David Boies: Control the facts, control the narrative.  You’ve got competing narratives. That is, if you’ve got a good opponent, you’ve got competing narratives.  You want the jury to focus on your narrative, and you never want to let the other side control your story and control your narrative. Now, that’s not always easy to do, because trials are — you put a witness on, and you examine them, and they examine them.  And they always get a chance to ask questions, and they always get a chance to put on their own witnesses.  So you can’t control the flow of information that comes in. So what you have to do is, you have to — as well you can — is package, mold, present that information in a way that supports the narrative that you’re presenting.  And to do that, probably the single most important thing is to be sure that you understand the narrative and that that narrative is true. Now, everybody is going to pick a true narrative that supports their case.  That’s what advocates do.  But you must be sure that the narrative is true.  There are truths that will support your case, and there are usually some truths that will support the other person’s case. The danger is that you aren’t willing, ready to rely just on the truths that support your case, and what you try to do is, you try to support your case with other things that aren’t going to be able to sustain the weight of cross-examination, the weight of a contrary narrative, the weight of cross-examination from the other side, the weight of contrary documents. Because in that case, if you try to build your narrative on things that you cannot demonstrably prove, you risk losing the credibility of the jury, and you risk confusing the jury, because now they think that some of the things that you put in there that you couldn’t sustain are things that are really important to you, whereas what you want to be doing is trying to convince the jury that the only thing that is important are the truths that support your case.