Pozner on Cross: Advanced Techniques Using the Chapter Method© - In Person
Pozner on Cross: The Chapter Method, is a unique and entertaining program that teaches advanced methods to recognize, write, and deliver winning cross-examinations.
Pozner believes powerful cross-examinations are the result of the application of well-understood techniques. These techniques can easily be learned and immediately used by lawyers regardless of their number of trials or years of practice. Building on principles of neuroscience and behavioral psychology, Pozner will explain how to turn cross-examination into storytelling, and how those stories will cause jurors, judges, or arbitrators to make decisions based on the facts they vividly recall. Pozner uses more than 250 PowerPoint slides to show the steps to each technique, accompanied by short examples of the resulting cross-examination. This highly polished seminar enables participants to easily learn these advanced techniques, and to be able to immediately employ them in their current cases.
Examples of these modern techniques are constructive cross-examination, which allows us to use the opponent’s witness to prove much of our case and thereby diminish our need to win the case through direct examinations, and asymmetrical cross-examination which discards the outdated theory that cross-examination is primarily a rebuttal to the direct examination, and replaces it with the concept that cross-examination is an expression of our factual agenda.
Pozner on Cross: The Chapter Method, is an outgrowth of Pozner’s book Cross
Examination: Science and Techniques (soon to be published in a 4th Ed, by Pozner and Dodd.) His book and seminar revolutionized our profession’s view of the purposes and methods of modern cross.
Home studies will be available approximately 2-3 weeks following the live program.
If disability accommodations or special assistance are needed, please contact us at [email protected]. Requests must be made at least two weeks prior to the scheduled program.
The program will be submitted for CLE accreditation in Colorado. If you need to seek accreditation in another state, please review the process and requirements for that individual state. CBA-CLE staff can provide a Uniform Certificate of Attendance, and it is the attendee’s responsibility to complete the accreditation outside of Colorado.
8:30 am
Check in and coffee
9:00 – 10:15 am
The science behind Chapter Method cross-examinations.
Behavioral economics: how people take shortcuts to decisions
Cognitive neuroscience: how the brain processes information and can tire
Cognitive psychology: how the brain prefers to acquire information
How storytelling wins cases
Construction of a cross-examination story
How jurors harmonize with the emotion of a story
Chunking facts to aid understanding
10:15 – 10:30 am
Break
10:30 am – 12:00 pm
The Chapter Method of cross examination
How to build chapters of cross with examples
The mental economics of chapter method preparation and presentation
Building chapters to achieve factual goals.
Chapter Bundles
The advantages of telling big stories through linked smaller stories
Viewing an event as a series of smaller events
Examples of chapter bundles
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Lunch on your own
1:00 – 2:30 pm
Constructive cross examination
Methods and advantages of cross-centered preparation
How constructive cross-examination wins cases
Asking safe questions when we do not have the fact in discovery.
Sequences of cross-examination
Placing chapters in a persuasive order
How to begin and end the cross
Staying on track when witnesses evade
2:30 – 2:50 pm
Break and get reception food and beverages
2:50 – 4:30 pm
Page preparation of chapters of cross-examination
The architecture of a page of Chapter Method cross
Page format samples
Preparing for instant impeachments
Forming questions that control the witness
Delivering questions that deprive the witness of time to deceive
Forming questions that shrink the field of evasion
Group facts to use opponent’s witnesses to tell our stories.
Controlling and using anxiety
How prepared chapters make cross more predictable
Using Chapter Method cross to ease juror anxiety
Inducing anxiety in the witness as a barrier to deceptions
4:30 pm
Adjourn to continued reception
4:30 – 5:30 pm
Happy Hour/Reception for in-person attendees
Registration Fees
Non Member | $529.00 |
CBA Member | $399.00 |
CBA Litigation Section Member | $319.00 |
CBA Criminal Law Section Member | $319.00 |
New Lawyer Edge Pass | $199.50 |
LLP/Paralegal/Legal Support Staff | $199.50 |
Active Military | $199.50 |
CLE Elite Pass | $100.00 |
Student Currently Enrolled in Law School | $0.00 |
- General Credits: 7.00
- Ethics Credits: 0.00
- EDI Credits: 0.00
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