Why do courts allow attorneys to demand Yes-or-No answers to their questions? Why do courts allow attorneys to demand Yes-or-No answers to their questions? I'm seeing a lot of that in the Chauvin trial. Attorneys are prohibited from asking leading questions, and from badgering the witness. Demanding Yes-or-No answers seems worse in my book: &quot;Has the defendant stopped regularly beating his wife and kids? Yes or no?&quot; (Not an actual example, but here to demonstrate the absurdity of demanding Yes-or-No answers)
The parties are generally entitled to present their case as they see fit, as long as they stay within the rules of evidence. If they want a straight yes or no, the court will often require the witness to provide one, which keeps lawyers happy, makes the answers clear for the jury, and limits the parties' grounds for appeal. If a yes or no answer is not as accurate as a more qualified answer, the other lawyer would typically have an opportunity to invite the witness to provide a fuller answer on redirect. If a yes or no answer is inappropriate because of assumption embedded in the question -- as in your &quot;beating his wife and kids&quot; example -- the question should quickly elicit an objection from the defense attorney, who would note that the question lacks foundation or assumes facts not in evidence. Assuming there isn't any evidence of domestic violence, the court should sustain the objection, in which case the witness would not need to answer at all.
Demand letters are often used to collect debts from one's own clients, most prominently, because filing a lawsuit against a client often triggers a counterclaim for malpractice or an ethical grievance, even if it is not justified on the merits. Demanding payment without suing rarely has these consequences and often isn't even enough to trigger an urge to post an unjustified (or justified) bad review of the lawyer online. Demand letters are not just efforts to generate billable hours. Lawyers want to generate billable hours for clients who pay them reliably, rather than devoting time to work collecting from a client who has a significant likelihood of not paying. One reason to send demand letters is that sometimes, the reason that clients don't pay is not that they are unwilling to pay, or dispute the bill, but that they are currently unable to pay. A demand letter keeps the debt fresh in the client's mind when an ability to pay is restored. Quite a bit of hourly charge legal work is de facto contingent fee work because the client almost by definition won't have the ability to pay for it promptly if the outcome is a bad one (often for reasons beyond the lawyer's control). Demand letters are cheap, can often be drafted by administrative staff for attorney review, and because they are cheap, don't have to have a high success rate to be worth the effort. Even a 5%-10% payment rate for unpaid fees that are sought in demand letters makes them worth it. A second reason to send a demand letter can also trigger a written response acknowledging that the debt is owed and apologizing for not paying, and/or paying a token amount like $25, each of which extends the statute of limitations to collect the entire amount of the debt for unpaid fees. A third reason to send a demand letter is that it helps the lawyer to keep current on the client's address, if the client moves, while a mail forwarding order is still in place. A fourth reason to send a demand letter is that it discourages the client from trying to get the lawyer to do additional work on existing or new matters that the client can't afford to pay for (especially in non-litigation representations) because it reminds them that they already owe money to the firm. Typically, a lawyer sues when (1) the client is known to be collectible now, (2) there is not credible basis for a malpractice lawsuit and there was not a bad outcome, and (3) the statute of limitations is approaching or the client has a serious chance of not being collectible later. The Business Model Context In a typical small and medium sized practice with a mix of litigation work done on an hourly basis and transactional work involving negotiations that are not flat fee, maybe 10% of unpaid bills are ever the subject of a collection lawsuit brought by the law firm that wasn't paid. A firm like that often ultimately writes off as much as 20%-30% or more of all the fees it bills to its clients on an hourly basis (with substantial variation from year to year), and typically receives maybe a third of all the fees that it is ultimately paid more than 90 days after the due date for the invoiced fees. A pattern of a client not paying for several months and then making a big lump sum payment for reasons that may or may not be related to the representation is fairly common. For reasons like this (and the timing of contingency fee payouts) solo practice and small firm lawyers with non-criminal practices typically have incomes that vary wildly from year to year, even though the amount of work actually done each year as measured by billable hours is quite consistent. Large law firms are actually quite similar to this business model as well, although they charge higher rates and bill more hours on cases, and the law of averages keeps their monthly fee collections a little more consistent. Many large firms pay all of their expenses from a line of credit so that they don't have to worry about the timing of their collections to pay their monthly expenses, and then settle up with their bank at the end of the year. Certain kinds of firms (e.g. criminal defense) require all anticipated fees to be in a retainer before work is started. Other kinds of work (e.g. probate administration and flat fee transactional work and contingent fee work) usually is paid promptly and reliably when due. In the insurance defense counsel business model, invoices are almost always paid so demand letters aren't needed, but are usually paid very slowly (90-180 days from invoice), the hourly rates are below average, and the insurance company routinely nitpicks bills to reduce hourly charges in any given month by 5%-10% or so.
