Litigators

Use Your Network To Win

Get out there, meet other lawyers, share your thoughts with them, and they will want to share their thoughts with you.

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While a good trial lawyer should be aware of overspecialization, a good trial lawyer also knows to rely on others who are better than her at certain things.

One of the proclaimed benefits of so-called full-service law firms is that lawyers who can handle any kind of matter or legal question are all under one roof (or, these days, at least a virtual roof). I’ve heard that the reality may not be quite how it actually works — that in bigger firms different practice groups can act almost completely independently of one another and that there is very little of the proverbial walking down the hall to your M&C colleague to ask her a particular question you don’t know as a litigator.

Reality at big firms aside, the point makes a lot of sense: a great trial lawyer should be an expert at identifying the strategic goals of a client who has a dispute or a potential dispute, and then winning for the client. But once you identify the goal and knowing what winning means, that is a very far place from saying you have figured out all the steps along the way. You may have a small-business client whose intellectual property is being hijacked by some big entity that is ignoring your client. But that’s very different than saying you have any idea what law might apply in a given industry, a given jurisdiction, or so forth.

While a lot of what we can do can be determined by investigation and research — in my example, read the relevant agreements, do the research on venue and substantive law, and so forth — if it’s a complicated mess of the kind that *my colleagues and I* often handle, that almost cannot be enough. I’ve written about the need to rely on your team. But to win you also need to rely on your network.

If you handle complex litigation like I do, you don’t handle routine matrimonial, bankruptcy, or patent prosecution matters. But each of those issues came up recently in matters of mine that on first blush may have seemed to have nothing to do with any of those areas. So did my colleagues and I investigate and research? Yes. But the work doesn’t end there. In each case, I called lawyers in my network who specialize in those areas, and they gave me insights that I think I never would have had even if I would have researched or investigated for dozens of hours more.

As a trial lawyer, you can contribute to your network the same way: that M&A lawyer may know in detail some regulation that applies to his clients’ work. But, again, that’s very different from knowing how a litigation resulting from the deal document might play out and what that could mean about what to include in the document right now. Indeed, we now routinely provide a trial lawyer’s review to deal with documents to try to minimize litigation later on.

If the big firm model works as it is supposed to, at least in this regard, and your work in a big firm, then great: you have your network. But you don’t need to work with 900 lawyers with offices in 22 cities. Just get out there, meet other lawyers, share your thoughts with them, and they will want to share their thoughts with you.

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As the father of several children, I appreciate the concept that “it takes a village” to raise a child right. It also takes a village to be a good trial lawyer: cultivate and then work with your network to win for your clients.

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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