Matt currently offers. Please contact us to book one of these courses for your organization.
Legal advocacy, in all of its forms, is the art of persuasion. Whether we’re in a courtroom, a negotiation, or even meeting with a client, lawyers are always giving a performance of one kind or another. In this program, Matt teaches you how to use skills from the world of theatre to be more intentional and more effective in the way you present yourself and your arguments.
Matt demonstrates how making deliberate choices about how to present yourself and your arguments will establish you as a more credible authority and make you a more effective communicator. You will learn how to focus your audience’s attention on the things, people, and arguments that benefit your position the most, and to evoke emotion in your audience through compelling storytelling.
This course helps you build the elements of effective presentation piece by piece from the ground up, from the way you use your voice, to your posture, to your hand gestures, to your word choice and your pacing, even to what you wear from one situation to the next. Every choice affects the way your audience perceives you and your presentation, and every choice should be intentional.
Whether you’re seeking to increase your effectiveness in the courtroom, or simply want to get better at communicating with your clients, your adversaries, judges, and everyone else you encounter in the legal profession, this course will help you explore the ways you can use the same skills an actor uses on stage or screen to be more effective in the practice of law.
All The World’s A Stage (Including the Courtroom): Elements of Theatre in the Practice of Law
Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System
This course teaches attorneys the ins and outs of navigating the criminal justice system on behalf of clients struggling with mental illness. Matt will teach you the differing standards for achieving a finding of lack of competency to stand trial, a not guilty by reason of insanity plea, a not guilty finding due to lack of sufficient mens rea, and persuading the prosecutor to reduce the plea offer based on reduced culpability caused by the client’s illness.
This course also covers how to properly document a client’s mental illness, how to talk to mentally ill clients and their families, how to find appropriate treatment for your client, and how to get the courts and the treatment facilities to work together instead of constantly passing responsibility back and forth to one another.
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