Dennis Elias’s Latest Tweet :. Injustice News Twitter Feed :.Mark Bennett | April 22, 2008
The title of this post is, according to Terry MacCarthy (buy the cross-examination CDs!), the criminal defense lawyer’s credo. I had always thought of it as descriptive — the way we are — rather than prescriptive — the way we should be. We should be prepared, shouldn’t we?
Yes and no. There are things we can [...]
Mark Bennett | March 24, 2007
A classic mistake made by inexperienced lawyers is to write out the questions to be asked in direct examination. When the questions are written out, the answers don’t matter because the lawyer knows what the next question is regardless of what the witness says.
Likewise, an inexperienced lawyer (or one who has not unlearned the bad [...]
Mark Bennett | March 23, 2007
In Keith Johnstone’s Impro for Storytellers he relates:
“A Japanese swordsman wrote that if you fight someone who has no plan, you’ll be thinking, I’ll do such and such! as your severed head bounces down the temple steps!”
(Then Johnstone adds, “(Well, he didn’t put it exactly like that.)”)
Johnstone is talking about how being “in the moment” [...]
