Improve your oral advocacy skills with this on-demand resource—select the topic of interest when you need it
Target audience: Lawyers (of all ages and experience levels) who have limited recent experience practicing their advocacy skills in court.
What the Advocacy Toolkit consists of:
The ACLEA Award Winning Advocacy Toolkit consists of short videos demonstrating oral advocacy, annotated with spoken and text commentary throughout. Additional materials provide practice tips and explanations. The videos demonstrate both effective and ineffective advocacy. The videos follow a single fact pattern, but only short clips are shown to focus on the microskills of oral advocacy. Note that the actors playing the parts of counsel and the witness vary from one demonstration to the next.
The skills demonstrated include:
- Theory of the case
- Opening
- Chambers applications
- Examination for discovery
- Direct examination
- Cross-examination
- Refreshing memory
- Objections
- Impeaching the witness through prior inconsistent statement
- Closing
Video demonstrations total: 138 minutes
The planning committee, most of whom also acted in the videos:
The Honourable Madam Justice Susan A. Griffin — Supreme Court of British Columbia, Vancouver
Wendy A. Baker, QC — Miller Thomson LLP, Vancouver
Brook Greenberg — Fasken Martineau DuMoulin LLP, Vancouver
Jacqueline D. Hughes — Hunter Litigation Chambers, Vancouver
Matthew Nathanson — MN Law, Vancouver
Jan Lindsay, QC — Lindsay LLP, Vancouver
Additional Actors:
Elizabeth A. Reid — Boughton Law, Vancouver
Isabel Romeral — Miller Thomson LLP, Vancouver