The Mission of the Effective Litigator is to Advance Claims and Defenses to Trial in order to Resolve Disputes as quickly and efficiently as possible. This Mission statement contains both the thing that Effective Litigators do (the what) which is Advance Claims and Defenses to Trial and the purpose for doing it (the why) which [...]
Missionality is commitment to Mission through dedication to cause. I was not Missional on the day that I graduated from law school. In fact, I was cynical about the practice of law as a profession. I’m not blaming my law school for making me that way, I’m just stating a fact. If you had asked [...]
To understand what a litigator does and why he does it, I went back to the drawing board—well, back is not really the right way to put it. Actually, I went to a place I had never been before, which was the general understanding of how this system of dispute resolution came into being in [...]
The third step in positive change is devising a solution to the Problem. Given that my Problem was that I was an ineffective litigator, I started by asking myself the most obvious question: what is an effective litigator. While the question was obvious, the answer wasn’t. At least it wasn’t obvious to me. At Kevin’s [...]
The second step in positive change is diagnosing the Problem. If you get the Problem wrong, you will only get the solution right by accident. Although PTE (Post Trial Exhaustion) and financial insecurity had caused me to recognize that I had a Problem, I knew that neither was the Problem itself, they were only symptoms [...]
All positive change begins with the recognition of a problem. A problem is an adverse circumstance that can and must be changed. If it can’t be changed, it’s not a problem but rather a condition that a person just has to learn to live with. Likewise, if it’s an adverse circumstance that could be changed, [...]
Trying cases before juries you come to realize that it’s not a good idea to appear to be too darn smart. Particularly when you are still young (say, less than forty), most jurors don’t want some smart guy making them feel even more miserable about their jury duty by rubbing their faces in his big [...]
I was in college when Prince’s song “1999” came out. At that point, the next millennium being seventeen years in the future, it was way too far away for my then nineteen year old brain to fathom. But those seventeen years went by really quickly. Before I knew it I was a thirty-six year old [...]
Unless you come from a family of lawyers or had happened to work in a law firm before you went to law school, all you would know of lawyers when you graduated would come from law school professors because they would be the only lawyers you would have known. That’s the way it was for [...]
The Litigator advances toward Trial to resolve Disputes Litigation is the process of advancing a Claim toward Trial so that Judgment can be rendered. Its purpose is to enable Litigators to resolve Disputes, which are the intractable legal controversies between parties. Above all, it is Resolution (and nothing else) that should be the objective, primary [...]
