Motion Practice, Opening Statements, and Summation

Three high-stakes set pieces of a trial — motion practice, the opening statement, and summation — share more craft than students typically realize, and this chapter treats them as a unified persuasion arc. It covers motion documents, oral-argument strategy, hot-bench preparation, and the use of LLM-generated rebuttals; the architecture of an opening (themes, primacy, restraint on argument); and the design and rehearsal of a closing built backward from jury instructions. A recurring through-line is rehearsal-as-a-craft, with concrete tools for AI-assisted critique. Particularly useful in a trial advocacy seminar where students perform mock arguments, the chapter gives professors clear anchors for grading rubrics — clarity of issue framing, fidelity to record, persuasive structure, and ethical limits on argument.