Synopsis
Win More Cases and Help More Clients! <P> Ralph Adam Fine pulls no punches. In the sixth edition of his highly acclaimed How-To-Win Trial Manual shows why the traditional ways to try a case in court are suicidal, and gives extensive examples of such suicidal advocacy by famous, high-profile, well-paid trial lawyers. <P> In each of his examples, Ralph Adam Fine shows how the lawyers could have done a better job. This will help you hone your winning skills! Ralph Adam Fine also demonstrates why many of Irving Younger’s famous Ten Commandments of Cross-Examination are not only wrong, but why following them significantly reduces your chances of winning. Since it was first published by JURIS in 1998, Ralph Adam Fine’s The How-To-Win Trial Manual has been giving lawyers that special edge so they can win even the toughest cases. Now, in this newly revised sixth edition, The How-To-Win Trial Manual takes the unique extra step of showing how and why famed trial lawyers Vincent Bugliosi and Gerry Spence, both superb advocates, could have been even more effective in their ground breaking face-off when Bugliosi “prosecuted” and Spence “defended” Lee Harvey Oswald in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. <P> The trial, memorialized in a superb two-disc DVD set, On Trial: Lee Harvey Oswald, was before a sitting Texas federal district-court judge and a jury of Dallas citizens taken from the Dallas jury rolls. Although the trial was more than two-decades removed from the assassination, Bugliosi and Spence managed to get as witnesses many of the people who were at the assassination and its aftermath; none of the witnesses testifying in the trial were actors. The “trial” was in London, in a replica of a Texas federal courtroom, and both Bugliosi and Spence gave it their all―preparing as they would have for a real trial, and arguing their respective positions with the gusto for which each is justifiably famous. Ralph Adam Fine has taken the transcript of the two-disc DVD set and shown with his interleaved comments, as he has done with the O.J. Simpson, Martha Stewart, and Enron (Jeffrey Skilling and Ken Lay) trials, as well as a federal-court antitrust trial, how Bugliosi and Spence could have been better. The Oswald chapter, new for the sixth edition, will help all trial lawyers nail the winning techniques to be successful in the courtroom. <P> The sixth edition also gives us Ralph Adam Fine’s special insights into the strategies and trial techniques of the prosecution and defense in the murder trial of Michael Peterson, memorialized in the six-hour DVD set, Death on the Staircase. Peterson was charged with killing his wife. He claimed at trial that she accidentally fell down the stairs in their Durham, North Carolina, mansion. This chapter, too, is new for the sixth edition How-To-Win Trial Manual and it shows what works and what does not work and why. It will help lawyers avoid the common traps that sink even the best “plans well laid.” <P> The How-To-Win Trial Manual shows how to win by using your most powerful tool: The jury’s belief that you, the lawyer, know the “truth” of the case. Ralph Adam Fine also shows how to ask questions on both direct-examination and cross-examination so the jury will know the answers before the witnesses (whether lay or expert) respond. Simply put, if you phrase your questions so that the jury answers them the way you want, before your witnesses answer and irrespective of what your adversary’s witnesses may say on cross-examination, you will win! <P> Ralph Adam Fine shows you how to do all of this and more! You and your clients deserve no less!
About the Author
Ralph Adam Fine was a Judge on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals for nearly 30 years, from 1988 until 2015. He served as a trial judge from 1979 to 1988, and presided over more than 350 jury trials. He was the presiding judge in the PBS Frontline production Inside the Jury Room, which was the first time jury deliberations in a criminal trial were filmed and broadcast. Judge Fine has taught trial-advocacy, evidence, and appellate-advocacy at over 150 continuing legal education programs around the country, at in-house trial-advocacy programs to law-firm litigation departments, and as Professorial Lecturer in Law at the George Washington University National Law Center in Washington, D.C. In January of 1995, the University of Virginia School of Law honored Judge Fine with the Honorable William J. Brennan, Jr., Award for his contributions to the teaching of trial advocacy. Judge Ralph Adam Fine is the author of The How-To-Win Appeal Manual - 4th Edition, as well as the annually supplemented Fine's Wisconsin Evidence, which Judge Jack B. Weinstein, original co-author of Weinstein's Federal Evidence, called "probably the best single-volume state treatise on the subject that I have seen." Judge Fine was also a senior contributing editor and reporter for the four-volume treatise Evidence in America (Lexis); and a contributing editor of the ABA publication Emerging Problems Under The Federal Rules of Evidence (Lexis). He had analyzed legal issues on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and PBS's The NewsHour.
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