I'd imagine that testimony from the defendant is rare enough that in the majority of cases, prosecutors do not meaningfully prepare for a cross examination. To the extent they do, I'd expect the preparation is similar to that for basically any other witness. So I wouldn't expect complicated flowcharts, because the general rule at trial is that you only ask questions whose answers are both known and helpful. So if I need to place the defendant at the OK Corral at 3 p.m., I'm only going to ask him where he was at 3 p.m. if I have evidence showing that fact is true -- maybe he gave a written statement to the sheriff, maybe he posed for a daguerrotype, whatever. I expect him to deny it, so I don't ask the question unless I have evidence more convincing than his denial. In this way, a defendant -- like any hostile witness -- is used less to provide any facts of their own, but rather as an involuntary narrator of my own story, authenticating evidence and validating the facts consistent with my theory of the case.
No. In order to practice law, one must establish an attorney-client relationship. Participation in Internet forums absolutely does not establish an attorney-client relationship. Everyone involved in law spends a disproportionate amount of time disclaiming this, so nobody inside the field will be confused on this point. I believe this is also directly stated in the Terms of Service. And as Jen notes, upvoting/downvoting is not even agreeing with the legal validity of the answer. Take the tour or read help pages for what voting means. It's perfectly conceivable for a psychic who knows how to sway people could write a better voted answer than three lawyers.
Language is contextual. When the meaning of a communication is at issue in litigation, that meaning is gleaned from the totality of the evidence, not from any presumption of what a word means in isolation. &quot;Okay&quot; can mean &quot;yes&quot;, it might mean only that you understand, it might communicate coerced acquiesence falling short of actual consent. See the discussion in R. c. Byers, 2018 QCCQ 4673: [81] Regarding the petitioner’s pretention claiming that she “clearly express her wish to consult an attorney”, the Court considers that the answer “OK” does not show a clear intention to consult a lawyer. [82] At the most “OK” could mean that she understood, that she heard them and also could [have] signified “Yes, I would like to consult an attorney”. [83] In the decision Ellis, the Court of appeal had to analyze the meaning of the words “OK” as part of evidence of purchasing a firearm, the Court considered that this had an equivocal meaning. [84] Moreover, the Court wrote: “[40] (…) Viewed in the context of the whole of the evidence, we consider it a reasonable inference that the two responses “Ok ok” signified nothing more than an acknowledgement of the prices quoted.” [85] For analysis purpose, the Court will consider that the answer “OK” means “yes”. See also R. v. Potvin, 2012 ONCA 113: The pertinent facts known to the appellant were straightforward. The complainant repeatedly said “no” to sex and then appeared to say “yes” by uttering the word “okay”. Viewed in the context of all that preceded it, we agree with the trial judge that the complainant’s use of the word “okay” was ambiguous. In the absence of further inquiry by the appellant, a single “okay” after five refusals over a sustained period of time was simply insufficient to ground a reasonable but mistaken belief in consent.
