In this episode of Cross Lab, hosts Steve Hohman and Olivia Espinosa welcome personal injury trial attorneys Susie Injijian and Jon Choate, along with personal injury and criminal defense attorney Russell Goodrow.
Watch as these 3 attorneys cross-examine Steve, who portrays an expert radiologist on behalf of the defense. They’ll challenge his opinion that only soft tissue injuries and pre-existing conditions—not lingering effects from MTBI—are present in the plaintiff.
What’s covered in this episode:
- Techniques for a 'yes, and' cross-examination that questions expert conclusions
- How to score points against an expert who protests too much
- The power of improvised loops to solidify words and concepts for the jury
- How to leverage the power of what an expert doesn’t know
- The offensive word that will make an expert witness bristle (even if it’s the truth)
Time Stamps
00:00 What’s Cross Lab?
3:18 How to start formulating a cross
6:22 Case Description: Sandra Little v. Grant School District & Gary Carpenter
9:20 Jon Choate’s cross: Word choice that paints a clear picture for the jury
19:35 How to stay out of an argument with the witness
29:40 Russell Goodrow’s cross: Loops to control a witness and an easy physical demonstrative
40:55 What to do when a witness that won’t answer the question
49:50 Susie Injijan’s cross: Techniques for being an effective teacher/guide for the jury
1:00:47 The word that no expert will want to hear (because it’s sooo good for you)
1:04:48 Your biggest weapon in the courtroom
1:09:44 Top takeaways of you had to cross a witness like this
Would you like to be a guest or have an idea for a future episode, reach out to us here!
Cross Lab is powered by LawPods.
Get FREE narrative building resources for the courtroom here!
Key Insights from This Episode
How to Use a Defense Expert to Retell the Violence of the Accident for the Jury
John Choate's cross of defense radiologist Dr. Benjamin Williams barely touched radiology at all — and that was entirely by design. Instead, he used the expert as a vehicle to put the violence of the collision back in front of the jury: a full-size school bus weighing approximately 25,000 pounds, traveling at 30 miles per hour with no brakes applied, crushing the rear quarter of an SUV and propelling it 61 feet while the plaintiff was halfway inside it. The expert tried to distance himself — "that's not germane to my expertise" — but John didn't need the expert to agree with his conclusions. He just needed the expert to confirm the facts, which he did, one by one.
Suzy Injijian noted afterward that the expert's indifference to those facts was itself the point. The more the expert confirmed devastating details with a dismissive tone — "yes, that sounds about right" — the more the jury could see that this highly paid witness didn't care about what happened to Ms. Little. As Suzy put it, the expert looked "uninterested and uninteresting." The technique works because it doesn't require the attorney to attack the expert. The jury watches a $800-an-hour witness shrug at a 25,000-pound bus collision, and they draw their own conclusions about whose side that expert is really on.
How Looping a Witness's Own Words Pulls Them Back Under Your Control Without Confrontation
Russ Goodrow's cross demonstrated one of the most consistent applications of looping across the entire episode. Every time Dr. Williams went off on a tangent — explaining his process, defending his impartiality, volunteering context — Russ would grab a word or phrase from the monologue and use it to redirect back to his original question. The expert would say "I review what's on the film and report my findings," and Russ would come back with "It's paramount for you what you find on the films." The expert's own language became the leash that kept pulling him back.
John Choate described the effect from the outside: it felt like watching something smash against a strong tree. The expert was wriggling and fighting, but Russ was immovable. Steve confirmed from the witness chair that this was deeply irritating — he hated being pulled back by his own words — but there was nothing to fight because every loop was factually accurate. The technique also signals something important to the jury: the attorney is listening to every word and won't let the witness talk their way out of a question. Over time, it makes the expert's long answers feel evasive rather than authoritative, because the jury notices the attorney keeps having to re-ask the same simple question.
How to Limit a Defense Expert's Credibility by Defining the Narrow Scope of What They Actually Do
Suzy Injijian's cross took a fundamentally different approach from John's and Russ's. Rather than confronting the expert on the accident facts or probing for bias, she methodically boxed Dr. Williams into the narrowest possible version of his role. He's a diagnostic neuroradiologist — she defined it immediately so the jury understood. He reads scans. He doesn't diagnose patients. He wasn't given clinical notes. He didn't ask for the plaintiff's deposition. He never met Ms. Little. He didn't review symptom reports, medical history, or any other diagnostic testing. By the time Suzy was done, the expert who had presented himself as authoritative was reduced to a person who looks at pictures and reports what he sees on them — nothing more.
