06/17/2026
Yesterday was hard.
We were in trial. We picked a jury. We gave opening statements. Then, at the defense’s request, the court declared a mistrial after concluding that portions of our opening statement violated the spirit of a pretrial ruling.
This post is not about the merits of that ruling.
It is about the struggle.
In our last few trials, we had the same issue handled differently. Different courtrooms. Different judges. Different boundaries. Different expectations.
This trial, we ran into limitations we had not run into before. Not necessarily because the law had changed, but because every courtroom has its own rulings, sensitivities, and danger zones.
That is part of trial work. And sometimes you do not fully appreciate how close you are to the edge until the moment has already passed.
That is a hard lesson.
As trial lawyers, we are taught to push. To advocate. To fight for the full measure of what was taken. To say the thing clearly. To not hide from the hard parts of the case.
But we also practice in a courtroom with human beings making real-time decisions under pressure.
That tension is real.
Push too little, and you are not doing the job.
Push too far — or push in a way the court views differently than you intended — and the whole case can be disrupted.
I have spent the last day replaying it, questioning it, defending it, second-guessing it, getting angry about it, and then trying to force myself to do the thing that is much easier to say than to live:
GOOD.
Learn from it.
Get better.
Move forward.
I believe that. But I also want to be honest: it is much harder to live that way when the thing that happened feels personal. When it feels like an attack on your judgment. When you care deeply about the case, the team, and the trust people placed in you.
But the real work is in sitting with the setback long enough to extract something useful from it. So that is what we are doing:
-We are reviewing our systems.
-We are tightening our process.
-We are asking how to better translate court rulings into clear red/yellow/green lines before anyone stands up in front of a jury.
-We are asking how to preserve the courage to push while building better guardrails around the push.
Because there will be a next time.
And candidly, defense lawyers do not ask for mistrials because they think the case is going well for them.
That part is worth remembering.
