New website Beforeclass.com offers six videos to help law students and attorneys fine-tune their trial advocacy skills. Currently, the site offers videos about Opening Statements, Closing Statements, Direct Examination (including exhibit procedures), Child Witnesses, Expert Witnesses, and Courtroom Spacing. The videos are a nice primer before taking trial advocacy, or a brush-up for attorneys. However, they fall short of replacing an actual advocacy course.

Each video is about 8-10 minutes long. The videos all start the same. They summarize the case, and then tell you the main points you should learn from that segment. The videos then feature attorneys performing an opening statement, direct examination, etc. While the attorney is performing the examination, text will appear on the screen to draw viewers’ attention to specific things. This is great repetition and really drills the points home. Then, after the video, the main points are reviewed for a third time.

I found the Courtroom Placement and Direct Examination videos extremely helpful. Knowing where to stand in a courtroom is something a lot of law students and attorneys have trouble with. A lot of people tie themselves down to the podium and that’s the end of it. The video encourages advocates to move around the courtroom to force the jury to focus where you want them to. The direct examination video also covers the proper procedure for admitting an exhibit. I thought their procedure was spot on and very helpful. The video goes over the procedure twice. First, the video focuses on the techniques, then on the key buzz words attorneys should use.

Overall the videos are helpful, but there is plenty of room for improvement. First of all, there should be more videos. Especially since they are charging almost $50 for the product, I would like to see videos on objection arguments and cross examinations, to really round out the trial skills. Further, there are things that the attorneys in the videos do that I think people should not do. For instance, saying “I would like to ask the court to approach the witness” instead of just saying “May I approach the witness?” Instead of ending direct examinations on a strong final point, the video encourages people to re-hash their earlier arguments. This runs the risk of an asked/answered objection, and ending your examination on a sustained objection looks bad.

The same company that makes these videos also produces a blog with some helpful “Law Tips of the Week” covering more trial advocacy skills. If you are a trial advocacy nerd like I am, the site is worth checking out.

FTC Mandated Disclosure: Before Class Media, LLC gave me a free license to the site and allowed me to view all of the videos. Access to all the videos normally costs $49.95

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