A Good Lawyer: Why Experience Matters

A conversation with a law student led to something coalescing in my mind about good lawyers. Experience matters when you hire a lawyer. I'm biased, but I think trial experience is critical. Of course it's most important when you need a trial lawyer. Even for other kinds of law, it can still matter. A good lawyer has to understand what happens when something goes to court.When a new case comes in,

Winning and Losing for the Wrong Reasons

I wrote before about winning and losing. There I was talking about "unwinnable" and "unlosable" cases. Now I'll talk about winning and losing for the wrong reasons.Most of our work involves cases where we expect the results to be straightforward. Take personal injury cases where the client is a passenger and had a broken bone. In such cases liability is essentially clear in one respect - it's not

A trial lawyer moment ...

I had a trial recently, and there was one short bit of the trial that really stood out. I was cross-examining the principal witness for the prosecution, the following exchange occurred - note that Q is a question from me, and A is an Answer from the witness ...------Q. Okay. So, it's your position that she does notknow how to spell her own last name? Is that what you'retelling this Judge?A. It

Why it's hard to be a trial lawyer

I had lunch with a friend the other day. He's one of the smartest and hardest working lawyers I know. The kind of guy who reads every decision and knows every nook and cranny of the law relevant to his field. He was telling me about a couple of cases he had. In one, he won the unwinnable case. In the other, he lost the unloseable case.We make decisions as trial lawyers. Should we have a jury