Testing an argument before battle is obviously preferable to testing it during one.
Good litigation teams have always done this. An important argument gets handed to someone who did not write it. A witness gets questioned by someone who does not particularly want the witness to succeed. Someone is asked to make the other side's case - and to make it properly.
Done well, it can be uncomfortable.
That is generally a good sign.
The difficulty is that genuine pressure testing is hard to do from inside a case team. By the time a matter is important enough to need it, the people involved usually know too much.
They know why the argument was developed. They know what the witness meant. They know why the troublesome document is not really troublesome. They remember the alternatives considered months ago and why this one won.
All useful knowledge.
Not particularly useful if the assignment is to attack the operating assumptions.
You can ask someone inside the team to be skeptical. But there are limits to independence among people who have spent two years reaching the same destination.
It is a little like asking your mother whether you look good.
For a real test, you want the shark.
Someone experienced enough to understand the case quickly, but with no investment in its conclusions. Someone who did not choose the arbitrator, develop the theory, prepare the witness or retain the expert.
The instruction is simple:
Assume we are wrong. Find out where.
Sometimes nothing important happens. The argument survives. The witness holds up. The assumptions prove sound.
Good.
Sometimes a small weakness is found early enough to fix.
Better.
And occasionally someone pulls at a thread that everyone inside the case had stopped seeing as a thread.
That is why the exercise matters.
There is nothing new about pressure testing. It has been part of serious litigation practice for a very long time.
What is less common is making genuinely independent pressure testing available when the team does not happen to have the right person down the hall.
The other side, of course, will provide the service eventually.
BETTER BEFORE BATTLE.