I learned a lot from Tom. Tom was a wonderful partner, a wonderful mentor. You learned discipline. You learned factual development. You learned to spend the time really understanding a case before you tried to put your imprint on it, before you tried to create your narrative as we were talking about earlier. You learned integrity. You learned that, particularly in a long trial, you can’t get away with deception. You’ve got to find ground that you can stand on and hold.

In a short trial, two or three day trial, four day trial, sometimes a clever lawyer can get away with deception before they actually get caught. That’s too bad. I don’t think it happens that often, but it does happen. In a long trial against really good opponents, you can’t get away with that. It’s gonna come out. And many of the cases that I’ve one, I’ve one because the other side has tried to take a bridge too far. They’ve tried to layout propositions that they couldn’t really withstand scrutiny later in the trial.

And that destroys your credibility. When you lose your credibility at a trial, you’ve almost lost everything. Trying to recover is extraordinarily difficult once you lose your credibility with a jury or even with a judge. Because, if you think about it, when you go into a jury trial, they don’t know anything about the case. Often the case, the kind of cases we try, are very complicated cases, and it’s very hard for jurors really to understand all of the nuances.

What they’re looking for is who to trust, who to believe. Juries are very good at figuring out who to believe. They’ve very good at figuring out who’s telling the truth. They’re not so good at determining complicated issues of technology and economics and even accounting sometimes. But if you can distill an issue down to a question that you can ask that forces a witness to either give you something or to lie, the jurys gonna be able to understand that in more cases than I think most people imagine.

And the ability of those six to twelve people to collectively decide who’s telling the truth and who’s not telling the truth is always I think one of the bedrocks of our justice system. And it works pretty well. So, what you’ve gotta do is you’ve got to make them believe you. And the way you make them believe you is by not deceiving them _____ necessarily not getting caught deceiving them. And, as I say, in a long trial, you’re gonna get caught if you try deception, if you try to overreach.

Now, that partly goes to how you create a narrative. You try to create a narrative, you have to create a narrative that both persuades them but also withstands scrutiny. At the same time, you’ve got to be sure that you don’t allow your credibility to be undercut and that you try the hardest you can to undercut the credibility of the other side.

And one of the ways you do that is by constantly reviewing what you’re gonna do, testing it, having other people on your team test it with you so that you see whether there’s any gaps in it before you go down the road. Because once you start down that road, it’s very hard to come back.