Inside you'll find Pozner Dodd cross-examination advice on how to:
- Use opponents’ objections as the springboard for deeper and broader cross-examinations.
- Sequence cross-examination to teach the theory of the case in the best way, and to literally expand the rules of admissibility
- Use “loops” (the practice of incorporating and repeating key phrases and terms in successive questions to the witness) to rename witnesses and exhibits.
- Use “double loops” to discredit opposing expert witnesses.
- Use voir dire to create great jurors
- Use a fact-driven investigation to develop a winning theory
- Use a witness’s own words to follow your theme and theory
- Control the runaway witness
- Communicate winning theories in opening, cross, and closing
- Use loops to box in the witness
- Use tactical sequencing to create the most powerful cross
- Convert a witness’s silence into admission of fact
- Induce the witness to voice your pre-selected words
- Prepare for devastating impeachment
- Close off any escape routes for the witness
- Punish the evasive or “I don’t know” witness
- Control the crying witness
- Use timing, posture, inflection, diction, wording, eye contact, and other effects to emphasize a witness’s concession
Effective cross-examination is a science with established guidelines, identifiable techniques, and definable methods. Attorneys can learn how to control the outcome with careful preparation, calculated strategy, effective skills, and a disciplined demeanor. Pozner and Dodd’s treatise remains the definitive guide to preparing cross-examinations,
