I know I've said this before, but it's worth saying again. When you try a case, the law is whatever the judge says it is. It doesn't matter if the judge is dead wrong on the law, and will absolutely be reversed on appeal. What happens in the courtroom is directly related to what the judge says the law is. Let's go with an example. Today, I tried a custody case. In an absolutely unusual situation, there was a statute that definitively supported my client's position. There was no question of interpretation - the law was clear. The judge didn't care; the law didn't support what he wanted to do, so he interpreted it so it would. I argued until my face turned blue; it didn't matter. That meant we had two choices. First, we could build a record for appeal, which I started to do. Of course, we knew a few things: first, that the chance that the court would postpone enactment of any custody order while the appellate court decided the appeal is slim. Appeals can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months to decide, and during that time, the judge's order stands. Second, we knew that at that point the judge's custody order would be the status quo, and even if the appellate court reversed the trial judge, the chance of the trial judge then deciding to change custody to what it should have been after the children had been living under the other custody order, was slim. So, that left the second choice, which was to settle the case. We had no other choice, if we had any chance of crafting a custody arrangement that in any small way met the needs of the children and the parents. Settle we did. It was annoying in that we had tried for months to settle the case, but the other side refused to negotiate. In the long run, it was better for all that we settled, but it still rankles. It makes you wonder why we work so hard to prepare for trial and know the law, when it doesn't necessarily matter. All that time and money for nothing - it's not just the clients who get annoyed with that. Here in the Trenches.
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