Winning Litigation

1. Most of what’s in here isn’t taught in law schools. Even if your school has a competent, experienced litigator teaching trial advocacy, you still won’t learn most of this information there; and
2. Working in the legal profession will not, without some outside help (like this book), teach it to you. At least not in the first 30 or 40 years or so.
How do I know that?
I’ve been working in the legal profession for over 30 years, as a law student, first in a legal aid clinic, then in the L. A. County Public Defender’s Office, for four years as a lawyer in an eviction mill, and free-lancing, first as a law clerk, then in private practice as an attorney, in both civil and criminal cases.
And I have met, worked for, worked with, partied with, opposed, negotiated with, negotiated against, represented, and just watched, in hundreds of offices, Courtrooms, and conference rooms, hundreds of lawyers, from sole practitioners to members of quite a number of the largest law firms in California, the United States, and beyond. And everything in between. I’ve worked for some very famous criminal attorneys, and a number of civil attorneys that I consider to be just as good as those were.
And guess what? MOST attorneys, until they’ve been practicing for quite a few years, don’t know most of what’s in this book. They ought to; they need to, right out of the gate. But they don’t.
We all need all of this, from Day One.
Let me put it in personal terms.
Some of the principles (or “rules”) in this book I learned over 30 years ago, while I was still in law school and had just started clerking for real lawyers.
On the other hand several of the principles in here I only figured out in the last few months.
And guess what else. I’ll bet a lot of money (and I’m not a gambling man) that there are quite a number of other principles out there that I have yet to learn.
What’s in this book will, if you actively practice it, move you into the top ranks among practicing litigators, short-cutting your learning curve by at least 20 years.
This book will not:
- Teach you a lot of actual in-trial, Courtroom techniques. Those fall into a variety of areas, many of which have already been well covered by other experts in other books. See the Bibliography at the back;
- Teach you how to run your office as a business. There are several good books out there that already do that;
- Teach you how to hire and fire staff.
What this book will do is teach you invaluable tricks, tools and techniques and, most importantly, attitudes and perspectives, that I’ve learned out there (and that all good lawyers know), that will enable you to out-think and out-plan your opponent
- partly because you’ll understand him or her better than he does himself;
- partly because you’ll have an introduction to the pitfalls of human nature that most lawyers have to spend years learning through trial and error;
- but mostly because you’ll be looking at a bigger picture than he even knows there is.
The One Assumption of this Book
There is one assumption I’m making in what I say here:
that the hundreds of lawyers I’ve worked with or against, or just observed, are not atypical of all the thousands of others out there.
That is to say, that my experience is NOT an aberration.
After you’ve been practicing for about two or three years, look around you, re-review this book, and you’ll agree.