Trial Lawyer Prep

Jury selection: either trial lawyers hate it – or love it. Although many trial lawyers are afraid of it, jury selection never gets old. You will be getting different stories, different personalities, and different answers each time. But it takes a lot of practice to get better at it. The skills required for it are learned, practiced, and honed for hours and hours. Today's guest, Laurie Koller, a p...

Creating opening statements is one of the common problems we see as trial lawyers. Opening statements are the first look that the jurors have at the case. Naturally, you would talk to them about principles and circumstances, and maybe some rules in jury selection. But a lot of times, once we get to the opening statement, it can get long and drawn out. In this episode, I'm going to talk about some...

In today's episode, we talk about focus groups to do for trial, whether that's 30 days or 60 days before your trial date. You may also choose to do this earlier. But most of the time, there are pending motions that need to be rolled on, such as mediations that people need to get through to get to the point and for them to really speak their minds.  Listen in to know more about the different focus...

Having before and after witnesses is very useful to help tell your client's story from an outside perspective. They can often talk about damages in a way that your client can't, and may shed light on changes that your client isn't even aware of. A well-prepared witness is able to talk about the changes in your client's life in an authentic way, without burdening your client with the labels of "whi...

There are a ton of reasons that a trial could be delayed and reset, whether that's continuances due to scheduling conflicts, the witnesses being on vacation, or whatever. At a certain point, after the second continuance, you start to get a little fatigued, almost burnt out on the case, and you begin to lose motivation. Burnout is real, and so is trial continuance fatigue. And so, how do we prevent...

Continuing this trial series today, we talk about trial management and organization, specifically, about organizing your team, organizing documents, and how to manage that day-to-day change with your team. As you replicate trial organization over and over, it helps the trial team handle uncertainties and changes as well as focus more on the key things they need to prioritize. Trials have different...

Opening statements are one of the coolest things in that the plaintiff can go first procedurally. The question is how can you take advantage of being first?  In today's episode, we discuss the ways that lawyers can lose the advantage of being first. Many trial lawyers have this tendency to have long opening statements that can bore the jurors. Therefore, you don't want to lose their attention, con...

Preparing and working with the client is so critical to a good direct exam. Success starts with our clients going in with a mindset that the jury consists of smart people who can smell good versus bad. Therefore, they just have to set their fears aside and trust the process. We also have to ask enough questions to get the information we need while making them feel at ease and comfortable. The chal...

As trial lawyers, it's important to remind ourselves about our goals for preparation for any case event. Even when that person has been deposed before or they've been to a hearing before, it's still best that we provide them with a roadmap.  First, make sure to teach them about what the whole event is and how it fits into the case. Then talk about what they can expect and correct any bad expectati...

We spend a lot of time working up our cases. We spend a lot of hours on discovery and go into deposition testimony to form that strategy, that we can test with focus groups. But if we get unreliable feedback, then it's just a waste of our energy, time, and resources.  In this episode, we're going to talk about the four factors that can cause unreliable feedback from focus groups, and what you shou...

It's a new year and it's time to look at new opportunities and new ideas for you to plug in and use. Today, let's start with the best time to run focus groups. Sure, you can run a focus group at any time. But if you want to get the most out of it, there are actually six spots to run a focus group in your case.  These are great places to help you prepare the case better. You may not get through to...

In today's episode, I'm sharing 22 lessons from 2022 – things that I have picked up on this year, things I have studied, and things where I just had some aha moments. These are valuable lessons that have helped me and my practice big time – from keeping up to date with technology and using visuals in focus groups and even during prep – all the way to letting go of toxic clients, investing in a coa...

As a trial lawyer, what is your mindset around deposition preparation? Today, we focus our discussion around that. Lawyers have different mindsets going into deposition preparation. You want to get the most value from every single case but it's also important to do things using a humanistic approach. At the end of the day, our mindset should be focused on helping our client as they go through seem...

As we're approaching 2023, this is the perfect time for planning, especially if you have cases that are going to be filed in 2023. And one useful case planning tool is a pre-litigation focus group. Maybe you've had this case for a couple of months now and you've done a little bit of investigating. So you have a little understanding of the facts around what happened, but you haven't actually filed...

As a trial lawyer, you probably know what goes into client preparation like the back of your hand but there could still be things missing in your process that you wish to improve on.  In this episode, I'm going to discuss four simple advice tips for successful client prep. These are simple yet sometimes overlooked, tried and true tips for nearly every single client and every single case.  These ar...

Bonding versus preparing a client for deposition are two things that we are told we need to do as trial lawyers to set ourselves up for success. Indeed, both are vital and important parts of client interaction, but where do we draw the line between the two? Sometimes, when you've already built a solid relationship with a client, this can be difficult to separate. But bonding and preparing a client...

Every witness gets asked about what documents they used to prepare. As lawyers, we have to be on the front end of things before meeting the client. This week, we are going to continue our two-part series on how to decide what documents to use in deposition prep.  Whether it's personal injury, an employment issue, or a business dispute, cases involve dealing with a ton of documents. Depending on th...

In this episode, let's take a backtrack to reflect on how I got to this whole spot of podcasting. I'm also sharing lessons we can all take away and use in witness preparation and coaching. Witness coaching may sound negative because you might think you're just coaching them on what to say. But try to look at this in a different way and turn this from a different angle. Witness coaching is really a...

In today's episode, we are going to focus on documents in deposition preparation, focusing on clients, not experts. This is an important but highly ignored topic, mainly because as lawyers, we have easy privileges and we don't get any pushback. However, there may be situations where it's a really close call.  No matter where you are in terms of knowledge on this topic or even experience, this is a...

Today, we talk about deposition pressure, specifically, this real-life example of the "Elon Musk vs. Twitter" lawsuit. Just to give you a little backstory, Elon Musk was supposed to buy Twitter, and then he decided to back out in July which prompted Twitter to file a lawsuit. On October 6, Elon Musk was scheduled to face a deposition, and then all of a sudden, a letter comes across from Elon Musk'...

Jury selection: either trial lawyers hate it – or love it. Although many trial lawyers are afraid of it, jury selection never gets old. You will be getting different stories, different personalities, and different answers each time. But it takes a lot of practice to get better at it. The skills required for it are learned, practiced, and honed for hours and hours. Today's guest, Laurie Koller, a p...

Not a fan of running focus groups before mediation? Hopefully, after listening to this episode, you will see the value of running focus groups before mediation. As trial lawyers, we all want clarity and certainty in any given case and focus groups can help provide those even as you're preparing for mediation.  Whether you settle, which is great, or you don't, you're still going to have this great...

One of the ways trial lawyers can prepare people for trial is the jury instructions where you basically look at how your client can help the jury answer the questions. Now, it doesn't matter what level of intelligence or understanding a client is. That's just the way a trial goes.  The questions that the jury is going to have to answer should always be the target. This way, you can help the client...

Times have changed. And after the pandemic, things have shifted yet again. The question is, are you changing with the times? Are you preparing your clients in the best way to make it easy and simple for everyone involved? There is currently a huge push into mediation, not trial. In fact, the whole thing about "saving on costs" has gone out the window. But what didn't really shift is the trial lawy...

Not sure about the case value of a case? Finding case values can be really difficult. Sometimes, cases are difficult to assess. Maybe you're just not sure how to evaluate this case. There are three sources lawyers generally tap into when it comes to evaluating cases. First, they could use their own experiences, which can be great, but at times, it can be limited. Maybe because they haven't practic...