Witnesses in our justice system are supposed to testify from firsthand knowledge. It is for juries to determine whether a witness is credible, how much weight to assign a witness’ testimony and what inferences to draw from it. The hearsay ...

Witness testimony is a key source of evidence in trials. As such, the Federal Rules of Evidence have developed several rules to regulate the use of testimonial witnesses’ behavior. In this module, we’ll address those rules, learning about the general ...

One of the most basic rules of introducing evidence at trial is that each piece of non-testimonial evidence must be authenticated before its introduction. Non-testimonial evidence includes tangible items such as documents, photographs, recordings, datasets and even murder weapons. Testimonial ...

Character Evidence Exceptions in Criminal Cases Federal Rule 404(2) allows a defendant in a criminal case to introduce evidence of his own “pertinent character trait,” which allows criminal defendants to bring witnesses as to good character. A pertinent trait is a characteristic ...

Relevance A fundamental rule of evidence is that evidence must be relevant to be admissible.[1] Federal Rule of Evidence 401 stipulates that evidence is relevant if “it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would ...

One of the cornerstones of the United States’ criminal justice system is the principle that every person is “innocent until proven guilty.” The tool by which guilt is proven is evidence. This, of course, applies to civil cases as well. ...

Now it’s time to consider how all this theory works in real-life e-discovery situations. In our last module, we will give brief overviews of the process of creating and responding to the e-discovery plan from the points of view of ...

Proportionality “Proportionality” is a cost-benefit analysis applied to the cost of electronic discovery to a party against other cost considerations like the potential value of the case and the probative value of the potentially discoverable evidence. The bigger the case, ...

There are several formal ways to request discovery from other parties in litigation, including subpoenas, requests for admission, requests for production of documents and depositions. All forms of discovery are ways of moving documents and other data from the receiving ...

ESI Storage The person in charge of data storage is termed the “custodian” of that data. That could be the party who created the document and keeps it on a local computer or it could be a cell phone company ...