Litigants or Witness Investigations:Do you routinely investigate whether an adverse party, or witness, has a criminal background? If not, you may be overlooking a key item of discovery, because the introduction of a civil litigant’s conviction could have a highly prejudicial effect on that person’s credibility, since most juries do not look sympathetically toward a litigant who has a criminal background. Although conventionally one thinks of utilizing a criminal conviction against a civil litigant in a personal injury case, the use of such a conviction is equally useful to impeach a party or witness in a commercial case.