F. Lee Bailey

One of America’s most famous attorneys, F. Lee Bailey, has captured the imagination of millions by taking on case after controversial case in a career that has spanned decades and continents. From his first blockbuster, the Dr. Sam Shepard murder case, to newspaper heiress Patricia Heart’s front page abduction and subsequent trial, Bailey has had more experience with selling judges and juries on his clients’ innocence than a politician would have selling voters on his platform during a whistle stop tour.

Currently Bailey spends a great deal of time speaking to groups about his experiences, insights, and lessons for success. In this exclusive interview with PSP, Bailey talks about integrity, success, and disappointment. He shares some of his secrets for making the sale in the courtroom and talks about his own ideas on professional selling. Along with his more renowned accomplishments, Bailey confided that he has sold airplanes and boats. Man of a thousand talents, F. Lee Bailey – a true superachiever.

PSP: To what degree do you feel preparation is an ingredient that determines success?

F. Lee Bailey: A very high degree. A colleague of mine once said, “If your investigator is good enough, most any lawyer will do.” That’s an understatement, but to have the material at your fingertips is essential. The way you use it begins to separate the talent from the also-rans.

PSP: I understand that you prepare yourself for 50 different variations that could come up in a case.

F. Lee Bailey: That’s a quote from Edward Bennet Williams. The day after I took the bar, I asked him how he managed to pull off so many timely escapes in the courtroom. He said, “If you are going to pull a rabbit out of a hat, bring 50 hats and 50 rabbits and get lucky.” There was some truth to that.

PSP: When do you know that you are over preparing?

F. Lee Bailey: There is no such thing as being too ready. It’s simply an economic constraint.

PSP: A lot of people don’t want to prepare because they are afraid of wasting their time.

F. Lee Bailey: That depends on the stakes. If it’s a serious crime…we once had a fellow charged with 102 counts of murder. If he lost any one of them, he was gone for life. It was the most thoroughly prepared case I have ever seen, partly because I had Army lawyers at my disposal and they had nothing else to do – they were on a salary. They could interview a witness five times. You would like to prepare all cases that way, but if it’s a suit for $100 you can hardly afford it.

PSP: Is there a methodology to questioning?

F. Lee Bailey: It’s a complex technique and there are several phases of each, both the friendly question and the adversary question.

PSP: What would be an example of a friendly question?

F. Lee Bailey: Well, if you are my client and I put you on the witness stand, and I am obviously trying to sell your story, I’m not likely to torpedo you. If you are the adversary, I may or may not want to take you apart, depending on No. 1 whether you are a decent witness and No.2 whether you are telling the truth. There are very few witnesses who tell all of that. It’s a difficult feat.

PSP: So, what you are saying is that the goal of a good question is to establish the truth.

F. Lee Bailey: Oh, no, far from it. The techniques of cross-examination are infinitely complex. It takes longer to learn, I would say, than psychoanalysis, because the variables are great and although you can be thoroughly prepared with materials, each question dictates the next one so there is no way you can prepare yourself for that. You have to be able to react very quickly if there is an opening. You have to seize upon it. Most lawyers come in with a long list of questions and if they get a very good answer to No. 5, they go right on to No. 6.

PSP: And your technique is to follow up immediately.

F. Lee Bailey: Leave everything on the table and just keep going. I figure I know more than the witness does about most of what he’s going to say.

PSP: When you say that very few people tell all of the truth, do you mean voluntarily?

F. Lee Bailey: The human being is a poor reproducer of historical events when compared with a video tape, for instance. Recollection simply isn’t that great and it’s colored by all kinds of things. If you hate the color red, your emotions will change if somebody walks in with a red dress. Your ability to report is dinished if you have a personal interest in the outcome. It is literally impossible to be totally objective because your ears are tuned to anything that will help and you tend to block things that won’t. I am speaking about the honest witnesses. We very seldom see black or white. There are some abject liars that are a total loss, but most people are in the gray zone, where it’s a question of shades.

PSP: In a business context, some people won’t tell the whole story because they have ulterior reasons for not giving it.

F. Lee Bailey: That’s a flaw in questioning. In questioning you eliminate the pieces that could be held back. That’s important to business people as well as lawyers because too often you get that old motto, “I know you think you heard what I said, but what you heard is not what I meant.” The whole business of selling is not to say, “I want to give you some reasons that it’s a piece of crap.” Sometimes an intelligent salesperson will indicate one tiny little drawback as an index of his honesty and to gain the trust of the subject, but generally he’s there to list the high points.

