{"id":747,"date":"2009-08-21T16:01:22","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T20:01:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/?p=747"},"modified":"2009-08-21T16:01:22","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T20:01:22","slug":"sometimes-you-just-gotta-go-and-act-like-a-lawyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/?p=747","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes you just gotta go and act like a lawyer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Courtroom-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

That’s good news, because that’s what I do for a living.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

When that particular direction was given, maybe only a few years ago at most, I wasn’t sure what to make of it.\u00a0 You need to know all the rules. You need to know everything about your case.\u00a0 You need to know everything about your opponent’s case.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You are either prepared or your are not.<\/p>\n

Friends, I have some news.\u00a0 Life in a small firm is not like that.\u00a0 If I had a team of lackeys working around the clock on all 100+ of my cases, I could maybe<\/em> achieve something close to that level of preparation.\u00a0 But in my world (where it’s mostly just me), it is simply not possible.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 No amount of preparation is going to change that.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And when it doesn’t, I get called in to mop up.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

That’s when you gotta take your best argument in front of the Judge, and, with absolute certainty and airtight conviction, make your case.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Let the Court take care of that.\u00a0 Just make the case professionally and with as much logic and support as possible.\u00a0 Make appeals to common sense and general principles of fairness.\u00a0 Don’t get cute and don’t crusade.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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!\u00a0 As right as he was, he was still nervous about his big appearance in that big room, and that really helped me.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I had just enough chutzpah to live another day.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The next thing that would happen is that the Sheriff would come to start selling stuff and we don’t want that.\u00a0 I exploited some obvious irregularities on the other side and wove that into my thin argument to give it a bit more life.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

So that’s what I have to do sometimes.\u00a0 It’s great exercise.\u00a0 I imagine it’s a bit like acting.\u00a0 I felt great after.\u00a0 I felt like I had given my client substantial value and so far, he seems pleased.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

That’s good news, because that’s what I do for a living.\u00a0 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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[702,317,43],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":750,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions\/750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mpomy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}