When I was in law school, one of my professors—a no-nonsense New Yorker with a Harvard pedigree—liked to say that those of us who became trial attorneys would need to learn how to effectively communicate with a group of “shoe salesmen and janitors.”

That’s how he referred to juries.

Pretty brutal, I know. But his point was that despite all the high-level legal philosophy that was being jammed into our heads, we’d still have to learn to translate complex concepts into language an average person could understand.