Let’s take a break from divorce articles this month. I recently had a pretty big civil trial up in San Francisco. The case involved someone who was alleged to have committed fraud against my clients in connection with their hedge fund investment and involved a large sum of money.
My clients were from out of state and unfortunately the first time that I was able to personally meet with my client to go over his trial testimony was the morning of the same day that he was testifying. As is often the case, sometimes clients do not have a proper recollection of the events in question. In this case, those events had occurred five years before our trial.
My other client had testified in accord with the defendant about the chronological order of certain events. But this client essentially contradicted both of the other witnesses on a critical fact. This left me with a rather large problem. This was not an issue of my client falsely testifying. He simply did not remember and no one could really blame him for not remembering with crystal clarity something that had happened five years before. I could not ask for a bathroom break and basically only had one opportunity to try to sort out the conflict in the testimony. When it was my turn to re-direct my client, I bluntly asked my client whether he was “good with dates”. I might have been even blunter than that by making the statement that he really wasn’t good with dates and asking him to agree. Luckily he did and we were able to establish that he had not recollected the events in question properly. Oh, the fun of trials.
I cannot stress enough the importance of witness preparation in advance of trial. You can never be too prepared.
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