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Leave it to a lawyer to know how to spot a good lie.
Trial attorney Dan Cogdell of Houston-based Cogdell Law Firm has been a criminal defense lawyer for over four decades, so it’s fair to say that he knows a thing or two about liars.
He revealed to The Post that the average person lies at least two to three times per day, whether they’ll admit it or not.
“It might be a white lie. It might be something that’s told out of kindness and not deception, but we all lie every single day,” he told The Post.
“How are you? I’m fine. That’s a f—ing lie,” he emphasized.
To know who is a Pinocchio, in a now viral TikTok video, Cogdell revealed a fistful of phrases to keep an ear out for.
The first erroneous lead in? “As far as I can recall.”
He shared that if a person starts a sentence with that phrase, there’s a high likelihood they are stalling for time: “They’re internally distancing themselves from the truth.”
He noted in the clip that when the liar in question prepares and processes these words before delivering them, “they’re justifying what they’re fixing to tell you.”
The second red flag phrase, an irritating one for Cogdell, is “to be honest.”
“If you say you’re being honest now, does that mean you were never honest before you said that?” he questioned in the clip.
According to Cogdell, the third favored phrase of deceivers is the self-righteous declaration “I always have, or I never have.”
“Very few people have always done something or never done something. So, I’ve never told a lie, or I always tell the truth? That’s a tagline of bulls–t,” he stated in the video.
The fourth strategy often employed by deceivers is to repeat any question they’ve been asked.
Cogdell gives the example of an untrustworthy spouse being questioned about their whereabouts, responding to “Honey, where’d you go last night?” with the mirrored question “Um, where did I go last night?”
“They are literally buying time to come up with an answer that’s suitable that they think you’ll buy,” he explained.
However, as some commenters on the video pointed out, echolalia, or the process of repeating a question back to the person asking it, is a common symptom among people living with ADHD.
So proceed with caution if someone uses that tactic with you.
The fifth and final fib strategy is the deflect and evade technique.
Coddell said responding to a question like “Did you go to a strip club last night?” not with an answer but with defensive, evasive or deflective language like “You don’t have anything better to do than wonder if I went to a strip joint?” is a telltale sign of a tall tale.
“If they deflect and evade, that’s probably a tell.”
Cogdell told The Post that his list is not absolute nor foolproof.
“These are general rules and there’s always exceptions. It depends on the context, your familiarity with the person, and their speech patterns. There’s nothing concrete about the list, it’s just a starting point,” he explained.
In addition to these phrases, Codgell relies on body language to identify cues in conversation, calling nonverbal clues “as important as verbal cues.”
And for the record, Cogdell counts his own kind among the most egregious justifiers and falsifiers.
“Lawyers are the biggest liars on the planet,” he told The Post. “The practice encourages dishonesty and puts a premium on creativity and stretching the truth. In particular, the adversarial nature of litigation encourages disharmony and the best way to continue that disharmonious relationship is to not tell the truth.”
On what occasion does Codgell himself lie?
“When I don’t have a choice and when I think the answer is going to cause more pain than the truth.”
He credits four years of sobriety with “reducing the baseline of my lying” but maintains that he has never intentionally told a lie in a courtroom.
“Have I raised a reasonable doubt and have I argued things that were reasonable deductions from the evidence? Sure. But have I ever solicited perjury or knowingly told a lie? I got to say I could pass that test, but others might disagree.”
