Hey Reader, Steve and I used to live smack in the middle of Old Town San Diego. Pros: The smell of carne asada burritos every morning. Cons: Eating carne asada burritos every morning. That's when I took up yoga. Restaurants and coffee shops came and went all the time. After a while, we started noticing the same thing happened right before one was about to close: The signs multiply. Fresh Pastries.Ice Cold Coffee.Craft Beer.Banners.Bunting.Arrows pointing THIS WAY. On. Every. Inch. Of. Space....
12 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, I had a system for report cards in high school. Step #1: hide it. Step #2: wait til Sunday at 9pm to get my parent’s sign it. I was a solid C student. (Until I got to college and found my academic love language: theater.) But when Steve handed me a report card this week…I didn’t want to shove it in my backpack. We wrote a deposition for an attorney we work with and started reading through the transcript. Halfway through, Steve stopped reading and started counting. Not...
19 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, We’ve ALL heard it a bazillion times—paint a picture with your words for the jury. Locations. Injuries. Pain and suffering. Loss. Make it visual. You wanna know what word gets me “painting” in my head every time? Cherry-picked. Maybe because it reminds me of eating frozen cherries in the hot Bay Area summers, until my fingertips turned red—or because my dad warned me that a cherry tree would grow in my stomach if I swallowed the pits. Either way, it’s a visual that’s got me...
27 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, No one gambles in Vegas. They don’t drink, blow a stack of chips on black, or make decisions they’ll half-remember on the long plane ride home to boring-land. That's what our witness Dane Butler (played by Steve) wants you to believe. And that's not all he's hiding. Watch how London barrister (and cross-examination badass) Bibi Badejo handles not one but two shady witnesses battling it out in family court. Her specialty is cases involving false allegations and fabricated evidence...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, We love playing expert witnesses. Neurologist.Orthopedic Surgeon.Radiologist—that’s Steve’s favorite. And no matter the attorney we spar against, no matter the case, there's always one chapter of questions we can count on... How much we're getting paid. So when we prepped an expert witness this week for their deposition, we made sure to practice those questions. Because every expert gets a chapter like this. Here’s take one: Q: You were retained by the plaintiff’s counsel in this...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, Sandwiches are my love language... acts of kindness and Jersey Mike’s. I got a #14 on wheat. Hold the “Mike’s way.” The spices are great but the soggy bread—not my thing. So I asked for mayo and mustard. Mayo was easy.Mustard was another story… The sandwich technician picked up the top half of my sandwich, walked into the back room, opened a drawer, grabbed the mustard, put it back in the drawer, walked back out, and finished making my veggie on wheat. Mustard— literally in the...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey, Before the $1.3 million result.Before the witness prep.Before the nightly “talk me off the ledge” phone calls. Keith Rutman found us through improv. In 2018 he started taking improv classes to stay sharp between trials. What he got was a second framework for everything he'd been doing in the courtroom. Then he went to Google — "San Diego trial skills workshops with improv." Keith found Trial Haus.He listened to our Cross Lab podcast and got hooked. But he didn't call us. Not yet. He...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, New Bluey mini-episodes came out this week. If you don’t have little kids, it’s a show on Disney+ about a family of Heelers who basically spend every episode doing high-level yes-and improv with their children. If you do have dogs, fun fact: all the colors are apparently dog-friendly. Meaning dogs can actually see what’s happening on screen. We were huddled on the couch smiling at the TV but something felt off. … I admit I’m an actor who overanalyzes any form of...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, We were yelling at the TV like it was Super Bowl Sunday. Instead it was just a regular Wednesday night and we were watching A Body in the Snow: The Trial of Karen Read. At one point I was on my feet and Steve was shouting: "NO. NO. DON’T ASK HIM LIKE THAT!" You’d think we had money on the cross. We didn't, obviously. While most people watch the documentary like an episode of Dateline—we were watching it like game tape. Rewinding the same thirty seconds. Pausing on a word choice....
2 months ago • 1 min read