Typically an Answer would have two parts. The first part presents the Defendant's side of the story raised in the Petition in an effort to assert that the Petition when viewed in light of the actual facts hasn't demonstrated a right to relief. The second part sets forth "affirmative defenses", most of which are procedural in nature. An affirmative defense raises some set of circumstances not discussed in the Petition that make it appropriate to deny relief even when, but for the defense, if everything in the Petition was true, this would suffice to establish grounds for relief. For example, procedural defenses might include: failure to meet a deadline, failure to give notice to the proper persons, failure to pay a filing fee, failure to include required information (such as a case number or a statement of facts or a signature) in the Petition, or lack of standing to file the Petition on behalf of the child because parental rights or legal guardianship are absent or because the person filing the Petition isn't an adult. The notion is that the Reply, in theory, should limit itself to responding to the newly raised procedural defenses stated in the Answer, or to new documents provided with the Answer, instead of trying to argue and resolve every dispute of fact or credibility issues between the Petition's version of the facts and the Answer's version of the facts. When in doubt, talk about it in the Reply. At worst, it is beyond the scope of what should be included in a Reply and can be ignored by the hearing officer as harmless. And, sometimes the hearing officer will decide that they want to know what is said even if it isn't strictly within the proper scope of a Reply. Certainly provide any documents that weren't previously provided that rebut the claims in the Answer.
The question of whether they can ask these questions will be left to the trial judge. If the parties can make any kind of reasonable argument that consumers of one product or the other are likely to be partisans, the judge should allow the question, though it would not be error to refuse. For a good comparison, look at Ham v. South Carolina, 409 U.S. 524, 525–29 (1973). There, the defendant argued he was framed for a petty drug charge because of his involvement in the Civil Rights movement. He thought jurors might be prejudiced against him because he was black and because he had a beard, but the trial court refused to let him ask jurors about either possibility. The Supreme Court said it was an error to refuse to ask the questions about race, but not about the beard: The inquiry as to racial prejudice derives its constitutional stature from the firmly established precedent of Aldridge and the numerous state cases upon which it relied, and from a principal purpose as well as from the language of those who adopted the Fourteenth Amendment. The trial judge's refusal to inquire as to particular bias against beards, after his inquiries as to bias in general, does not reach the level of a constitutional violation. Assuming the question is permitted, the mere fact of using an iPhone would not be sufficient to obtain a &quot;for cause&quot; strike, which the court will only grant if the juror does not indicate that he would be able to fairly consider the case. &quot;I like my iPhone&quot; is not enough. &quot;I like iPhones better than Android&quot; is not enough. &quot;I hate Google&quot; is not enough. &quot;I worship at the altar of Steve Jobs&quot; is not enough. Instead, the question will be whether a juror indicates that they can set aside whatever prejudices they might have. The court is not required to strike them &quot;as long as he or she ultimately asserts an ability to be fair and impartial.&quot; United States of America v. Abel Martinez-Salazar, 146 F.3d 653, 659 (9th Cir. 1998). Batson prohibits peremptory strike based on &quot;gender, ethnic origin, or race.&quot; United States v. Martinez-Salazar, 528 U.S. 304, 315 (2000). Other than that, a lawyer is generally free to strike based on anything or nothing at all (though there remain some questions about whether Batson also applies to other protected classes, such as sexual orientation, disability, age, etc.). So peremptory strikes would be the only permissible means of eliminating iPhone users from the jury.
There should be no more lawyers in an event such as that described by the OP. The Legal Profession, by its own constitution, exists to ensure that everybody can access our adversarial justice system through a diligent and competent advocate. For example, among the responsibilities stipulated by the American Bar Association: [A]ll lawyers should devote professional time and resources and use civic influence to ensure equal access to our system of justice for all those who because of economic or social barriers cannot afford or secure adequate legal counsel. There are famous examples of lawyers, perhaps reluctantly and even at their personal peril, honoring their professional obligation to advocate in court on behalf of unpopular people and causes. One that comes to mind is John Adams defending the British soldiers who perpetrated the Boston Massacre. Of course, lawyers are people too so I wouldn't be surprised if there are counterexamples. But there shouldn't be any counterexamples unless every last lawyer in a jurisdiction resigned his professional membership and hung his head in shame.