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, [...]
Big Law Firms And The Crack Dealer Business Model
Four and a half years ago, I wrote a brief post criticizing Thacher Proffitt's hypocritical plan to fire their associates while giving under-performing partners the opportunity to "market" and "retool" themselves. It didn't work. A year later, the 160-year-old law firm was dead, a month after I had written about how large corporate firms were risky, transient businesses that will slough off the associates at the first sign of trouble. A year later, I came back to the subject of the broken social contract between young lawyers and their law firms, again noting that "firms show no loyalty to their young lawyers ... Continue Reading
How To Excel At The Basics As A Young Litigator
A year ago, I posted the Young Lawyer’s Guide To Legal Marketing. My thoughts haven't changed, i.e., find a mentor and then "build your practice the way you’d built a cake store or a plumbing business: through superior quality, exceptional customer service, making calls and wearing down your shoe leather. Get your name out there and make sure it’s associated with quality." And be generous with your time. Within that post I quoted another article with ten lawyer marketing tips for young attorneys, which began with "#1 - Excel at the Basics." Let's elaborate on how young litigators improve their "basics." 1. What Not To Work ... Continue Reading
The Benefits Of Being Generous With Your Time
Yesterday, a pizza. A few weeks ago, a bouquet of flowers. A few months ago, a pound of yerba mate with a calabash gourd and a bombilla. And a bunch of thank you notes. As a lawyer, I like to think that my work solves people's problems or at least makes things a little better, but the pizza, bouquet, and yerba mate were all gifts I received from people whose problems I did not solve. There's a nice take-out-only pizza and hoagies around here, and one day a few months ago the owner asked me, you're a lawyer, right? I ... Continue Reading
Chamber of Commerce Swings And Misses At Plaintiffs’ Lawyer Advertising
Just when I was going to write a substantive post about a recent New Jersey Supreme Court opinion, the leading propagandist for the Fortune 500, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, came in and released a new report about online advertising by trial lawyers. Tort reform and lawyer marketing in one article? I can't miss that. (An aside: don't kid yourself that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce cares the slightest bit about small business. The Chamber is the most anti-free-market lobbying group in the country, an organization dedicated to ensuring the biggest corporations in the country stay that way, squashing small ... Continue Reading
Stolidly Productive Humility: Instilling Discipline By Finding Fun
Yesterday Letters of Note, one of the essential reads of the Internet, posted a letter from David Foster Wallace, who had just completed but not yet published Infinite Jest, to Don DeLillo, asking for advice: Your note of 9/19 was heartening and inspiring and also made me curious about several things. I would love to know what changes in yourself account for "And discipline is never an issue (as it was in earlier years)." I would love to know how this education of the will took place -- would that you could assure that it was nothing but a matter of ... Continue Reading
The Real Risks Of Writing A Legal Blog
Over at the North Carolina Law Blog, Jim Dedman, proprietor of Abnormal Use (and friend of this blog) writes about a perceived risk of writing a law blog: that your opponents may take the things you write and use them against you in court. I agree with Jim entirely that there isn’t much reason to worry about that, not least because of the low odds that you will actually say something your opponent could really use against you in court. I believe in what I do as a lawyer and so my thoughts expressed on this blog are usually consistent with ... Continue Reading
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
