During the questioning phase of litigation, a good personal injury lawyer should manage to judge the strengths and weaknesses of a given client’s case. At the same time, the questions and answers ought to expand the size of the lawyer’s collection of the known facts, and thus narrow the number of issues that remain in dispute.
How can preparation of the client aid achievement of the phase’s purpose?
It is not enough for the personal injury lawyer in Red Deer to know all the facts; the client, too, should be familiar with each significant fact. The client should be warned about the need to remain truthful. Make it clear in the client’s mind that his or her answers will be recorded; in addition, a transcript of the answers will get made.
State the right of any questioned person to refuse an answer, if the question has not been made clear. A confused client has the right to consult an injury lawyer.Tell the client to be polite, and to maintain eye contact with the questioner.
Caution client against trying certain strategies.
Clients must be cautioned against adding extra information in any answer. All answers should address just the query that was stated by the person doing the questioning. The lawyer for the other side would delight in learning a fact that he or she had failed to learn during the earlier investigation.
Clients should understand how their answers will get reviewed. The recorded tape will be played back. At that point, any non-verbal response will appear to be a non-response. If the other side thinks that the client refused to answer one of the questions, then the client’s non-verbal response could trigger the creation of plans to keep drilling for more information.
One of the worst strategies relies on the client’s readiness to offer a guess, when the exact answer is not known. No lawyer should encourage the presentation of a client’s guesses. The need to be polite does not translate as the need to guess at what to say, in order to offer some type of answer.
No client wants to imply one thing, only to discover that the other side has arrived at a very different inference. By the same token, no attorney wants that to happen. Consequently, practice sessions help. Each of them allows the client’s familiarity with implications and inferences to get strengthened.
Lawyers must do their best to design each practice session as a learning experience. It should work to make the questioned subject/client feel a bit more confident. Possession of a feeling of confidence on the part of a lawyer-client team serves as insurance of success, at completion of the questioning phase. Every attorney strives for the realization of such success.