Happy birthday to me. I spent mine trying a custody modification case in court. The other side was representing himself. Watching him made me start to think (again) why that is really not a good idea. If I have said it once, I will say it again: if you are actually going to try a case, hire a lawyer. No, I take that back: after watching the case before ours where it took one of the attorneys almost half an hour to prove a case for an uncontested limited divorce (which usually takes less than 10 minutes), I amend my previous comment to tell you to hire a good lawyer. Why should you hire a lawyer? Really, how hard can trying a case be? Actually, it's very hard, which is why lawyers go to law school for three years after college. It's not just knowing the substantive law that makes a lawyer necessary. It is understanding the nuances of two things: questioning and proof. A good lawyer knows how to ask a question. A good lawyer knows how to take an answer. A good lawyer knows how many questions to ask. There are tons of questions you can ask in any case. The trick is knowing what is important, how to elicit that information, and how to know when you've gotten it. It's a question of degree, and it's subtle. The ordinary person does not understand this concept. As a result, they ask 100 questions where 1 will do. They ask all the wrong questions. Plus, they push for the big admission which almost never comes. It's tedious, or as the judge in my case today put it, like beating a horse with a broom. The same is true of evidence. You can introduce every piece of paper ever written concerning your case. The judge will die of boredom, but you will not have forgotten anything. You also will not have proven anything that anyone will be able to follow. The trick here again is knowing what pieces of paper help your case and what don't. Don't even get me started on knowing what pieces of evidence are admissible and which are not. I don't have enough space here. The point is that the ordinary person has no clue. Today was a prime example. It took the opposing party an hour and a half to conduct a cross examination of my client that would have taken me 15 minutes or less. He repeated every question at least 5 times, in 5 different ways, hoping against hope my client would finally give him the answer he wanted. She wouldn't. The judge made her horse comment. There was a point when he made a good point, and even though I was representing the other side, all I could think was that he should stop there and sit down. He didn't. He continued and completely obscured his really good score. I would have shut up and moved on. It makes a difference to the judge, who after all is your audience, and that makes a difference to your client. Would you do brain surgery on yourself? Well, the courtroom is the lawyer's operating theater, so don't try your own case. It isn't pretty and the result is not what you'd want. Here in the Trenches.
No comments:
Post a Comment