Follow up to 2.16.2006 Dispatches from the court room)

As a follow-up to yesterdays (2.16.2005) post --- (concerning the employment-injury-whistle blower case testimony)

One question that epitomizes the importance of being cool under fire was as follows:

At the beginning of the opposing attorneys cross examination, during the beginning of his personal attack phase, he asked me a series of questions one of which was did I know the date that the plaintiff was terminated.

At the time, I could not recall the date. So he followed up with.

Q: You are going to tell me you came to Federal Court and have not refreshed the details of this case?

As the economist discussed in the post yesterday, this was round one and instead of realizing the opportunity for a counter punch was available, he played the attorneys game and answered:

A: No I believe it was sometime in February of 2002.

The answer was correct but not a good one. In fact it was February 14, 2002 but the official date for the company was March 1, 2002. While of course, none of this is really important. The correct dates were used in the reports.

However, what was important was the way the question was answered by our economist. The imprecision in the answer, like it our not, makes the economist look like he was not completely on top of the case.

Instead, as mentioned yesterday, had the economist remained completely COOL the open ended nature of the question would have actually allowed he to provide a strong reply that could have actually helped add to the credibility of his research.

For instance, a better answer (and one that can more or less be used in any situation where the opposing attorney is hammering an expert on some unimportant detail) would have been something as follows

A: No, sir that is completely untrue. I have prepared intensely for my trial testimony concerning my expert analysis today. I have thoroughly reviewed all the case documents, legal documents, my depositions, and my expert reports in this case. I have also reconstructed and checked the spreadsheets and other financial calculations that are included in my expert report.

The information such as the date of the plaintiff’s employment termination is contained in those files and the expert reports that I have filed in this case.

The open ended nature of the cross examination question, had he remained cool, would have allowed for a wonderful come-back. The key point is that when testifying you have to be cool to be able to see when the opportunity (and it always will) to response in kind presents itself.