The Year of Practicing Law

So it hasn’t been exactly a year of practicing, but I practiced law exclusively throughout the 2012 calendar year, and boy was it an experience. Since I was sworn into the California bar in December of 2011, I’ve worked on 10 different cases, appeared before 7 different judges, been in 15 different courtrooms, been the lead attorney on 6 different cases, reached settlement in 3 different matters, and barely scratched the surface of what litigation is. Here’s what I learned in my first year.

1.)    The first rule of litigation is not to talk about litigation.  No seriously, several times over the year I’ve tried to talk to laypeople about litigation; their eyes kind of just glaze over. Other litigators who know litigation also don’t want to talk about it, they want to get as far away from it as possible whenever they get a break from it.

2.)    Judges matter. Law school gives you a false sense that the law is the law, and judges are bound by it. Ha. Judges are human; they make mistakes. They interpret the law differently. They have “bad days.” The identity of your judge has a HUGE bearing on the outcome of your case. You must adapt or you will die. Well, not die, but your case will suffer. If there was a ratemyjudge.com or therobingroom.com for California state judges, it’d get a lot of hits from my webpage.

3.)    Dealing with court clerks. Like dealing with customer service, it’s not always the easiest. Court clerks, whether they’re justified or not, are often unhappy. Your job is to make them happy so that you do your job of helping your client. That job can be hard.

4.)    Arguing with other attorneys- an art in itself. It’s (usually) not personal; it’s actually an attorney’s job to blither and blather and make ridiculous, often overreaching arguments with other attorneys to establish some leverage or make the other side give in (often to reach settlement). Some attorneys even specialize (like a closer in baseball) in being nasty and as unrelenting as possible to push the other side into re-evaluating their positions and giving ground during settlement. These guys love to feast on first-year attorneys ESPECIALLY because they’re relatively new at the game, like a “Welcome to the big leagues, rookie” type of move.

5.)    Dealing with clients. – often half of the battle. Just in this year of lawyering alone I’ve dealt with several variations of a client suing their former attorney for malpractice and/or the attorney suing the client for legal fees unpaid. This is a business, and lawyers need to be paid. And they charge a lot, often resulting in these difficult situations. It’s soul-sucking, very soul-sucking.

6.)    Evaluate the quality of the case first. Learn everything you can about the case: the client, the other side, the other side’s attorney, the judge, the venue. At least 50% of the time you will have the losing end of the facts of the case. Get out ahead of that. Like Michael Clayton stated in “Michael Clayton,” lawyers are not miracle workers, we’re fixers. If someone’s screwed up, we minimize the damage, so don’t get your clients’ hopes up too much. Don’t promise a grandiose settlement amount when the case has a good chance of going sour.

7.)    Legal theory and whatnot goes out the window at many times. Oftentimes when writing a complaint, those eloquent judicial opinions and centuries of case law go out the window when you’re writing a complaint that needs to get through the demurrer stage; that’s when you look at the boilerplate language of the elements of different causes of action and plug-and-chug; it’s not pretty but it’s what judges look at.

8.)    Settlement can happen at any time. They can happen in the middle of a deposition, on the phone, in your sleep, because your client’s having a bad day, anytime. And you need to be ready to get the client the best deal when that settlement’s happening.

9.)    Getting clients- that’s half the game. It’s a business and you want to get as many and as qualify of business partners as you can. It’s not good to put all your eggs in one basket for the reasons mentioned above (you’re subject to the strength of your case, subject to the judge). At some point in any lawyer’s career you become a salesman, because without the sales, you have no cases to practice law on.

10.)            Know when litigation’s not for you. More on this later, but some people are just not cut out for litigation. Not that they’re not intelligent enough or qualified for it, but their personalities don’t mesh, they don’t want to continue the leeching and soul-sucking, and they want to do something else. That’s ok. Litigation is not the end all and be all. Litigation is litigation.

Fantasize (and litigate) on,

Robert Yan