If you have to testify under oath, are you prepared? Preparation makes all the difference. The personal injury attorneys at Lovins Law, PLLC, get their clients prepared to give testimony in a deposition or trial. They remove the mystery and fear of the process and empower clients with the most powerful weapon available—the truth.
If you get seriously injured in a car accident, trucking wreck, oilfield accident, or other accident, you may need to hire a lawyer. And your lawyer may have to sue the person or company that caused your injuries. And if that happens, you may have to testify in court or in a deposition.
Your testimony will either help or hurt the litigation of your case depending upon how well your attorney gets you prepared to testify. There is a great example going around the internet right now. Senator Ted Cruz cross examines the president of the Sierra Club, Aaron Mair, about climate change in a Senate Committee hearing. The video of the exchange is below:
Testifying in a Senate committee hearing isn’t really much different from testifying in a deposition. In this testimony, the witness simply doesn’t answer Senator Cruz’s question. This has nothing to do with what you think about global warming. He simply wasn’t prepared for the question, and it’s obvious. Here are a couple of ways Mr. Mair could have answered the question and completely disarmed Senator Cruz’s attack.
“Senator Cruz, I’m familiar with the data you reference, and the Pause. I am an executive for the Sierra Club, not a scientist. We work with many scientists who are scientific experts on climate change, and they are qualified to explain that data. I’m not. I rely on the scientific opinions of scientific experts. Having said all of that, if the scientists conclude that global warming is a hoax, we will absolutely issue a retraction. But 97% of scientists say that the data shows that the climate is changing and that change is harming all of us.”
This answer follows two key rules of good testimony:
- It’s not your job to know everything. Nobody knows everything. And nobody likes a know-it-all. So if you don’t know, that’s okay. Don’t act like you know. A witness who acts like he knows something he doesn’t know, ends up looking like a liar or not very smart, even though he just felt like he was “supposed” to answer the question. Mr. Mair would have helped himself greatly if he had simply admitted that he relies on scientists to interpret this data, which is very complex. (Of course, if Mr. Mair were a climate scientist and tried to avoid this question, he would look very bad. The Wikipedia page about Mr. Mair does not indicate that he is a climate scientist.)
- Agree when you can. In any lawsuit, a decent lawyer for the defense is going to have some reasonable argument about something, even if it is not really relevant to the crucial truths of the case. Agreeing with the other side when you can shows a judge and jury that you are a reasonable person. In the example above, Mr. Mair can easily agree that, if the data shows that the climate isn’t warming, he will retract his position because he is confident that the data shows that the climate IS warming.
- Always be on the side of Truth. This goes along with “Agree when you can,” but it deserves its own category. It’s a little ironic that, by agreeing to issue a retraction if the data show global warming to be false, Mr. Mair would have (a) gained credibility with viewers by showing that he is for Truth above all, (b) disarmed Senator Cruz’s attack, and (c) not conceded any important point.
If you or a loved one are injured and need a lawyer, you need a lawyer who understands how to help you be a great witness. The personal injury attorneys at Lovins Law are here to walk with you through that stressful process.
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