The Trial Practice Tips Blog

Gerry Spence: Voir Dire Example

From Paul Luvera at Plaintiff Trial Lawyer Tips: "Gerry Spence Voir Dire Questions."

According to Luvera, his examples illustrate what "a great lawyer can do with limited time" to interact with the whole jury panel.

Giving Legal Research Assignments to Others

How do you give research assignments to junior lawyers? Probably in a way that leaves the junior lawyer wondering exactly what he's supposed to be doing. That was my experience anyway when I was a junior lawyer who used to get a lot of assignments. After awhile, I learned to stick around in the senior lawyer's office until I'd figured out exactly what my assignment was. Remembering to ask questions before I got started was a good lesson to learn.

Continue reading "Giving Legal Research Assignments to Others" in the archives.

Ten Rules for Depositions

At Litigation and Trial, Max Kennerly lists his "ten rules for depositions," beginning with "use plain, simple language" and ending with (almost) "don’t get into a stupid bickering match with the witness." A useful post.

Preparing for Expert Depositions by Looking Ahead to the Cross-Examination at Trial

Your preparation for depositions will generally be much easier if you think about the ways the testimony will be used at trial. This tip applies to most pretrial discovery: it's almost never an end in itself, but something that will be used later in front of a jury. It's no accident that the ins-and-outs of pretrial discovery often make more sense after a lawyer has witnessed some actual trials. When trials are scarce, even reading trial transcripts helps.

The looking-ahead-to-trial tip can be especially useful for deposing your opponent's experts. If you often rely on outlines prepared by other lawyers, this method will also help you understand why it's important to ask the questions lawyers typically ask when deposing experts.

Continue reading "Preparing for Expert Depositions by Looking Ahead to the Cross-Examination at Trial" in the archives.

My Deposition Book: Deposition Checklists and Strategies

Here's a nice review of my book, Deposition Checklists and Strategies, by Kevin Fine at the blog Lawyers Who Read: "Deposition Checklists and Strategies." 

Published by James Publishing, I add new content each year. More information here.

Cross-Examination and the Evasive Witness

Here's a useful post from the At Counsel Table blog, written by Alex Craigie: "Three Ways To Control An Evasive Witness On Cross-Examination."

Craigie offers three suggestions for controlling an evasive witness, drawing from the work of James McElhaney. Recommended.

Valuing Personal Injury Cases

Some thoughts from Ronald Miller at the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog: "Can Lawyers Properly Value Personal Injury Cases?"--

An article titled "Predicting Civil Jury Verdicts: How Attorneys Use (and Misuse) a Second Opinion" written in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies provides the answer as to how personal injury attorneys do as a class in estimating verdicts: not good.

The average error for lawyers in predicting the value accurate was 0.387. For a verdict of $100,000, this is equivalent to an estimate of $244,000 or $41,000. That's a big range. With those estimation skills, it is a wonder more cases don't go to trial.

As Miller notes, "[I]t is important to underscore how unbelievably important this skill set is for trial lawyers." Read the full post for ideas about improving your own "estimation skills."

How to Deal with "Self-Important Blowhards"

At Above The Law, there's some good advice for dealing with difficult opposing counsel by Brian Tannebaum: The Practice: "Dealing with Threatening, Demanding Opposing Counsel"--

Part of the problem is that we’ve all been trained to do things a certain way. Someone writes a letter, you write back. Someone threatens, you threaten back. Someone raises their voice, you speak louder. Why are you doing this? What are you accomplishing?

For solutions to the problem, read the whole post.

15 Ways to Ruin a Deposition

In this series of posts, I'll dig into the archives of The Trial Practice Tips Weblog and highlight some of my prior posts about depositions. Although you can see all of these post in this weblog's deposition category, I thought I'd try to reorganize some of them in a new way.

I'll begin with the first five ways a lawyer can ruin a deposition. I've been guilty of all of them at one time or another--

1. Deposing someone who doesn't need to be deposed at all. Unnecessary depositions are a waste of time and money. See this post: "Not Every Witness Need to Be Deposed."

Continue reading "15 Ways to Ruin a Deposition" in the archives.

Some Post from the "Legal Writing" Category

In case you missed them, here are a few of the many posts I've written for the "legal writing" category of The Trial Practice Tips Weblog--

• How to Begin a Brief or Memorandum
• Is Shorter Really Better?
• When You're Stuck, Pretend You're Writing a Letter
• How to Maintain Your Credibility
• Begin First Drafts in the Middle
• A Writing Tip that Pays Dividends in Reader Comprehension
• An Easy Tip to Make Your Writing Look More Professional
• Self-Editing Tips for Legal Writers