Please Raise Your Right Hand...

• Author: Daniel Small
• Profession: Is a partner in the Boston and Miami of ces of Holland & Knight LLP
• Pages: 1-3

• An ordinary person walks into a room full of strangers.

• Someone with an odd-looking machine is taking down every word.

•

A stranger is waiting to ask difcult questions and pick apart the

answers.

• The person is told to raise their right hand and swear under oath.

As Dorothy exclaimed upon entering the bizarre Land of Oz: “Oh, Toto,

I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore!”

When someone is called as a witness in any kind of legal matter, it is

usually a new and disturbing experience. Still, too few people—and too

few lawyers—understand just how completely new and different it really

is. This is not a conversation: it doesn’t look like one or feel like one, so

no one should expect it to be like one. Communicating effectively in a

question-and-answer format is an extraordinarily unnatural and difcult

process. A witness must learn a new and strange language and a discipline

that is very different than anything we use in our everyday lives.

I was fortunate enough to begin to learn this lesson early in my legal

career. Just out of law school and still trying to nd my way around the

labyrinthine hallways of the Department of Justice in Washington, I was

assigned to the team prosecuting Bert Lance, the former U.S. budget direc-

tor and lifelong friend of then-president Jimmy Carter, in his home town

of Atlanta, Georgia. It was an opportunity for a new lawyer to learn many

lessons. The lesson for this purpose came with the testimony of President

Carter’s mother, “Miss Lillian.”

1

Chapter 1

“Please Raise Your Right Hand . . .”

Small_PrepWitness_20140403_13-27 Second Pass.indd 1 8/12/14 10:20 AM