Small Law Firms

Accept Your Thankless Job Or Get A New One

You can find a stage somewhere if you want people to applaud your work, and then you should quit your job as a trial lawyer.

By  
on

If you want adulation and praise for your work, be a rock star. If you want a tremendously rewarding job — but where you won’t frequently be on the receiving end of “thank you” — be a trial lawyer.

Purported wisdom gets dropped by lawyers who want to act like they are more experienced than they are, especially in what is frighteningly becoming the increasingly rare event of trying a civil case to a jury. One set of wisdoms includes a list of the kinds of cases you simply cannot win at trial as a plaintiff: defamation claims, malicious prosecution or vexatious litigation claims, RICO claims, or on behalf of a big company in a (again, supposedly) anti-defendant jurisdiction.

I think those are hard claims to win. But you can. My colleagues and I have won on such claims, as, I’m sure, other hard-working trial lawyers have. It may be tough — indeed, it is tough — but you can win.

However, when you win, do not expect your clients to present you with the modern equivalent of the Roman Triumph. If you’re representing a plaintiff, they expect to win because they believe that they were wronged and, if you’re at the stage I’m talking about — devoting a lot of time and maybe a lot of pressure to getting to and through a trial — they really were committed. Yes, the jury went their way, spectacularly, but weren’t they supposed to?

This can be tough for even a thick-skinned trial lawyer: you and your team not only worked spectacularly hard, and almost always for a very long time, you got a spectacular result, and in what might be one of those very difficult to win cases. OK, no feast at the Roman Forum, but maybe some hearty thanks? A box of chocolates?

That’s not the way it works. And if you want to be at this job for half a century or more, you had better learn that early. I’ve written before that you need to do this job for yourself and your team in order not be burned out. That principle can be particularly tough to keep in mind when you get what you know to be a great, maybe rare, and certainly not guaranteed (as nothing is guaranteed in dispute resolution) result. But that’s the job and that’s the way it goes. If you want praise for any kind of work, the opportunities are out there (my 10-year-old recently lamented at his school’s talent show, “They really clap no matter what you do. I could put my foot up to my cheek and they would clap at me. It’s ridiculous”; while on this earth only a decade, he has the soul of a crotchety 78-year-old paesan). Those opportunities are not found in trial work.

And that’s just fine, indeed, good. It’s fine because you get so many other rewards from doing what we do, if this truly is for you. The list is long but at the top of it is that it’s so damned fun: you’re dropped in the middle of some mess, whether it took place in seconds or has been brewing for years, and you have to rely on your judgment and skills and that of your team to fix that mess, somehow, within certain pre-determined rules, but ones which give you a lot of freedom and creativity. That’s fun. And the challenge to do it well is huge. To be a truly great trial lawyer hardly means only being good on your feet, though it definitely means that. It means tactically planning a winning strategy that can take years to execute, which requires fortitude, patience, and dedication. It means managing your team and resources well. It means being a good researcher, investigator, writer (of course), and a lot more. This is tough work and it feels great to do it well.

Sponsored

Not only is the lack of thanks fine, it is good. By that I mean it helps us get our job done. You don’t do the work to seek praise since no praise is forthcoming. That takes away the ego (somewhat, at least) and helps you focus on what a trial lawyer should always focus on: winning for the client. You have to figure out what winning is; you have to help the client determine what winning means to her or should mean to her. But then you focus on that.

You can find a stage somewhere if you want people to applaud your work, and then you should quit your job as a trial lawyer. But if you can get past that need and want to find decades of reward in a fun, funny, very hard job well done, keep the shingle out and get into a courtroom.

john-balestriereJohn 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.</strong

Sponsored

Topics

, , , , ,