Win Your Case: How to Present, Persuade, and Prevail--Every Place, Every Time

by Gerry Spence

I see many deserving people deprived of justice because of these well-paid frauds—the horribly crippled children negligently injured in childbirth who can never walk or speak an intelligible word, the woman who will never see again because of an incompetent surgeon asleep at the switch, the hordes of injured who lose their right to justice because insurance companies have embraced these charlatans who, case after case, spread their malignant lies on innocent jurors. Their haughty pretenses and their venomous testimony (which they know is false) always angers me, sometimes to the precipitous edge. But if we angrily attack these petty prevaricators before their lies have been clearly demonstrated we will lose, because, although we know the truth, the jurors do not. While we are justly angered by the witness’s testimony and see him as a cheat, the jurors see him as a man of enlightened authority, and our attack will appear to be generated by one who has taken a strike in the heart and, without the character to accept it gracefully, releases his anger as does the poor loser. Until the testimony itself creates anger in the hearts of the listeners, we must redirect the energy of our anger. We do not deny it to ourselves. We feel it. But we rechannel it into a precise, thoughtful, solid cross-examination. Only when the liar is at last exposed is it time for appropriate anger. I say, don’t attack the witness until the jury wants him attacked. Then we had better do our work efficie...