PSP: What is the difference between asking questions of a friendly witness in the courtroom and a salesperson asking questions on a call?

F. Lee Bailey: Well, a friendly witness is one that I have prepared, but when you go in to a sales prospect, you haven’t spent hours preparing him for the interview. You’re in there perhaps cold or perhaps had some preliminary phone calls or perhaps after distributing some literature and getting indications of interest, but it’s an experience where credibility is all important. If the fellow believes you and there is a need for the product, he is sometimes more likely to accept it than if he has doubts about what you are saying. And intelligent purchaser will ask some loaded questions. “How many people do you know that are really happy with this product that I can call?” for instance.

PSP: I’ve heard lawyers say, “Never ask a question in court that you don’t know the answer to.”

F. Lee Bailey: That’s a luxury that none of us can afford. The people who become foremost successes in life usually are the rule breakers. You have to know when to do it. Every racing driver, whether he’s in a car, airplane or boat, breaks all kinds of rules. But they know how to do it. Chuck Yeager is a good example. These are all the things we tell all the average users “don’t do, you haven’t developed the skills to operate in that parameter.” To ask questions to which you don’t know the answer is a technique – a very dangerous technique – it can get you in big trouble.

PSP: How do you size up an opponent?

F. Lee Bailey: In two ways: by observing mannerisms and conduct, and by testing. You can suggest to an opponent that maybe something was going to develop in the case that would be of great concern to him. It’s a question of his reaction. He will say, “Well are you going to tell me what it is so I can deal with it?” Or the guy may say, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference to me, I’ve got an overwhelming case.” You don’t worry too much about people like that because he’s either bluffing or he is stupid enough to believe that he does have an overwhelming case. Then there are all kinds of reactions that will begin to give you an index of your opponent. I learned in psychology that only certain kinds of birds are thought to have intuition. For the rest of us, everything else is a product of some kind of absorbed knowledge that is functioning in a subconscious way. The fact that you don’t go through a logical step-by-step thought process to mirror your own very rapid analysis doesn’t mean it’s intuition at all. Sizing up people is a logical but subconscious process.

PSP: It seems to me that a trial and a sales call are similar in the kinds of stress they produce. How do you deal with stress in a trial situation?

F. Lee Bailey: To me, stress is almost the elixir. The worst thing now is boredom when I’m apt to miss something because it does not keep my attention. I think some people function best under pressure.

PSP: How do you deal with failure?

F. Lee Bailey: Well, there are several ways to define that. America, which has the attention span of a four-year-old, defines lawyers in terms of wins and losses. We don’t know any such listing. You can defend a fellow for murder, and if you saved his life, it would be a tremendous victory. You could defend someone else for murder and if he got convicted of simple assault it would be a loss. Failure would be a horrible mistake in the courtroom that led to a result the client didn’t deserve.

PSP: How would you define it for yourself?

F. Lee Bailey: Well, if you make an effort to do something and it doesn’t succeed, as opposed to the converse, that would be failing. And that is unpleasant and you’d rather it didn’t happen. But, I don’t’ find it to be shattering in any respect. A lot of things I attempt are long shots. It’s usually worth the try and if you don’t win anything, you usually learn something.

PSP: Do you feel that a disappointment is a source of growth?

F. Lee Bailey: If you handle it properly, I think it’s a source if growth. If it gets you down, it probably does the reverse. It would probably prevent you from growing in those areas and maybe cause an inhibition to try it again.

PSP: What was your biggest professional disappointment?

F. Lee Bailey: That’s hard to say. The meanest case I ever tried was the Patricia Hearst case. From a professional point of view and in view of the original set of problems we were given, the case finally turned out rather well. I think the disappointment was that half of why we did what we did was kept under wraps for probably two or three years and the bar was critical and the public was critical and puzzled until they found out the true story. That only happened when she revealed it. It was within the attorney-client privilege; therefore we couldn’t say anything. When she finally told what she was up against – what we were really hired to accomplish – and that there was a murder case in the background, then people began to say, “Ah, now I understand why you had to take the Fifth Amendment,” and so forth and so on. That was frustrating. A disappointment is an expectation that didn’t materialize. The inability to go after a problem because its solution is off bounds – that is pure frustration.

