Litigators, Small Law Firms

Trying Cases While Running A Law Firm

Please welcome our newest columnist, John G. Balestriere, who will write about litigation and about building and managing a law firm.

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Ed. note: Please welcome our newest columnist, John G. Balestriere, who will write about litigation and about building and managing a law firm.

“You’re in our world now” is how an experienced litigator (and one of my closest friends), Partha Chattoraj, describes the reality faced by even the most sophisticated, intelligent, and, frequently, moneyed clients when they have to face a lawsuit.

And it’s true: most clients at least think that they can understand a lot of what many transactional lawyers do (even though our transactional brethren will most certainly disagree). But when things go wrong, and the client has to call the litigator, the client enters what seems like a bizarre world, one with its own logic, its own vocabulary, and with traditions that do not make sense to those outside the litigation world (and frequently not even to those in it).

Litigation 101

One of my new columns, Litigation 101, is going to be about that world. Every other week on Fridays, I will try to present ideas and stories regarding litigation in plain language for non-litigators, and, hopefully, some good ideas for litigators on how they can be better trial lawyers.

Like most litigators out there, I learned interesting things in my classes in law school and met what I’ll call some interesting people in those classes. But, with all respect to some very accomplished academics, I learned nothing about being a trial lawyer.

Becoming A Trial Lawyer

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I learned how to be a trial lawyer by second-seating trials as a paralegal in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office helping experienced lawyers take on organized criminals, and as a law intern in the Federal Defender’s Office assisting lawyers defending drug mules and low-level (and not generally bright) fraudsters. I learned a ton more about trial work when I returned to the DA’s Office as what we called a line assistant under Robert Morgenthau handling street crime, domestic violence, and sex crime cases. It was the 1990s and not quite what the old guys revered as the crime heyday of the 1980s – one experienced homicide assistant told me over a drink, “There was blood in the streets everywhere. It was amazing.” But we still each had way too much work. I generally put in 12-hour days at least 6 days a week, arraigning criminals when my family was having Thanksgiving dinner, and writing up cases against the newly arrested as the ball dropped in Times Square. And I felt like I was constantly prepping for trial or on trial.

Then I was in the right place at the right time, lucky enough to get a job in the early days of Eliot Spitzer’s Attorney General’s Office – years before any scandals, and a time when he and everyone around him wanted to take on seemingly everything. I did not try as many cases there, but got to investigate everyone from La Cosa Nostra, to street gangs, to corrupt police and doctors and lawyers, to Russian mobsters and ethically challenged Swiss bankers. It was fantastic and we had tons of resources to conduct investigations the way they should be done.

Somehow headhunters got my name and I left Spitzer’s office to work briefly in a litigation shop in Midtown Manhattan that specialized in cases I frankly knew nothing about when I started – securities class actions, antitrust suits, and consumer fraud matters. At the time, the rage was class actions against analysts who had sold off their stock recommendations in supposedly unbiased analysis pieces to help their investment banker colleagues get deals with the companies the analysts recommended (or, in one case I handled, get their kids into – this is the term the bankers used – a “prestigious”
Upper East Side pre-school). Our adversaries were what this website calls Biglaw and I finally learned how to write like a litigator.

Becoming an Entrepreneur

And then I made what had to be the most foolish decision in my legal career. I decided that since I had no clients, no client leads, a two-year-old boy, a six-month-old baby, and a recently widowed mom, the right thing to do was to open a law firm in
Manhattan.

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Somehow, ten years on, we’re still here and growing. I now work with more than a dozen of the absolute best trial lawyers, analyst paralegals, and chief of staff working in
any law firm anywhere, representing plaintiffs and defendants in any kind of dispute in New York or anywhere else.

Building and Managing a Law Firm

And that’s what my other column on alternating Fridays will be about — starting a law firm, hiring and training staff, handling clients, and anything else related to building and managing an entity that handles what our clients believe are incredibly important matters (and they are often, if definitely not always, right).

As the saying goes, if I had a nickel for every mistake I made in building and managing a law firm, I’d be a very rich man. At the least, I have some lessons to share.

I welcome any comments for column ideas, and, at least as much, criticisms from experienced litigators and managing lawyers. Simply email me at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

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