You hang yourself with your own words.

One thing I learned well as a lawyer is that you could almost always hang an adversary with his own words.  When deposing the opposing party or a witness for the opposing party, my strategy was always to get the person to talk as freely and voluably as possible.  I’d ask open ended questions, nod agreeably, follow up with words like “Really?” to prompt even more loggorhea, and, invariably, when the transcript came back I’d find one piece of testimony after another that was damaging to my adversary’s case.  Conversely, when I prepared witnesses to testify in response to the questions of adversarial lawyers, the advice, pounded in with a hammer, was to answer the question and SHUT UP.  If a yes or a no answered the question, just say yes or no and SHUT UP.

Here’s an amusing example (pdf): in a prosecutor’s opposition to a defense attorney’s request for a delay in the defendant’s trial, the prosecutor explains that the defense attorney “is a partner in a large law firm (over 325 attorneys) and presumably has daily access to a horde of eager, smart, hard working associates to assist in this case.”  That’s not all that bad an argument about why there should be no delay in the trial, but it doesn’t have all that much bite.   But her footnote points out that the defense attorney “touts himself as a ‘Super Lawyer’ on his website.”  Ouch.  Surely a Super Lawyer shouldn’t need more time given the other points the prosecutor has made.

The threat one’s own words pose to oneself is one of the things that scares me most about writing so much on the internet.  Shoot me if I ever refer to myself as a super lawyer.  But how can I?  A recent commenter wrote that something in a recent post of mine wasn’t “worthy of a First Year, much less a professor of law.”   And, after all, considering what the prospect for a hanging does to one’s mind, being wary of being hanged by my own words probably not the worst thing to consider when I’m spouting off.

(hat tip to Southwest Virginia Law Blog, via Brian Ledbetter)