PSP: I’d like to go back to what you said earlier about if disappointment is handled properly, it is going to help you grow, and if it’s not, then it prevents you from trying. What do you mean by “handled properly”?

F. Lee Bailey: Well, I think the first thing to do with any problem is to confront it very squarely. If one is disappointed, the first defense is analysis. How did this happen? If it turns out that it wasn’t any fault of the individual, that’s comforting to a degree. Somebody else did something beyond your control, you at least might learn from that how in the future to see the torpedo coming in time to get out of its way or to turn it back. If you made a bad mistake that was stupid, or the result of just not thinking it through, you either learn a lesson and it isn’t going to happen again, or you don’t. If you don’t then you try again and fail again. I think you’re simply going further down the road. It’s like people being thrown off a horse. The general school of thought is put them right back on the horse. I know when we have a pilot who has a close call, our preference, as long as we know he is physically okay, is to put him right back up in the air before some kind of fear sets in that will be an inhibition for a long time.

PSP: What background best equips a professional for dealing with difficult people situations?

F. Lee Bailey: Psychology, which is basically the study of behavior, English courses, history and learning to read or speak the King’s English very well. People whose job it is to communicate in critical situations should have a good handle on the language they are using. They shouldn’t be inhibited. The inability to abandon all the crutches, incident to making a statement or declaration or series of questions, lead to a hobbled approach. People who are dependent upon written materials and who don’t take the time to memorize what’s in them nor to analyze them and keep them on the tip of their tongues will suddenly by looking at notes instead of addressing the issue.

PSP: To what personal qualities do you attribute your success?

F. Lee Bailey: A trained ability at a very young age to retain a tremendous amount of information. Most of the trial lawyers that I know that are any good were crammers in school. They were out having a good time, drinking beer and going to ball games. A short time before exams they would sit down and sock it home.

PSP: Are you still doing that?

F. Lee Bailey: If I were to ask you, as I did the chairman of the board of Continental Illinois during a trial, whether you made this and that statement in Geneva on such and such a day – which was fine except I wasn’t reading from anything – you would have to sit there as he did and decide whether you had said it. He didn’t have any of the materials available. And every time he equivocated, I would hand it to him. Then he started saying, “I don’t remember.” He didn’t want to say yes or no so he said, “I don’t remember.” Well, I got him not to remember things that happened 48 hours ago including the day the bank collapsed. And not to remember what happened on the worst day in your whole life is difficult to sell. But he wasn’t afraid of anything when he walked in there. He was arrogant. One of the most important bankers in the country. He figured that he could swagger his way through anything.

PSP: Where does integrity fit in when you take a case?

F. Lee Bailey: Well, if you’re asking how I define integrity, Bobby Kennedy would have said, “Doing the right thing,” which presumed that Bobby Kennedy or anyone else knew what that was. I think you have to sit down and ask, “What is the justification for taking this step?” A difficult question for which there is no good answer.

PSP: When I interviewed Senator Sam Ervin, Jr., he said that the hardest thing you will ever have to do in life is to choose between conflicting loyalties.

F. Lee Bailey: That’s certainly true. In the adversarial system that we have, one assumes that whatever I am doing to destroy an opponent’s case, he is doing equally hard to destroy mine. I have a great deal of trouble feeling guilty for doing a better job than my opponent and winning the case because he or she wasn’t working as hard or being as smart as they could have been.

PSP: What is your measure of success?

F. Lee Bailey: Generally at the end of a trial, the judge will indicate whether it has been successful. In a well tried case, the lawyers did what they should have done. But that’s a staple answer and in my view a better answer is when there’s a case that they say can’t be won. When your client is right but the system and so forth is all stacked against him or her from the start. I have always been very quick to react to someone saying it can’t be done.

PSP: How do you personally measure success?

F. Lee Bailey: Public response is certainly one measure. I like to speak in front of an audience and get them to agree with my ideas even if they are a group that absolutely stands for everything I am speaking against or a group that like everything I have to say – I enjoy the idea of selling the same ideas to both of them albeit with different language, that is an index of success.

PSP: What are the key qualities of a good salesperson?

F. Lee Bailey: A good salesperson has to like what he is selling, be terribly well prepared, know a lot about his prospect, and then be able to create or inflate a desire for what he is selling beyond what he found when he walked in the door.

PSP: Thank you.