I’m a trial lawyer for injured people and businesses at The Beasley Firm. Founded in 1958, we have recovered over $2 billion for our clients through hundreds of verdicts and settlements in excess of $1 million. We’re listed in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, U.S. News’s Top Lawyers, [...]
The Secret Behind The Dumb But Successful Lawyer
Lawyers, particularly young lawyers, often pride themselves on being more clever than one another, and so particularly resent other lawyers who don't seem to possess the same rapier wit and razor-sharp reasoning skills we claim for ourselves. Every lawyer knows that dimwit who they can't believe even passed the bar. The one with all those uninspiring and poorly-researched arguments in their briefs that never cite any relevant cases. The one who prefaces every argument to the court with "in layman's terms," as if the judge wasn't also a lawyer. The one who, despite being dumb as a stump, has a steady clip ... Continue Reading
Trial Lawyers As Storytellers, The Narratives Versus The Numbers
It is a truism among trial lawyers that compelling stories win cases. Jim Perdue, a trial lawyer in Texas, wrote a trial advocacy book literally titled Winning with Stories: Using the Narrative to Persuade in Trials, Speeches & Lectures. I’ve written several times before about studying the methods of the great storytellers of our times and of classical times and how juries respond to the emotions conveyed by counsel. The cynics might say we are doing nothing more than scheming to manipulate the emotions of jurors — like when a judge wrongly let defense lawyers drive an inadequate security / wrongful ... Continue Reading
More Pie
As I've written before, blogging is a pie eating contest in which the prize is: more pie. Elaborating a bit more: If you write well, you will get readers who will want you to write more. You will be contacted by those who run blogs, publish magazines and books, host radio shows, or organize CLEs with offers for you to contribute to those forums with your thoughts. Does that interest you, even though most of those pay nothing at all? If so, great! Blogging may be for you. I find contributions to other forums one of the more rewarding parts of ... Continue Reading
The Three Types Of Practicing Lawyer Blogs
SCOTUSBlog, the premier media source — internet, newspaper, anywhere — for Supreme Court news, has just undergone a revision, including sponsorship by Bloomberg Law. Scott Greenfield, the premier source for complaints about legal blogging, thinks something was lost in translation: Most disturbing is the resort to the formulaic approach of "ask the expert," and the expert invariably being someone with scholarly credentials so that their every utterance comes with built-in academic credibility. We see it in newspaper articles and on television news, the lawprof opining about things he's never personally touched and only seen from afar. We were knee deep ... Continue Reading
Attorney Work-Life Balance and the Stalwart Worker
If you follow any legal news or law blogs, you won't go long without another article on the concept of "work-life balance." I try to stay out of the debate because it usually goes nowhere, but I've even had a post on it before. Two recent posts inspired me to write about it again. First, the Young Lawyers' Editorial Board at The Legal Intelligencer: We were saddened to learn about a 32-year-old corporate associate who passed away in June of an apparent heart attack. Some commentators have suggested a connection between her premature death and her workload, which had been ... Continue Reading
Poet Laureate Philip Levine On Writing “Where The Poem Leads”
As a lawyer, you're either a conversationalist, a counselor, a writer, a storyteller, or some mixture of them all. I spend a fair amount of my time reading or writing pleadings and briefs, a fair amount of time either preparing a story (through discovery and depositions) or telling a story (at a court hearing or at trial), and the remainder of my time counseling clients. Consequently, I'm a sucker for any advice from writers and storytellers, and have previously referenced the methods of writers like David Mitchell and Philip K. Dick, as well as storytellers like Jay-Z and David Mamet. ... Continue Reading
Disruptive Innovation In Medicine And Law
There's been a lot of chatter on a couple law blogs about Rachel Rodgers, a 2009 law graduate with a knack for marketing herself. She's licensed in New York and New Jersey but practices out of a home office in Arizona, where she's not licensed; I'm not sure if it's a "virtual law office," because I don't know what that marketing term really means, but I consider it to be one. Let's reflect for a moment on how novel that sort of law practice is. Not for Rachel in particular — she certainly didn't invent telecommuting — but historically: until ... Continue Reading
Lawyer Branding And The Race For Actos Bladder Cancer Clients
Below is a post I wrote for my legal blog, which is ordinarily read by other lawyers and by others interested in the legal industry. If you were diagnosed with bladder cancer after using Actos and are reviewing your legal options, please see my Actos bladder cancer lawsuit page for patients. Personal injury law isn't like running an ordinary business, not even an ordinary law practice, because of the risk involved in taking cases. Defective drug and consumer products lawsuits exemplify both extremes of our work: the cases are enormously expensive to pursue and require a tremendous amount of attorney ... Continue Reading
Jose Baez And The Philip K. Dick Method Of Lawyering
I've written before about the lessons for lawyers of Jay-Z and Aristotle and what Atticus Finch really teaches about persuading a jury. I firmly believe that trial lawyers can learn as much from the great communicators — the entertainers, the philosophers, the writers — as they can from other lawyers and advocates. We may be advocates, but our audience is rarely made of advocates. First, a recap of the basics of trial advocacy. For plaintiff's lawyers, Rick Friedman and Patrick Malone wrote in Rules of the Road that the three greatest problems that plaintiffs faced in proving liability were complexity, confusion, and ambiguity. Reptile by Don ... Continue Reading
Fixing The Lawyer Surplus By Ditching 3L
Earlier this week the New York Times' Economix blog had a post called, "The Lawyer Surplus, State by State" about the (already widely-known-and-discussed) oversupply of recent law school graduates and newly-minted lawyers who just passed the bar exam. A quick aside: the Economix blog's subtitle — "Explaining the Science of Everyday Life" — is, in my humble opinion, misleading. As a basic matter, economics does not use the scientific method to test hypotheses under controlled conditions and is therefore not truly a "science." It's statistical and sociological, but not scientific. (For more, see this article or, for a contrary view, this article.) Moving ... Continue Reading
