As a young lawyer, I received plenty of bad advice.

I learned many bad trial habits that I ultimately had to unlearn. I've spent a lot of time wishing that I'd had better resources and better mentors early on in my career.

So when I see bad advice being given to other lawyers, it gets under my skin a bit.

There's one piece of bad advice that I see given often that really grates on me: Cross examination is about "poking holes" in your opponent's story.

If you're a lawyer and you're reading this, I'm positive you've been given this piece of advice multiple times during your career. I've heard it more times that I can possibly count. Here's a direct quote from a law school's mock trial guide for their students:

It makes me want to scream.

The purpose of cross examination is using your opponent's witness to tell YOUR story.

When you use cross examination to "poke holes" in your opponent's story, you make the fatal mistake of focusing the jury on their story - and not on yours. By trying to attack their story, you actually end up lending it extra credibility.

There's no better real world example of this mistake than how McDonalds handled the issues their reputation faced in the early 2000s.

That's when videos begin circulating the internet showing an intestine-like bubble gum pink goo oozing out of a large faucet like meat soft-serve, claiming that this "pink slime" is used to make their nuggets and burgers. It's one of the first-ever videos to go viral.

Rumors about mystery fillers in their chicken nuggets and burgers such as worms and lips and eyeballs start to lead to the impression that McDonalds' food is made from some nasty ingredients.

These negative associations start to take hold.

McDonalds knows that they need to do something. And their first instinct is to "poke holes" in the story being told about them.

They do a series of videos inside their plants intended to show how their food is really made. One starts off with the video's host standing next to a conveyer belt at a food processing plant, watching unprocessed raw beef move down the line. About ten seconds in, the host asks, "are there lips and eyeballs in there, Jimmy?"

🤦‍♀️

Another series of videos features a customer asking at the counter if the chicken nuggets really do contain pink slime.

The results are disastrous.

Rather than change people's mind about the entirely false rumors, they cause them to stick in people's minds even more.

By responding to the claims, McDonalds unintentionally reinforces them.

A major decline in sales ensues.

It isn't until McDonalds takes hold of their own narrative and begins to tell their own story that their sales surge. Can you picture a fresh-cracked egg on a griddle being transformed into the egg on their McMuffin? That's because they started to tell their own story about the source of their food, and it worked.

Cross examination works the same way.

When you spend your time with the witness trying to dispel the other side's theory, you'll unintentionally reinforce it. Instead, use their witness to tell your client's story.

And when someone tries to tell you differently, tell them that's a bunch of pink slime.

-Keeley

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