Law Commons^™

What Your Opening Statement Should And Shouldn't Do: Some Surprising Advice, Steven H. Goldberg

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Prosecutors and criminal defense attorneys would do well to consider how civil trial lawyers fashion their opening statements. As with any other part of the trial, the primary question to be answered in constructing an opening statement is: What do I want to accomplish? In civil cases the answer is almost always that each lawyer wants to persuade the jurors that the lawyer's version of the dispute is more likely to be correct than the opponent's. Opening statements in criminal trials, however, do not usually sound as if they were constructed with that goal in mind. Most fall into two …