Private Lessons on Direct

Today we attended the New Trial Lawyer Intervention hosted by County Judge. It turns out County Judge mentors a lot of new attorneys; it’s kind of his thing. He particularly reaches out to women and minorities. Fortunately, we have one of those in our firm, so we all rode her coattails into Courtroom X this afternoon for a lesson on direct examination. County Judge gave us the following advice:

1. Primarily use journalistic questions: who, what, when, why, where, how. If your mouth is not making a ‘w’ sound, it’s probably not a good question.

2. Always use open-ended questions (except when laying foundation).

3. Maintain control over the witness by using focus tools when the witness starts to stray, e.g. “tell us more about . . .” “show me . . .” “describe . . .”

4. Transitions help focus a line of questioning on one particular subject. Examples:
a. “I want to talk to you about your experience . . .”
b. The loop back: “You said there was a red Ford parked on the road; can you describe the car in front of it? Behind it?”

5. The focus of a direct examination should be on the witness, not the examiner. This is in contrast to cross examination, when the focus is on the questions the examiner is propounding.

6. Only ask questions with a goal in mind; do not ask superfluous questions.

7. When laying a foundation, it’s okay to ask leading questions. For example: “Do you watch Grey’s Anatomy?” I’m laying a foundation for questions about an episode of GA.