Sometimes you just gotta go and act like a lawyer

Courtroom-2

That’s good news, because that’s what I do for a living.  The more I do this work and the younger everyone else is around me (I swear I was in Court today with an assistant District Attorney who was no more than fourteen), I realize that the advice of my current employer is exactly right – “sometimes you gotta just go into court and act like a lawyer.”

When that particular direction was given, maybe only a few years ago at most, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.  You need to know all the rules. You need to know everything about your case.  You need to know everything about your opponent’s case.  You need to know every piece of law, every reported case, every statute, and every rule of Court that is pertinent to every part of your case.  And if you don’t, well you can just forget it, curl up in a ball of anxiety and shake with fear until your appearance is over.  You are either prepared or your are not.

Friends, I have some news.  Life in a small firm is not like that.  If I had a team of lackeys working around the clock on all 100+ of my cases, I could maybe achieve something close to that level of preparation.  But in my world (where it’s mostly just me), it is simply not possible.  Now, if there is a big civil trial that’s worth a lot of money, then you definitely crank it up a notch or two.  But there are times – lots of times in my practice – where there is a Court appearance that may have a big impact on my client’s life and I don’t have the best part of it.  No amount of preparation is going to change that.  This is especially true in a civil case where the client has waited too long to get an attorney, perhaps hoping that a problem will simply go away.  And when it doesn’t, I get called in to mop up.  I got no problem taking out the trash and mopping up, but sometimes, there is only so much you can do, despite the fact that I’m being paid, perhaps thousands of dollars.

That’s when you gotta take your best argument in front of the Judge, and, with absolute certainty and airtight conviction, make your case.  You may not have the best of it; you may hardly have anything to hang your hat on, but that’s not really for you to decide.  Let the Court take care of that.  Just make the case professionally and with as much logic and support as possible.  Make appeals to common sense and general principles of fairness.  Don’t get cute and don’t crusade.  Just lay it out so clear that a child could understand, with respect and deference to your adversary and (for the love of God) to the Court.

I had an opportunity to run this play last week and it went OK, especially considering I didn’t have a leg to stand on.  I was in Federal Court, where everything seems so much more important and serious (even though it isn’t), and I had a great Judge and a very young adversary – sometimes getting old is a good thing!  As right as he was, he was still nervous about his big appearance in that big room, and that really helped me.

I was clear enough about why my client had done the stupid things he did in this business dispute that the Judge had to think twice before nailing shut the coffin.  I had just enough chutzpah to live another day.  I was politely admonished, but at least given a chance to force my guy to do the right thing without having a judgment hung around him or his company.  The next thing that would happen is that the Sheriff would come to start selling stuff and we don’t want that.  I exploited some obvious irregularities on the other side and wove that into my thin argument to give it a bit more life.  In business, it is mostly the case that there’s a bit of wrongdoing on both sides when it gets bad enough to go to Court.

So that’s what I have to do sometimes.  It’s great exercise.  I imagine it’s a bit like acting.  I felt great after.  I felt like I had given my client substantial value and so far, he seems pleased.  It wasn’t my most lucrative day in Court, but it helped me learn a little more, even at this advance age of 37, about what I do for a living.