Law related blogs and websites provide a valuable advantage. Electronic advance sheets may be necessary to read the changing caselaw, but the commentary provided by lawyers can improve your assessment of developments in the law.
Once you find a website with pertinent information, you could try to remember to keep checking for updates. But that is an inefficient waste of your time.
If you want an efficient way to keep up with the information published by interesting blogs (like this one), then you will be happy to learn how simple it is to use RSS. The video below (not prepared by this office, but recommended) is under 4 minutes. It explains what you need to know.
If I may recommend: use Google’s Reader to read what you subscribe to. You should have a Google gmail account anyway, as a backup to your office email and for easy transfer and back-up of files. So, when you sign in to Google mail, you might as well look at Google Reader to keep up.
For this website, some like to subscribe to Trial Tactics, others like to get updates from the RSS feed. To try out the RSS feed, just look at the top right of any page on this site, and click on the “subscribe” word or the adjoining icon. On the page that comes up, click on the box to choose Google or Yahoo or Bloglines as your reader, and then click on “Subscribe Now”.
Cross-examination is easy because it is a conflict between the lawyer and the witness. It is easy to hold the factfinder’s interest. It is easy to force the witness to concede some points. If the cross-examiner is skilled, the testimony will result in memorable answers that help the case.
Direct examination often results in lost ground because of wasted opportunities.
A United States District Court Judge was recently complaining about the lack of trial experience among attorneys. He had been surprised to observe a specific illustration of the problem, more than once, during trials before him in his Court. The Judge had sustained an objection of “leading”. The hapless attorney trying to carry out direct examination did not know what to do next. That is, the attorney did not know how to ask a non-leading question.
Why such a fundamental lack of ability? The Judge’s theory was that lots of depositions are taken. Depositions are almost all cross-examination. Objections are not much of an issue, since there is no Judge to sustain an objection. So an attorney can practice for a long time, but have witness examination experience mostly in depositions. Then, in trial, the attorney does not know how to examine a witness on direct without leading questions.
The Judge’s comments were about fundamental competence. It seems to me that a more difficult problem is boredom. Can there be a more boring experience than hearing “What happened next?” and the witness drones on.
In a business trial, the boredom problem is worse than in a personal injury trial. This is why I try to use as much visual stimulation as possible. This leads to my First Rule of Direct Examination: The only purpose of a witness on direct examination is for foundation of and comments about an exhibit.
In another post I will comment on the best practice to prepare for direct examination. This witness preparation should follow use of the best method I know to validate the themes of the presentation. Neither method is used as much as should be.