John Choate observed that Suzy built this so naturally that the jury would have seen the conclusion coming before she stated it: this expert can speak to one narrow slice of the diagnostic picture, and there's an entire universe of clinical information he never looked at. Steve noted from the witness chair that he was frustrated because every time he tried to expand his role — explaining how he'd report findings just like a treating physician would — Suzy would loop it back and pin him down. The word "assignment" was particularly effective: it reframed the expert's participation from professional opinion to a task given to him by a defense lawyer, which is exactly how the jury should see it.
Why Starting a Cross-Examination with How You Want the Jury to Feel at the End Changes Everything
Before any cross began, Suzy Injijian described her starting point: "How do I want the jury or the fact finder to respond to this witness? What is the feeling I want to generate through this cross-examination when it's ended?" Russ Goodrow echoed this — he starts big and works to get it smaller, organizing around stories, chapters, and the emotions within those chapters. This approach stands in contrast to what John Choate identified as the most common trap: finding a factual error the expert made and going after it like a dog with a bone, even when that error won't contribute to the feeling the jury needs to walk away with.
The distinction matters because all three attorneys faced the same witness and none of them expected to land a knockout blow. Dr. Williams was experienced, polished, and disciplined — exactly the kind of expert who has testified 800 times and knows how to hold his ground. The goal was never to destroy him. It was to leave the jury with a specific feeling: that this expert didn't care about Ms. Little, that his role was narrow and purchased, and that his testimony shouldn't carry much weight. Each attorney achieved a different version of that feeling through entirely different chapters — and that's the point. The feeling drives the structure, not the other way around.
How a Criminal Defense Attorney's Instinct for Cross-Examination Translates to Plaintiff's Civil Work
One of the episode's most interesting dynamics came from Russ Goodrow, who started his career doing criminal defense cross-examinations before moving into plaintiff's personal injury work. His approach reflected that training: he was comfortable with silence, unflappable when the witness went off script, and focused on control rather than confrontation. John Choate described Russ as having a "groundedness" — an immovable quality that made the expert's resistance look like fighting for no reason.
The criminal defense instinct showed most clearly in how Russ handled the witness volunteering information. When Dr. Williams mentioned he'd found a bone chip fracture that the plaintiff's own treating physicians had missed, Russ didn't panic or change course. He looped it: "So you found something that Ms. Little's treating physicians missed." Then he pivoted to framing the expert as a fact-checker — a characterization the expert bristled at but couldn't fully escape. Suzy Injijian called it brilliant because it gave the jury a framework for understanding the expert's role: he's here to second-guess the people who actually treated Ms. Little. That reframing came from a criminal defense attorney's comfort with taking whatever the witness gives you and turning it into your narrative.
Why the Most Effective Cross-Examinations Make the Jury Feel Like They're Solving the Puzzle Themselves
A theme that ran through all three debriefs — and connected to the broader philosophy Steve and Olivia teach — is that the best cross-examinations make the fact-finder feel like they're figuring out the story rather than being told the conclusion. John Choate described building his butcher-paper checklist of crash facts so the jury could see the accumulation. Suzy Injijian built her scope-narrowing questions so methodically that John said the jury would have been able to figure out where she was going — and that's the most fun for the jury, because it feels like watching a mystery unfold. Russ Goodrow's looping created a rhythm where the jury could hear the same question asked three times and the witness dodge it three times, letting them conclude on their own that the expert was being evasive.
Steve made the point explicitly during the debrief: curiosity is the superpower. The attorneys who are most effective in cross aren't the ones who announce their conclusions — they're the ones who stay curious, follow the thread, and trust their audience to arrive at the destination. As Olivia noted, mock jury feedback consistently shows that jurors get bored when an attorney beats a point to death. The attorneys who let the jury solve the puzzle — who lay out the breadcrumbs and then step back — are the ones who earn the verdict.
