Part of your practice—whether it focuses on civil or criminal litigation, internal investigations or even business transactions—will involve interviewing witnesses who will inform your matters. Here are a few tips, gleaned from my experience in speaking and listening to witnesses in offices, roadside diners and detention facilities, for conducting effective interviews.

  • Know your witness.

Read all pertinent documents before speaking to a witness. Conducting a thorough document review beforehand will ensure a thorough interview. It also will help structure your outline of questions (see below). Regardless whether there are documents available, do background research on the witness. If you have the resources, obtain a report on the witness from a database service like Accurint. At minimum, plug the person’s name into an internet search engine. You can learn a lot about someone through Google, especially if the person is prominent in a professional field or has a substantial online presence for other reasons. Once, while preparing to interview a child psychologist, I learned through a basic online search that the witness had been disciplined professionally and sued civilly for having an affair with a barely legal patient. That information at least arguably tainted the diagnosis she rendered in the instant matter.

  • Put questions to paper.