Small Law Firms

It’s The Extra That Matters

A fine job isn’t enough to help your clients win.

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Most lawyers, most of the time, do a reasonably good job for their clients. That’s not enough. To win you need to do that extra bit all of the time.

A couple of my colleagues and I recently had a mediation in what I can characterize as one of our typical matters—typical in that emotions were high on both sides in what was supposedly a dispassionate dispute “only” about money but that was, like all “solely” business disputes, also about issues of fairness, and which involved a lot of emotion.

Our clients had other lawyers from a so-called good firm that had been representing them for quite a while before we took over. And those lawyers had done a fine job: our clients had some good claims, but, respectfully (and, again, typically) our clients had waited way too long before engaging lawyers and frankly had made some missteps in early negotiations which the clients handled by themselves without outside counsel. This didn’t give the lawyers who had been on the case a lot to work with, and if I had been hired simply to assess their work I would have said that they did a fine job.

However, a fine job wasn’t enough to help our clients win. Before the mediation we conducted an investigation into all the parties involved and found out some bad information about one of the individuals on the other side which proved crucial at the mediation. We also drafted a complaint for a possible individual suit against one of the principals on the other side for claims that the lawyers who originally represented our clients had not considered. While it’s tough to say what exactly gets people to settle, I think that the combination of the fruits of our investigation along with the threat of an individual suit is what helped us help our clients resolve the dispute quickly, and on favorable terms.

That kind of work—that extra—that helps you put your clients over the top is always what matters. Of course, everything else matters. We are not in a field where having the cute or clever idea wins, at least not by itself. Indeed, nothing helps a lawyer win like simply hard work—not having the original idea (though that can help, sometimes), not the judgment and wisdom that comes from experience (though, again, that can and definitely does help a lot), but simply putting in the time is what will lead to success more than anything else.

Yet, as much as I extol such boring old hours and months of hard work, I acknowledge that is the extra that often helps your client win, as it did with our clients in the mediation I mention above. The extra could be as simply as the extra work—having the extra authorities available for the oral argument, talking to those extra few witnesses, preparing the drafts of those discovery demands you may never use but which you bring up at the court appearance, and so forth. It might be forcing yourself to be creative—for example, considering any kind of counterclaims even though your clients are largely in a defensive position, or seeing if bringing suit somewhere else that no one had considered might provide some competitive advantage.

The lawyers we took over from in that mediation charge top big city big firm rates, and their clients pay them those rates; that’s at least some indication that they do a decent job, and, as noted, I could point to no glaring errors in their work after we were hired. But they just weren’t doing the extra. In many ways, they were managing the litigation rather than driving it. In that case in particular, I think that what they were missing was the extra focus. Our firm has been called scrappy, and that other firm would never be called that; but if scrappy means extra driven and extra hard working and extra creative, I’ll take it.

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Being a good lawyer is fine, but really not good enough. To do right by your clients, you need to be willing to put in the time and push yourself. That above and beyond effort and creatively is what helps you win.

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.

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