Advanced Objection Techniques: Making Multiple Objections

Multiple Objections
You’re likely in the course of your Mock Trial career to encounter content (questions or answers) that could be objected to on multiple grounds. There are three basic ways to handle this:
1) Object in every possible way at once.
This is usually a weak approach. By throwing multiple objections at the judge, you’re creating the appearance that this is a huge issue which is going to take a lot of time and energy to resolve. If the judge doesn’t have the same impression, you’re losing credibility- it looks like you’re overreacting. It also makes you look desperate, like you’re throwing everything at the judge and hoping something will stick. Using one strong objection would work- so you can only be using six because none of them are strong.
This is effective if the content is egregiously objectionable and the judge knows it. Using multiple objections then emphasizes how ridiculous the content is, and might prompt the judge into a quick ruling. Importantly, you’re using multiple objections here to create a particular impression in the judge: that this issue is easily resolved in your favor. Your tone needs to support that impression. Rattle off all the objections you’re making fairly quickly, like it doesn’t take you much effort to think of them because they’re so obvious. A touch of surprise or impatience in your tone- you can’t believe this even came up- can also help. The ideal is the judge not even letting you finish your list before instructing opposing counsel to pose another question.
2) Put forward only the strongest objection
This is usually the right choice. It avoids the issues mentioned above and plays out virtually identically to the objection arguments that only involve one rule.
3) Start out with one objection and switch to another
There are two reasons you might do this. First, you might have tried to go with approach (2) and realized the judge wasn’t buying it or your argument was otherwise failing. Without conceding that your initial objection failed, say something along the lines of “Your Honor, in that case, I renew my objection to [your new objection]”. Be careful to pay attention to the judge on this one- if they’re leaning your way on the first objection, don’t give up on it!
Alternatively, you might have deliberately used your initial objection to strengthen an argument for a second objection. Essentially, sometimes opposing counsel will concede points or make claims in arguing for one objection that make them vulnerable to another. If that happens, it can be advantageous to switch to the other. Relevance is a very common objection to do this with. Say that someone’s trying to put an out-of-court statement into evidence. Instead of objecting to hearsay right off the bat, you might start with relevance. Hearsay, remember, requires that the statement be used for the truth of the matter asserted. To make a good relevance argument, opposing counsel will tell the judge what he’s using the statement for. If at that point they essentially admit that they’re using it for the truth of the matter asserted, you’re in a strong place to make a hearsay argument. Or you can do it the other way around: if you object to hearsay first and opposing counsel states a flimsy excuse for putting the statement in other than for the truth of the matter asserted, you can then object to relevance- the flimsy point they say they’re trying to make is irrelevant. With this technique, you might choose to abandon the first objection you made, in the same way as described in the above paragraph. But it might sometimes be advantageous to argue both at once, and this requires some careful and clear argument. Usually you’re not genuinely objecting on two grounds at once. You’re setting up a dilemma: if the content escapes one objection, it is covered by the other. You’re not arguing that the statement is both hearsay and irrelevant; you’re arguing that it is either hearsay or it’s irrelevant. Opposing counsel can escape one objection, but not both. If you’re confused, hang in there- I’m definitely going to provide an example down the line that covers this technique.