By STEPHEN ELLISON / PLAINTIFF MAGAZINE
November 2012
"Veteran public interest lawyer trains trial lawyers at California Rural Legal Assistance to win non-injury cases. Hint — become your own best expert"
While many people believe truth is all powerful in law, knowledge comes in a close second in Cynthia Rice’s book. As a seasoned public interest lawyer, Rice has long held the belief that the ideal approach to a case involves diving in head first, absorbing every last pertinent fact and coming out dripping in expertise – in essence becoming her own expert witness.
"I think that really is the key to being a good trial lawyer," said Rice, the director of litigation and training at California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA). "The challenge of doing really good trial work is – whether you do the discovery work yourself or you have a team doing discovery – you have to immerse yourself in the facts so that you are as comfortable with the facts as your percipient witnesses and as comfortable with the theories of damages or causation as your experts. That's also the intellectual excitement about it.