Travis Parmer

I grew up in a political family in Fort Worth and studied Government (Political Science) at the University of Texas, with no real plan to make a career of politics. Straight out of school, I spent two years inside a U.S. Senate campaign in Texas, running against the best-funded incumbent senator in the country at the time. It was an education in persuasion at scale.

In the mid-nineties I came home to Fort Worth to run a congressional campaign. When it ended, I took a job in sales, something I always had a talent for. But into the early 2000s, people in politics were regularly asking me to run their campaigns or give them strategic advice. I was happy with my job and would offer whatever advice I had but wasn’t interested in doing politics professionally.

That changed when a close personal friend with no political experience decided they wanted to run for judge. I agreed to run their campaign full time as their political consultant. Incumbent judges almost never lose. In that race, we took a solid local attorney with no political background and beat an entrenched twenty-plus-year incumbent judge. That race launched Parmer Consulting. Since then I’ve worked on more than 100 campaigns, from local races to national ones, most of them across North and Central Texas.

Many of my closest friends are trial lawyers, and over the years, some of them found they liked talking to me about cases they were taking to trial because my professional career involved persuasive communications and strategy. They weren’t asking about the law. They knew that better than I. They wanted to know how a set of facts would land with ordinary people, which was the question I had spent decades answering and building communication strategies around.

In Texas, jury panels are drawn largely from the same people on the voter rolls. The audience in the jury box is, in large part, the audience I had spent my career persuading. I ran a few focus groups and wrote a few strategy memos for friends, mostly because I enjoyed the work. More than one lawyer, and more than one judge, told me I ought to consider doing this kind of work professionally.

Early this year my sister, a very successful family-law attorney in North Texas, tried a case in West Texas as out-of-town counsel. Opposing counsel was local, and the opposing party had deep roots in the community. She understood she had a lot of obstacles to overcome. She asked me to come along and keep an eye on the jury.

When I told her she could probably read a jury as well as I could, she explained why she couldn’t. While she’s examining a witness, the witness is the person she must be watching in that moment. She added that she believed staring at the jury while talking to the witness would be off-putting to the jurors, and she was right.

At the first recess she turned to me and asked what I had seen. By the second day, those recess conversations had become real strategy sessions. When the jury was charged, before deliberation began, I told her I thought she had ten jurors. She was, let’s say, skeptical. The jury came back in about an hour. The verdict… unanimous for her client.

That trial is the whole business in miniature. The lawyer’s attention belongs on the witness. Someone else’s belongs on the jury.

A few months later, I worked a property-rights trial. Going into deliberations, I told the trial team I believed they were ahead with a significant number of the jurors. When the verdict came back ten to two for the defense, I started to wonder whether the first trial had simply been luck.

Then I talked with the jurors after they were discharged. Their first vote had been ten to two for the plaintiffs. My read had been right, but, over the next two hours, one persuasive juror had turned the room.

I’ve spent my career understanding small-group dynamics, and I’ve watched a single strong voice carry a room more times than I can count. I have been that voice on many occasions. But I hadn’t yet accounted for that dynamic inside a jury room. The read on the jury was right. What I hadn’t weighed was the one juror capable of changing everyone else’s mind. Spotting that kind of juror is now something I focus on during voir dire.

Reading people is not magic or some parlor trick. I have always paid close attention to how people react to things and over the years I have become very deliberate about understanding what I see. I’ve honed that instinct by taking courses, reading books, and following the academic research on body language and facial expression. You never stop learning, even if it’s simply learning to put a name to something you already sensed. One of the primary things this study gives me is vocabulary: a precise way to name what I’m seeing and explain it to others.