Who you face

The opponent is a setting, not a fixed character

A newly admitted opponent who objects at everything is a different exercise from a veteran who objects twice in an hour and picks both moments. A cold bench that gives nothing away is a different exercise from one that takes the argument over. LexGrit lets you declare which room you are in — in the studio, under Configure & start — because the point is rehearsing the hearing you actually have.

Everything below is declared before the session and frozen onto it. Nothing shifts under you mid-argument, and a score months later is still attributable to a room you can reconstruct.

Start from a preset

Four named starting points, each a whole room rather than a single dial:

• An ordinary day — a competent opponent and an attentive bench. What most hearings actually feel like, and the right default.
• The veteran — rarely objects, and never at a moment of your choosing. Concedes small points to win large ones.
• Noise — a new opponent who objects at everything and is overruled constantly. Practice at keeping your composure and your thread.
• The hot bench — you will not finish a sentence. The argument is shaped by the questions, not by your outline.

A preset fills the fields; it does not lock them. Everything it set stays yours to change, and a clock or curveballs you had already configured are left alone.

Opposing counsel

Experience — newly admitted (objects often, and is overruled often), seasoned (objects when there is a real ground), or veteran (objects rarely, and chooses the moment).

How readily they object — low (only where the point matters), normal (where a real ground lies), or high (wherever a colourable ground exists). Experience shapes judgement; this shapes appetite. A veteran set to high is a specific and unpleasant afternoon.

You cannot cut opposing counsel off. They can interrupt you; the courtesy does not run both ways, because it does not in a courtroom either.

The bench

Temperament — neutral (an ordinary bench on an ordinary day), cold (says little, and gives nothing away), or hot (interrupts, presses, and follows up).

Engagement — passive (lets counsel present), engaged (questions where a point is doing work), or interventionist (takes the argument over).

These are different axes and worth setting separately: a bench can be warm and passive, or icy and relentless, and the second is the one that finds out whether you know your record.

The witness

In an examination, demeanour decides how the witness answers: cooperative (answers fully), guarded (answers narrowly), or evasive (answers around the question). The witness never invents — it answers only from the record it was given — so an evasive witness is being difficult within the truth, which is the realistic version of the problem.

Curveballs, and the clock

Curveballs are scheduled, not improvised — you choose what may land and when: a hard hypothetical from the bench, a document you have not addressed, or your remaining time halved. They come from a declared set precisely so a rehearsal cannot surprise you with something the product invented.

The podium clock, if you set one, counts your argument — not the objections against you. Time spent on somebody else’s objection is not your time.

Voices

Each role speaks in a distinct voice, so you can tell who is talking without reading. Where a proceeding seats more than one judge, each seat gets its own voice, and the room says so when two seats necessarily share one. Voice is a property of the voice, never a behaviour setting: it changes who you hear, not how hard they are on you.

When the room is bigger than one judge

Some forums sit as a panel. Where the catalogue says so, the room seats the whole bench — each seat speaking for itself, addressed as that forum addresses it (“Justice”, “Your Honors”), and the transcript records which seat spoke. A seat may put a question, and opposing counsel yields the floor while the bench has it.

You do not configure this: it comes from the forum you chose, because guessing a panel from a court’s name is the one thing LexGrit will not do.