Real quick before I get to more good stuff— This summer between witness prep and live trial consulting our award total has reached over $54 million! Which means we got to update our website with some pretty exciting wins. 🎉 Speaking of websites… We’ve been telling you to look at theirs. The company website. The plaintiff’s website. The expert’s website. They’re often FULL of juicy info that never made it into discovery. And last week, one of our clients showed us he’d been listening. We were...
9 days ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, A judge recently called us out for using a dirty word in court. Storytelling. Okay, technically, he was talking to the attorney. The attorney had been referring to people by their first names instead of calling them “the plaintiff” or “Mr. So-and-So.” The judge had his opinion as to why… “I understand why you’re using first names. It’s storytelling. But we’re not doing that.” First: It’s just how we’d been referring to them leading up to court. Second: That’s not storytelling. At...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Hey Reader, We’ve gotta tell you about one of our favorite moments that just happened in a depo. A little context… We’d been helping an attorney prepare for a 30(b)(6) corporate witness. As we built the deposition, Steve and I found a few things we definitely wanted marked as exhibits. Cut to the deposition and our attorney pulls one up. Defense counsel: “Just to be clear, this is not a [Company] document.” Plaintiff Attorney: It’s from their website. Another document came out… Defense...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Hey Reader, Yesterday, I stopped at a new coffee shop in a trendy neighborhood. Me: I’ll take a cold brew. Oat milk. One packet of Splenda.Barista: We don’t have sugar. Me: You... don't have sugar?Barista: We have syrups. She pointed to a little sign— Vanilla.Salted maple.Cherry.Spiced rosemary. 🤯 Just as I was about to flee this artisanal nightmare, my coffee date walked in. In case you’re wondering—I ordered it black. Maybe I’m the first weirdo to ask for sugar in my coffee. Or maybe......
2 months ago • 2 min read
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....
2 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months 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...
3 months ago • 2 min read