The rules of advocacy were designed to help attorneys to evaluate their advocacy tactics in a logical manner.
They were not intended to serve as an exhaustive list of litigation guidelines, or to be followed rigidly in every situation.
These rules were created as a general framework for effective advocacy, accompanied by the reasoning behind each principle. If the justification for departing from a rule outweighs the reasoning supporting it, then the rule should be broken.
The rules stem from my own experience handling cases and reflect what has consistently worked for me. I developed them based on the belief that, without a foundational set of principles, an attorney would have to “reinvent the wheel” in every case—an approach that is both inefficient and ineffective. Having such a framework also enables attorneys to assess and refine their litigation skills over time.
Whenever I deviate from one of my rules, I ask myself whether the decision to do so was beneficial. When there is no justification for breaking a rule, the answer is almost always no. In this way, these rules represent an effort to bring an element of science to the art of advocacy.
