TRIAL ADVOCACY: Planning, Analysis, and Strategy 4th Edition

Trial Advocacy: Planning, Analysis, and Strategy 4th Edition provides the experience and approach to thinking, planning, and performing as a practicing lawyer. The book presents a wide range of practice situations and fosters the kinds of analytic processes and skills needed to perform trial work. Today’s lawyer must be fluent with technology for case organization and courtroom presentation, as well as with alternative forms of dispute resolution. The book provides these new tools while retaining the trial lawyer skills that remain very much the same as they have throughout the history of the legal profession.

Trial Advocacy: Planning, Analysis, and Strategy, 4th Edition, is divided into 14 chapters. Each chapter covers a separate trial subject area—persuasion, jury selection, opening statement, objections, and so on. Each chapter presents a theoretical and practical approach to the particular skill that is the subject of that chapter, provides illustrations of practice as applied to hypothetical situations, and offers a series of practical and strategic pointers in the subject area.  Each chapter also includes a checklist of skills dealt with in the chapter.

Accompanying the book are Assignments which take students through the trial process in the context of the criminal and civil cases, both of which arise from a tavern shooting after which the victim dies. The assignments are intended for role play in professional workshops and legal education advocacy classes.

The Fourth Edition of Trial Advocacy: Planning, Analysis, and Strategy has just been published by Wolters Kluwer. This edition continues to explore all aspects of trial persuasion with expanded and updated coverage.

Some of the Major Additions to the Fourth Edition are:

·      Complete case files for mock civil wrongful death and criminal murder trials, with witness statements, exhibits, legal memoranda, statutes, jury instructions for mock trials, and performance assignments

·      Seventy-nine role-playing assignments, from jury selection through closing argument

·      Comprehensive witness instructions for assignments and mock trials

·      Trial preparation and case management, covered in a new chapter

·      Updated rules for Civil Procedure, Criminal Procedure, Ethics, and Evidence

Particularly important is that this fourth edition comes with a brand new website AspenAdvocacyBooks.com  This website features:

·      A full-length trial demonstration movie that can be streamed, showing experienced trial lawyers engaging in every stage of trial from jury selection through closing argument

·      A video of a crime scene tour

·      Case files, Actors Guides and a Teacher’s Manual for mock trials or experiential exercises either in professional development CLEs or law school classes