Everything You Thought You Knew About Witness Preparation…

Writing in the American Bar Association’s Litigation journal, Kenneth R. Berman, co-chair of the litigation practice at Nutter McClennen & Fish, considers the conventional best practices for preparing a witness (Don’t try to answer a question you don’t understand; Don’t volunteer information, etc.). “Before we give these standard instructions to another witness,” he says, “we need to think about how slavishly adhering to them can harm our cases and cost us valuable opportunities to win them. And to do that, we need to consider how these instructions probably evolved and what purposes they were meant to serve.”