Effective Sign Posting
Your jurors do not know the case as well as you do. Much of the time, they’re still trying to fit the pieces together and understand who all the players are. And because trial lawyers often cannot tell a story from beginning to end through a single witness, you must help the jurors understand what part of the story a witness will be telling and, often, why that witness is the right person to tell it.
Many advocacy programs teach the importance of sign posting to help the jury follow an examination. But don’t only sign post to tell the jury that you’re transitioning to a new subject. You must give the jury the information that it needs in order to understand the part of the story that they will be hearing: What is coming up? Why does it matter? And, often, why is this person the right one to talk about it?
Therefore, it is useful to think about setting and context the way a novelist or filmmaker might. With a new chapter or scene, the creator in those fields asks what the viewer or reader must know in order to follow along. Sometimes that’s as simply as a date and place. Sometimes there’s more to it. But if we’re going to be more effective storytellers, think about your examinations the way other expert storytellers do, and take setting and context into account.
