Litigation terms
Leading question
A leading question is one that suggests its own answer — "You never saw the contract, did you?" — prohibited on direct examination of your own witness, and the entire engine of cross-examination.
Federal Rule of Evidence 611(c) states the default: no leading on direct examination, leading freely allowed on cross. The exceptions matter as much as the rule — leading is permitted on direct for preliminaries, for hostile or adverse witnesses, and as necessary to develop testimony from a struggling witness.
The test isn’t whether a question can be answered yes-or-no; it’s whether the question plants the answer. “Did you go to the meeting?” is not leading. “You went to the meeting, didn’t you?” is.
Why it matters in practice
The rule encodes trial strategy. Direct examination is the witness’s story, so the questions must be open — who, what, when, where, walk-me-through. Cross-examination is the lawyer’s story, told in declarative sentences the witness is invited to confirm one at a time: short, single-fact, leading questions, each anchored to something in the record the witness cannot fight. The classic discipline — never ask a question you don’t know the answer to — is really a records discipline: every good leading question has an exhibit or a transcript page standing behind it.
In the fact record
That’s the practical link to fact work: a cross built from a verified chronology is a sequence of leading questions with citations attached. FactMarshal’s witness-level record — every statement and document tied to its source — is, functionally, the raw material of a cross-examination outline.