It has been said that the failure of a lawyer in the courtroom is the failure to critically analyze a case. Strong analysis of a case begins with proper investigation.
Proper investigation requires lawyers to ask the hard questions and physically attend to the scene. Don’t believe the client. They have a vested interest in remembering things a certain way. It is the lawyer’s job to challenge the client and corroborate their statements with independent evidence.
Immerse yourself in the life of your client and the life of the opposition. Develop the habit of asking questions early on about the case and asking how do I explain this & how do I prove it? By the end, you should be able to visualize the entire context that the event took place in. The defence will come to you once you have the entire facts straight.
Unfortunately, often times the way lawyers are compensated rewards mindless processing of a case, where lawyers just go through the stages and paper the file. Instead litigators should be looking backwards, intimately knowing what happened, and figuring out how to prove their version of accounts through the mouths of witnesses.
