Ā Hi, I'm Cliff Atkinson
Creator of Group Sync. Trial Consultant. World Traveler.
I help people think more clearly, communicate more powerfully, and perform at their best in the highest-stakes rooms of their lives.
For 20 years, that meant courtrooms. Now it means something bigger.
TheĀ Work
I've spent two decades as a trial communications consultant to some of America's leading plaintiffs attorneys ā€” helping craft the narratives that persuaded juries to award billions in verdicts.
The first case that defined my career was the nation's first Vioxx trial. I helped Mark Lanier build the opening statement. The jury awarded $253 million. Fortune magazine called my work "frighteningly powerful." That description stuck.
Since then I've worked on 150+ cases ā€” antitrust, personal injury, pharmaceutical liability, patent, and more. My most recent case was a $5 billion antitrust verdict with Bill Carmody of Susman Godfrey.
What I've always done in those rooms is not just make better presentations. I read the group field. I find the narrative arc. I create the conditions for a room to turn.
It took me twenty years to understand exactly what I was doing ā€” and why it worked.
TheĀ Discovery
I started as a writer and journalist. In 2003 I published a series of articles arguing that the real problem with presentations wasn't the software ā€” it was that communicators were talking at audiences instead of thinking with them. The board of directors of GE read them and called me. That became my first client.
In 2005 Microsoft Press published Beyond Bullet Points ā€” my synthesis of cinematic storytelling and strategic communication. It sold 125,000 copies, was published in four editions, and was translated into a dozen languages. Amazon named it a Best Book of the Year. Mark Lanier found it, hired me, and changed the trajectory of my career.
For the next twenty years I lived inside the most complex, high-pressure group dynamics imaginable ā€” trial teams, mediations, jury rooms. I watched some groups perform brilliantly under impossible pressure and others collapse under far less. I kept asking the same question: what's actually happening between people when things go right?
The answer turned out to be one of the most well-documented phenomena in neuroscience ā€” and one of the least talked about in everyday life.
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