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People so often are busy playing their roles that they hesitate to shed those roles to relate soul to soul. Just about everyone likely yearns to find people with whom to relate soul to soul, but is not ready to bare their soul to just...

Criminal defendants' mere need for my services does not automatically mean anything worse than that they have been accused of a crime and are presumed innocent and well may be innocent, but the very risk of a conviction can clash for them with their sense...

At the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin aptly proclaimed “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Prosecutors police, and, unfortunately probably more than a handful of judges, would love nothing better than to see a fractured criminal defense...

In what looks like a promotional interview, masterful trial lawyer and persuader Gerry Spence — pictured here with me near the end of the 1995 Trial Lawyers College, when my grey hairs were few — underlines that caring for one’s client is an essential element...

“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”- Ben Franklin. Prosecutors’ offices likely share with each other on email listservs and at conferences to help make each other better prosecutors. Plenty of criminal defense lawyers do the same, and...

The three basics of effective trial advocacy, and persuasion beyond the law, are knowledge/intelligence/preparation, skill/experience, and passion/conviction. They all need to be synthesized into a harmonious whole. Passion, conviction, and persuasion are major hallmarks of the Trial Lawyers College, which I attended for four weeks in August...

Is criminal defense work about proverbial war and sometimes bloodletting? Hell, yes, whether one wants it that way or not. As I have said before, t’ai chi principles are important to criminal defense, for focusing on harmonizing an imbalanced situation without applying more than a...

The closest I came to waiting tables was working as a pantry assistant in the kitchen of my old summer camp, making orange juice and bug juice with a garden hose and metal oar, moving food on hand trucks and flat trucks, shoving my hand...

What drives criminal defense lawyers to fight for the accused? I am not talking about the mere willingness to do such work, but about the very thirst to represent such clients and to do it excellently. Here is my brief story; I welcome the stories...