The Better Chancery Practice Blog

This is the sixth in a series counting down 10 common-sense practice tips to improve your chancery court trial performance. If you’re a long-time reader of this blog, some of these will be familiar. That’s okay. They bear repeating because they are inside tips on how to impress your chancellor, or at least how to present your case in a way that will help her or him decide in your favor.

TOP TEN TIP #5 …

Use summaries and compilations.

MRE 1006 allows you to present summaries and compilations of voluminous and complicated evidence. If you simply dump 300 pages of credit card statements on the judge, you likely will not get the same result you would if you instead presented her with a table summarizing those statements and highlighting what you want the judge to consider.

The entire rule reads this way:

The contents of voluminous writings, recordings, or photographs which cannot conveniently be examined in court may be presented in the form of a chart, summary, or calculation. The originals, or duplicates, shall be made available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at a reasonable time and place. The court may order that they be produced in court.

Rule 1006 is a great tool to help you accomplish the Golden Rule of Chancery Court, which is “The easier you make it on the chancellor, the better your chance that the judge will rule in your favor.”

Think of it this way: If you dump those 300 pages of accounts in the judge’s lap with little or no guidance, how thorough do you expect the judge to be in his examination and analysis, when he has other hearings and trials to deal with day after day after day? Judges are like everyone else. Faced with unrelenting time pressure they will take shortcuts to get some relief, and that includes even the very best, most thorough judges. I am sure that in the back of the judge’s mind is the thought that if the lawyer could not take the time and effort to elucidate this mass of evidence, why should I? 

You can alleviate that judge’s drudgery by admitting into evidence a chart or summary of the data, showing calculations you used to produce your compilation. Some forms could include month-by-month summaries with yearly totals, time lines with highlighted benchmarks, account calculations, graphs, comparative charts, illustrations, diagrams, and just about any other form of graphic depiction of the evidence that will aid the judge.

The only requirements are: (1) the summary or compilation must be of evidentiary matter that is too voluminous to be examined conveniently in court; (2) the summary or compilation must be based on that evidence; and (3) the originals must have been made reasonably available for inspection and copying, and you should have the originals available in case the judge orders that they be produced in court.

Earlier this year I tried a case in which the attorneys had cooperated to reduce hundreds of bills and accounts to tables and charts with totals and recaps that were easy to decipher and follow. It made a complicated case much simpler to decide, and I was able to get out an opinion in short order with the aid of the Rule 1006 summaries.

Use MRE 1006 to your advantage. It might just be the leg up you need to prevail.

Tagged: documentary evidence, MRE 1006, summaries and compilations, trial practice