Making an Impact

• Author: Daniel Small
• Profession: Is a partner in the Boston and Miami of ces of Holland & Knight LLP
• Pages: 145-147

After the process of working through the Ten Rules, which can sometimes

be difcult, there is often a real need to bring these important concepts

together in a way that makes an impact on a witness. Over the years, we

have developed one method that helps witnesses to pull together this dis-

tinction between a conversation and witness testimony and to consider in

real terms the principles of “listen, listen, listen” and “don’t try too hard.”

The idea is to plan into the beginning of your rst meeting with the wit-

ness one or more simple broad conversational questions leading to a normal

conversational ow. Then, after the process of talking about the language

of question-and-answer, going back to that question is a dramatic way to

help the witness analyze it and show the extraordinary differences between

these two means of communicating.

There are three examples of this method in appendixes C, D, and E.

The rst involves a witness who was a nancial manager who had lived in

Moscow for some time and was own back to the United States to give a

deposition in a complex nancial case. The problem was that between her

travel schedule, my travel schedule, and the case schedule, the deposition

was coming up very quickly.

There was very little time to prepare. So the questions became: How do

we pull this together? How do we drive it home? She came in and we chat-

ted for a while. We did that introduction phase in preparing witnesses and

I asked her typical questions you might ask someone: “How are things in

Russia?” and “How was your ight?” Both questions naturally led to long

discussions of various issues.

145

Chapter 24

Making an Impact

Small_PrepWitness_20140403_13-27 Second Pass.indd 145 8/12/14 10:20 AM