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The impressive cross-examination: cross-examination can leave the jury with a variety of impressions that may help or hinder your case. A firm focus on your goals will help you elicit the responses you want - and make the right impression.

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Trial is about persuasion. To persuade a jury, you have to do more than merely present facts; you have to create an impression--an impression as to why you as an attorney can be trusted, why your story is correct, why your adversary is wrong, and why it is lair for your side to win. Effective cross-examination requires a focused effort to elicit testimony that leaves the jurors with those impressions.

Through cross-examination, we attempt to communicate with the members of the jury. Communication is not what is said; it is what is heard. Everyone enters every communication with preconceptions and biases. To effectively communicate, you must understand your listeners (the jurors) and how they are likely to process the information presented to them.

People reach conclusions by evaluating new information in light of background information that they have already accepted--their anchoring knowledge. As people receive new information, they immediately test it against their model of reality. The conclusions they reach are a function of either accepting the information because it confirms or enhances their model or rejecting the information because it is inconsistent with their model. In the context of a trial, jurors will reject evidence if it is inconsistent with their anchoring knowledge.

It is human nature for people to have preconceptions. All information is processed based on individual life experiences. As one law professor put it: "People's judgments about fault and compensation, like other social judgments, are shaped by who we are: our life experiences and attitudes, our habits of mind, our intuitions about how the world works and how it ought to work, and our received wisdom about who is responsible for what in given situations."

Therefore, cross-examination must focus on how the witness can reinforce the trial story you are presenting or how the witness's story doesn't fit into a believable paradigm.

Should you cross? Regardless...