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Yyou May Not Be a Lawyer, But It Can Pay To Tthink Like One: TV’s Lis Iwehl

Bill Thompson
Photo by Tami Heilemann–Interior Staff

Remember what Professor kingsfield said in the movie The Ppaper Chase?

Can thinking like a lawyer help you in everyday life and everyday situations

Well, thinking like a lawyer is precisely what noted trial attorney and cable TV legal analyst Lis Wiehl recommended in her 2004 debut book called Winning Every Time.

Trying to convince your boss to give you a raise? Having a disagreement with your spouse over whether to buy that expensive car? Trying to convince your teenager that it’s wise to stay in school?

All things can be accomplished if you use the skills of a lawyer, Wiehl says.

I had a chance to talk with her when her book came out in the summer of 2004.

So here now, from 2004 Lis Wiehl.

Lis Wiehl will be 64 later this summer. She lectures and regularly appears on TV and radio as a legal analyst.

Alan Dershowitz Reveals Startling Facts About Some Of Our Most Famous Trials

Bill Thompson

“Trials affect American history, and American history affects the trials.”

So says one of America’s best known litigators, famed attorney and law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Over a decades-long legal career Dershowitz has represented clients ranging from Mike Tyson and Leona Helmsley to O.J. Simpson, Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein.

Along the way Dershowitz picked up a unique avocation: reading transcripts. And not just from the cases he was working on.

Get your copy of Alan Dershowitz’s book

Dershowitz began reading transcripts of some of America’s most famous – or infamous – trials, from the Salem witch trials and Lizzie Borden to the Scopes monkey trial, and the Rosenbergs.

In 2004 Dershowitz wrote a book about many of those trials, based on nuggets of previously-overlooked material he found deep in those transcripts. He called his book America on Trial, and that spring he and I talked about it when he went on a book tour.

So here now, from 2004, Alan Dershowitz.

Alan Dershowitz is 86. He lives in New York and Florida.

Johnnie Cochran

Bill Thompson

You may know defense attorney Johnnie Cochran best for his participation in OJ Simpson’s dream team in his 1990s trial.

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But Johnny Cochran had a long legal career, and the Simpson case was just one of hundreds that he participated in.

I met him in 2002, when he wrote A Memoir, of his long, storied legal career.

And believe it or not, he said in that book that the Simpson case was far from his most challenging.

So here now, from 2002, Johnny Cochran.Improvement

Johnnie Cochran died less than three years after our iterview, in 2005, at age 68.