Litigators

Don’t Give Up. Do More.

Times are tough. Times get tough. Don’t give up. Do more.

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It seems that some believe we have already been cast into the furnace of fire. Certainly, you can read plenty of articles, daily, about the problems facing, for example, commercial real estate, restaurants, and, yes, law offices, which sound like biblical-style gnashing of teeth. Indeed, for us lawyers, a major publication lists news regarding belt tightening and layoffs and more at big firms. The piece is perhaps most startling, however, because it lists the firms alphabetically and a reader of the piece online who scrolls down quite a bit is still in the Bs when seeing which firms are on the list.

This is tough for a lot of people, including those in our profession. But that’s not an excuse to have a bad attitude and wallow in negativity. Indeed, for any of us that are fortunate enough to be healthy, this is an opportunity to do more, whatever more may be for us, and think of “more” in the highest terms.

I’m not trying to minimize how tough this has been. In my native New York City we saw, literally, the worst of it. My uncle manages a company that assists in guarding federal prisoners in private hospitals in the city. He told me that on his worst days he saw initially empty hospital rooms fill up, steadily, over the course of an hour or so with genuinely deathly sick individuals. And then those individuals died and when the room was completely full their bodies were moved to refrigerated trailers in the hospital parking lots so that the rooms could fill up, again, with the dying and eventual dead. And this is something he saw day after day after day at the worst points in April.

Restaurateurs throughout all five boroughs are suffering, with over a thousand closures, meaning many tens of thousands of jobs lost. And while it’s very popular to hate landlords, most are the equivalent of small businesspeople with a small number of rental units, and the lack of payment of rents brought on by the crisis means we could have massive foreclosures unless government steps up. As I wrote above, and just referencing my own city, times are tough.

Without minimizing any of this, times get tough in life and we have to deal with it and try to come back stronger and better. One morning that now seems like a billion years ago, I was in my apartment getting ready to head out. After hearing what sounded like a crazy car crash, I stuck my head out of my apartment window to see dozens running from a building down the block from me as glass and brick fell to the ground. Within an hour and a half I’d see much worse, including a plane going into the other of the Twin Towers, and almost 3,000 fellow New Yorkers would be dead. It devastated the city and certainly upended life in my Lower Manhattan neighborhood. Yet, that neighborhood now is better than ever, with more parks than any urban neighborhood I’m aware of, all kinds of mixed businesses (including our law firm), new schools, new theaters and artists, hundreds of small businesses, and tons and tons of kids who 20 years ago city planners never could have imagined would call this part of New York their home. We did more after things were tough.

During the toughest times, when everything, even houses of worship, were closed, New York’s bishop became essentially our parish priest. Cardinal Dolan’s Easter homily, given on April 12 — a day when nearly 700 would die in the city — touched on the life that comes from emptiness (this is not a religious column, so if you want to get to the most on-point part, start at 6:19). We can seek and make new life — as a nation, as a city, as a profession — from these tough times. As a lawyer, I wish it would result in a rethinking of our work, including our obligations to justice and the weakest in our societies. Without any bitterness, I don’t see that happening.

But, again, no need to be negative: we as individual lawyers can do more, whatever that more is. The Jesuits speak of the concept of “magis” or “more” (I’m really leaning into the Christian thing in this article) and that certainly applies when things are tough. How can we as lawyers be more, whatever that means? I don’t think it means making more money. Sure, for trial lawyers of all kinds it can meaning seeing cases that come from this; if people are to have disputes that result from the pandemic, I hardly think it’s terrible that lawyers seek to counsel them in those disputes, and maybe even fight for them.

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My focus, though, is how as lawyers in this tough time, which has kicked our butts as a country, and as a world, and as a profession, that we lawyers — those invested in and responsible for the rules that organize our country and world, and responsible for addressing disputes and problems when the rules are broken — can seek more of ourselves in this tough time.

My articles are always about winning for clients. If we can really seek how to do more of ourselves in this tough time, we can truly win, in the best definition of that word, for our 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 john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

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