Learning from Your Mistakes
By Elliott Wilcox

He was doing it… again. 

This was Bill's second trial, and he still couldn’t get a particular piece of evidence admitted.  There was no excuse for it. 

In his first trial, his opponent had successfully objected to the introduction of the evidence.  Bill skipped one of the predicate questions, so the judge properly sustained the objection.  If Bill would simply ask the proper question, his evidence would be admitted, but he either didn’t know how to do it or was too embarrassed to ask for help. 

Bill tried a few different ways to get the evidence admitted, but after a few tries, he finally threw in the towel, moving on to the next section of testimony. 

The jury never got to see the evidence.

Granted, the evidence wasn’t crucial to his case, but it was embarrassing to watch him fumble with it and make a futile attempt to get it admitted. 

Here's the unfortunate part: Bill won his trial. 

With the taste of his first victory fresh in his mouth, he believed he’d done an excellent job.  He didn’t realize that he’d won because his eyewitness was a spellbinding orator who had held the jurors in the palm of his hand.

When Bill returned to the office, he didn’t read through Imwinklereid’s Evidentiary Foundations.  He didn’t ask another attorney how to get the evidence introduced.   He never asked the judge why his opponent's objections had been sustained.  Nope, Bill was content, knowing that he had won.  He thought he had tried an excellent case. 

That's why he wasn't able to get his evidence admitted in his second trial, either.

Many lawyers make the same mistake.  They don’t learn from their own mistakes.  Don't be one of those lawyers.  Don’t think your trial work has concluded when the jury retires to deliberate.  After every trial, while you’re waiting for the jury to return with their verdict, invest your time wisely.  Now, while the trial is still fresh in your mind, spend some time in quiet contemplation reviewing your performance during trial. 

   - What were the strengths of your case? 
   - What areas could have been presented more persuasively? 
   - What lessons did you learn during trial?
   - What would you do differently if you could try the case again?
   - What was the most important lesson you learned during trial?
   - What is the area of improvement you intend to target for your next trial?

How serious are you about improving your trial skills?  Will you invest the time to learn from your mistakes?

Regardless of the verdict, you’ll want to improve for next time.  In fact, you'll probably learn more from the trials you lose than from the trials you win.  The best way to improve is to review what happened during your trial.  Ask yourself, “What did I learn from this trial?”  “What worked exceptionally well?”  “What could I have done differently?”  Many lawyers will never ask those questions.  They’ll try the same case over and over again, making the same mistakes in their 10^th trial that they made in their first trial.  They’ll never take the time to learn from their trial experiences.   

But not you.

You can set yourself apart from the rest of the pack by capturing the lessons you learned during trial.  The best time to do that is while you’re waiting for the verdict.   

What did you learn in the trial?  Did you pull a rabbit out of a hat?  Did you make a big blunder?  If you take care to observe what you learned and what errors you made in the trial, you will improve exponentially faster than other attorneys who have tried the same number of cases.  This discipline will ensure that you become an attorney with 30 years of experience, rather than an attorney with one experience for 30 years.

I tried more than 30 trials before I wrote down even a single lesson from any of them.  Who knows how many lessons I missed because I failed to write them down?  How much faster would I have accelerated my learning curve if I’d invested time to capture those lessons? 

Over the next 90 trials, I started writing down a single lesson or two from each trial in a little notebook that I bought at a bookstore.  I’m glad that I captured the lessons, but there wasn’t any direction or structure to what I wrote.  Everything was usually in a winding, "stream of consciousness," narrative form.  With a blank page in front of me, there wasn’t any guidance to help me capture the important lessons from trial.  Sometimes I would write a summary of the case, sometimes I would write down things I wish I had done in trial, and other times I would capture the best techniques I used during trial. 

What I needed was a book that would help me analyze each section of my trial to help determine what worked and what didn't work.  I needed something to force me to focus on what lessons I learned, and what I should improve upon for next time.  That’s why I created my book, The Trial Notebook: Lessons Learned from the Courtroom. 

You’ll never try a “perfect” trial.  If you’re serious about improving your trial skills, you need to focus on learning from the mistakes you make during trial.  When you capture the lessons you've learned, you won't repeat them in the future.  If you would like some help capturing those lessons, please visit www.TheTrialNotebook.com today.

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