Hi, I'm Dave Ward, one of the things that is stressful for most people is the idea of having to go to court and possibly testify, sitting there with the judge and being asked questions and things like that. And it's been our experience at The Ward Law Firm that when people sort of understand at least what's happening around them, some of that fear can be mitigated.
So what I want to do is put together a little series for you, to help explain some of the things that you can expect to happen in a courtroom and how to handle those things as well as how to engage in answering questions and testifying. So, we're going to start the series on what you can expect when going into court and what to do when you're testifying.
Rule number one, tell the truth. The reason why it's important is because the court in going through and making inquiries about the things that it has to decide in the case, has to make assessments about whether or not people are telling the truth and courts are very, very good at determining whether or not somebody is being truthful with them. There are a number of things that we do subconsciously that we don't even think about when we're trying to be deceptive about things or trying to perhaps stretch the truth a little, those kinds of things and courts know how to look for these things.
If you tell the truth, you can avoid some of the pitfalls that can happen when you're trying to sort of bend the facts a little bit to try and make things look better. There's also a side benefit something that a lot of people don't think of and it's called the damaging admission. A lot of people think that sometimes, if I have this bad fact if I try to minimize it or try to gloss over it all together that that will make me look better in court and the reality is quite the opposite. Because what ends up happening is the other side whether it's an attorney or the other party almost always is going to bring up this bad fact and now it looks like if you didn't address it, it looks like you're backpedaling.
By making this damaging admission to the court and saying yes this bad thing did happen and then moving on to some other things what it does is it actually establishes credibility for you with the court because the court looks at it and says, okay well if this person is going to tell me the truth about this thing that maybe isn't so good. They must be telling me the truth about these other things.
So, it really ends up building credibility more than it does hurt you in those things. So that's why rule number one whenever you're testifying in court is always, tell the truth. I'm Dave Ward with The Ward Law Firm and we help parents protect those things that matter most.