Remember the scene near the end of To Kill a Mocking Bird in which Atticus Finch, having lost the case, wearily packs up his things to leave the courtroom? As he's preparing to leave, the blacks in the gallery stand up for him; Reverend Sykes tells Scout, "Miss Jean Louise? Miss Jean Louise, stand up! Your father's passin'". Why did they stand up for Atticus Finch? Because

In Simple Rule 12: The Field Trip Rule, I talked about how the jury panel is a group, and you have to stay with the group.This group has sixty heads and sixty bodies, each one of which is throwing off communications cues every second.It is not possible for one lawyer, talking to sixty people, to listen to and record what one person says and how he says

In Simple Rule 2: The Blind Date Rule, I pointed out that the 60 potential jurors, by the time they reach the courtroom, are no longer strangers to each other; they have formed a group.When you get up to talk to them, what's your relationship to the group? You're an outsider. You are not someone who they are eager to follow. In the best-case scenario, your opposing

When you outsource your marketing, you outsource your ethics and your reputation.It applies to judges running for reelection as well as lawyers looking for business.That's all I'm sayin'.

I often (well, I used to often) gripe here about the want of real-world experience (that is, experience outside the high school–college–law school track) in prosecutors. As a broad generalization, it works great.I believe that before anyone is put into a job that includes making decisions about what punishment other people deserve for their misdeeds, he ought to spend a year or more being (metaphorically) kicked in

Back to our originally-scheduled program:So you’re in jury selection, and you want to get the jurors talking about the things that maybe they’re not used to discussing in front of 60 near-strangers. What do you do?Well, everyone knows The Playing Doctor Rule: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, right? That’s our 11th Simple Rule for Better Jury selection. If you want to see theirs,

New Chron.commons blog post.

Maybe it has something to do with the lousy economy. I'm spending a lot of blogging energy whacking the moles of unethical lawyer marketing. If we—the bar, honest members of the practical blawgosphere—let people like Andy Nolen and a Fresno criminal defense alwyer slide with their flaming astroturf and their content scraping, we'll only see more such conduct from bad lawyers who are desperate to make a

Despite the very clear line above the comment box saying, "Leave a (non-anonymous) Reply," some North Carolina whackjob tried to leave a comment under the name "JustAnotherVictim" an hour ago. Less than half an hour later he tried to leave another comment:Why remove my post? I just thought it was funny that he stated almost exactly word for word what Jackson said. Nothing negative or insulting about

If you're going to fake your suicide to avoid prison, it's better not to write the note in the past tense.