By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: For some attorneys on the defense side of civil litigation, there can be something I call the “adversarial impulse,” which is the belief and behavior that, “If it can be denied, then deny it.” The most seasoned trial lawyers, however, know that it doesn’t always pay to fight every battle. Not only are some battles unlikely to be won, but fighting them can actually make your situation worse One area where practical strategy can often run up against this adversarial impulse is the decision on whether to concede liability. Sometimes that decision is patently obvious, and sometimes

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: There are many phases to a trial. Some of those phases are just for lawyers, but some of them really should include the clients as well. The voir dire process, where the ultimate jury is selected, is one of those latter phases. The clients for all parties should be there. But I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in my own cases — in the last three picks, in three different states, the Plaintiffs themselves attended none of the jury selections. In those cases, I was working for the Defense, and we had a client representative present and

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: There is a common perception that when you apologize, it means you’ve done something wrong. The Latin “mea culpa,” after all, means “through my fault.” In a litigation context, that perception on the part of lawyers and insurance companies can lead to the belief that you should avoid apologizing if you don’t want to accept liability. But we know from the research that an “I’m sorry” can do a lot of good: Psychologically, it can be satisfying for a victim, and persuasively, it can help boost the credibility of a source. And for some cases,

By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm: The news cycle has been drowning in it. For the first time in history, a former U.S. President faces criminal charges. Donald Trump was arraigned this past Tuesday on April 4th, after being indicted on 34 charges involving the falsification of business records in furtherance of another crime, all surrounding payments of hush money to several individuals in the weeks preceding the 2016 election with the goal of concealing alleged extramarital affairs by the candidate. Public opinion on the charges is predictably quite split, with one group seeing it as a long-delayed comeuppance and another group seeing it

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Lawsuits rarely occur as a result of something good happening. More often, there has been some kind of very bad outcome, maybe even a tragedy. For people who are close to the events that give rise to a suit, it can be hard to avoid absorbing and personalizing some of those negative emotions. For a witness called to testify in deposition or in trial, there might be a strong temptation to mentally reconstruct a bad event with a focus on how it could have been avoided. Maybe there is a tendency to blame yourself. Or