Be A Real Trial Lawyer: Be A Generalist
Be that unsexy sounding generalist so you can fight and win for your clients.
As our profession becomes more and more chopped up into parts, the advice to develop a niche comes from all corners. The advice is wrong. Train yourself to be a general trial lawyer so you can be a great trial lawyer.
I recently had an exchange with a potential client where the client asked a question very similar to those new clients often ask which was, in short, had our firm ever handled a matter like his before. From my perspective, the answer was an easy yes: it was a messy, international business dispute with a complex set of facts that had gone on for years, and where, at this point, there was a lot of finger pointing and high emotions all around. For my colleagues and I, that’s the kind of dispute we work on every day.
However, that is not how the prospective client framed the matter. Instead, his question was more like, “Have you ever handled an oil and gas case involving Canadian shale with a minority business partner based in Ukraine?” The matter did not actually involve oil and gas, nor Canadian shale, nor an entity based in Ukraine. But the client presented the case as of a type that was peculiarly unique, as if there is a tiny, tiny niche for lawyers who focus on representing businesses in disputes in that particular industry only in a certain country, and he wanted one of those niche lawyers.
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You can understand the client’s question — clients do not think in terms of breaches of fiduciary duty, nor whether a case would proceed in federal court or state court or even arbitration. Non-general counsel clients (and even many general counsel) think in terms of industries and geography. Thus, they look for lawyers who they believe have experience for their particular definition of a dispute.
This view — that there are lawyers out there who have incredibly focused practice areas — is consistent with a many-decades-long trend of specialization in the legal field. And when we graduate what certainly seems like way too many young (and without a job at graduation) lawyers year after year, when the traditional billing model is constantly questioned, and when there is at least the talk of outsourcing legal work outside the country, it is easy to see the appeal in being a specialist: you are one of the only ones who can do whatever it is specialists in your field do. You can be the one that handles those Canadian oil shale cases. There are clients who will need you.
Resist the temptation to think that this is the way to succeed as a lawyer, since it is not. I do not mean that those specialists will not necessarily find work, or that they might be put out of work when their specialization is no longer needed (though the latter was certainly true for those boatloads of lawyers a decade or so ago who became “experts” in creating, packaging, and selling mortgage-backed securities). I mean that if you seek to hone your skills in such a focused way, you will also wrongly narrow it and not be a great lawyer that can serve your clients.
Holmes long ago taught us that it is not our acumen which makes us great lawyers but getting our butts kicked and living life. His actual quote may be slightly different. But his point is as clear now as it was when he gave his lecture nearly a century and a half ago: the law demands that we be experienced, that we develop judgment born of that experience. If the experience is all one way, in one of those tiny niches, we will not develop our judgment as well. We will not hone the full set of skills we need to be all around great trial lawyers. We will not have diverse enough a set of experiences to be able to counsel our clients (who are similar, but in the end all different from one another, no matter how they view their case) with prudential judgment.
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I told that prospective client I could not pretend to be an expert in the niche he was looking for. I could tell him, though, that I had handled all kinds of crazy disputes, in dispute fora all around the country and even the world, with all kinds of clients, with every set of facts you could imagine, and that his messy business dispute was the kind that I handled every day. It may not be what he originally wanted to hear, but in the end he did hire us, and not because we could recite the history of pricing for Canadian shale. He hired us because in the end, he realized we were the all-around lawyers — non-specialist, complete generalist trial lawyers — who could counsel him and fight for him.
Be that unsexy sounding generalist so you can fight and win for your clients.
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 [email protected].
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