This article uses a Goffman-inspired framework for addressing lawyers’ facework activities. It is argued that cross-examining lawyer's facework strategy will mainly situate itself somewhere between Goffman's intentional and incidental level: a new zone is thus presented – that of strategic ambivalence –, situated (in order to ebable movement) between Goffman's (1967) intentional and incidental levels. Intention, here, is deployed in a pragmatic – especially a discursive – sense as contrary to a philosophical or legal sense.