Friday, June 30, 2006
I was making toast for breakfast, and I asked Dave, “Would you like peanut butter and honey, peanut butter and jam, jam, butter and honey, butter, or peanut butter?” He started laughing before I’d even finished. I guess it shows how I stress out about making perfect choices and, by extension, want to provide every possible choice to others.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Today instead of working I attended a one-day seminar called “Litigation Skills for Legal Staff.” I was a little wary since the marketing materials made the class sound like it would benefit paralegals and legal assistants (is there a difference?) more than attorneys, but like any clever education service, it said the class is also designed for lawyers. Since I’m a young lawyer who will probably be “working alongside a senior attorney in litigation,” I asked to take the class and the partners approved it. I’m not sure it was the best $319 the firm ever paid, but I did get some benefit I suppose.
The attendees were nearly all women, and all looked to be the assistant-possibly-former-legal-secretary type. I know, that’s snotty of me. I was probably one of two female attorneys there; the other attorneys were male. Lets just say, the two blondes on my left were talking nonstop during a break when they erupted into “omg, no way, that’s so awesome!” upon discovering they both used the same Bally’s personal trainer at some point.
It started out with a certified legal assistant (there’s actually a degree for these things) called Michele Pfeiffer, I kid you not. She was not a good speaker, and unfortunately in this day and age, that decimates most listeners’ attention span no matter how useful the material. Her handout, the first of the series given to us in a spiral-bound book, was this awful outline where none of the headings were bolded or otherwise distinguished from the rest of the text. I mean, there was a letter or number before certain words, but not all the time. Law school made me more of a stickler for clearly presented information, and outlines are our specialty.
She talked about discovery and the different checklists of evidence to obtain that every paralegal should go by. Apparently there are several choices of software big firms use to keep track of all the correspondence and evidence that comes in – I caught a couple names – Concordance, and Summation. Though I yearn for the kind of efficiency available via OCR and document review software that sahn educated me about, I really doubt our firm will be using that in the near future.
I did learn that the statute of limitations for personal injury lawsuits is now 2 years. It used to be you had 1 year to file suit after discovering you’ve been injured by someone’s negligence. I also learned that data stored in your Palm Pilot or cell phone SIM card is discoverable (i.e. can be subpoenaed to be turned over to the other side). She also made a big deal of Business and Professions Code section 6450 et seq. that defines a paralegal as someone who is given work by an attorney and only that. Paralegals are not allowed to solicit work from clients. They’re not even supposed to say things as basic as “the statute of limitations is 2 years” to a client because that’s giving legal advice. I think it’s a good thing. We didn’t go to law school and sit for the bar for nothing. There was this shady law firm somewhere in LA that was busted because the State Bar found out the lawyer whose name appeared in the ads was never there and it was just some guy doing all the work.
Michele Pfeiffer’s voice (she introduced herself without so much as an acknowledgment of her famous moniker) was kind of droning, but it was nothing compared to the guy who talked about pleadings. He and the other 3 attorneys who taught were all from the same firm, a personal injury law firm in Santa Ana. They all had varying levels of public speaking skill. The pleadings guy literally droned. The worst part was that his “handout” were model complaints his firm had filed that he went over line by line, literally, like “make sure you check this box” and I don’t even know what because I started reading National Geographic.
The guy who talked about motions was good – sort of what you’d imagine a trial lawyer to be – energetic, talks fast, and self-assured. He did a great job with a very technical area. Plus he used PowerPoint. The main lesson I got was that from the very beginning of the case, whenever you talk or write about the facts, use it as an opportunity to advocate. You could describe the plaintiff as a father of four, or uninsured with pre-existing injuries he lied about. You could call the defendant a prominent provider of live-saving pharmaceuticals, or a large multinational corporation. Once you establish your 2-3 sentence nutshell of the case, use it as a mantra, and it will affix itself in the judge’s mind, and the next time he sees pleadings from your case he’ll think “oh yeah, that one with the poor kid who got messed up by the drunk driver.”
The most interesting speaker was the senior partner of the firm who talked about trial preparation. He kept it big picture and gave very relevant examples from the firm’s work. He actually represented the girl who was mauled by a mountain lion in an Orange County park, the woman whose face was nearly torn off when a nylon rope that was supposed to hold back a boatride snapped at Disneyland, and the family of the teen who died (died or severely hurt, I’m not sure) riding Thunder Mountain also at the “happiest place on earth.” He had an easygoing presence and barely referred to his notes, which really held our attention.
He said trials are just another form of communication, and nobody is born with trial skills – you practice them. It’s about collecting information and organizing it, then distilling it to its essence, keeping in mind that the way people learn has become very different due to technological advances and media. Think about it – TV shows about lawyers are able to depict an entire trial in one hour, and viewers understand it. That’s what today’s jurors expect. They want the info digested and organized and presented to them on a silver platter. They want color exhibits and PowerPoint and audio-video. They want entertainment. I was starting to think, this is bad news for lawyers, but the speaker thought the opposite. It’s good because it forces lawyers to distill the case.
Then he showed off three beautiful exhibits they’d used in real trials. I was quite impressed. The one for the Thunder Mountain ride case was two timelines spanning 30 years: “A Track to Disaster” showing the opening of the ride and all the problems Disney had with it throughout the years; and “A Path to Hope” showing the parents of the teen at their wedding, the birth of the ill-fated kid, and photos of family events. The two timelines eventually converged at the right side of the exhibit on the date of the accident. It was creepy how the timing matched up almost exactly, like the opening of the ride within a year of their wedding. But very effective for weaving a story.
The best prepared speaker talked about mediations and how to prepare for them. I liked him because he seemed to speak more to the attorneys. He had an incredibly organized PowerPoint that contained a proactive approach and case study of the types of exhibits you can use to persuade the other side your position is right. It sounded like a way to force the attorney to get certain things done by a certain time. It’s like any other discipline – one you figure out a trick to force yourself to do it, it’s not as hard.
The last speaker was horrible. The topic was Ethical Considerations for the Legal Assistant. The paralegal is stuck between a rock and a hard place with clients or opposing counsel badgering them for information, yet they should be information gatherers, not givers. That was the exact language my former boss (the one that made me cry) would use when rebuking me for not being a good clerk. Basically, the role requires that you take but never give. That’s just not something I want to deal with.
The only interesting thing that came out of it was an ethical dilemma. Say a personal injury client has represented that she is so hurt, she can’t function independently. The paralegal is in a situation where s/he finds out that the client intends to drive herself to court. Opposing counsel calls and somehow deceives the paralegal into divulging this damaging fact. Opposing counsel hires someone to videotape the client leaving her house, getting into her car, and driving to court. Paralegal’s firm finds out and withdraws from representing the lying client. On the one hand, the paralegal breached attorney-client confidentiality and did not fully represent the client’s interests (I mean represent as an extension of the attorney’s authority). On the other hand, the firm never would have found out their client was lying and that they had no case if it weren’t for the slip up. Well, I never found out what the ultimate lesson or solution was, because the lawyer switched topics.
I came away with mixed feelings. Listening to these lawyers talk, I was reminded of my days doing fluffy quasi-legal work as a personal injury clerk. It’s also taking me one step closer to signing up for Toastmasters. I really need to work on my fear of public speaking. It’s not healthy and it’s so limiting. And it got me strangely excited about litigation, though lately it has been a relief not to be doing it. Law is a jealous mistress.