Trial Lawyer Culture: The Ring

There are two basic cultural types involved with lawsuits: litigators and trial lawyers. Litigators dance. Trial lawyers fight.

The courtroom and the boxing ring are decisive arenas — there is a winner and a loser. The combat is public — whether an open public courtroom or a boxing match with an arena and television audience. Each of the participants has an entourage to assist, but whether in the courtroom or the ring, the combat is between two people on different sides. Only one wins.

Both the courtroom and the boxing ring require thorough preparation and training, remarkable endurance, strategic skill, and the ability to take a punch and to deliver a stronger one back.

Litigators are found in business firms of some size. They usually charge by the hour and are part of a litigation department. They typically have little or no experience picking juries, engaging in the give and take of voir dire with potential jurors, making opening and closing statements, or waiting, utterly alone, for the jury to announce its decision after a long, drawn out trial.

Litigation firms tend to avoid the courtroom and the real combat associated with it. Many hours are billed; paper is generated; depositions are taken.  The process lacks strategic focus, and often the case is not aggressively pushed to trial. Instead, after much time is expended and after a theater-like performance, the litigators sit down, settle the case, and go home. The true potential of the case was not achieved because the possibility of going to trial was not seriously accepted or desired.

By comparison, trial lawyers start out differently than litigators and are cut from a different cloth. Typically bright with good schooling; they usually are not part of a big firm. Their origins are scrappier and more from the street. They began by defending criminal defendants or representing injured people in personal injury cases. They have selected juries and waited for the verdicts themselves. They like to fight, they enjoy the fearfulness and challenge within the ring, and they are determined to win. Fighting and winning for a client are a trial lawyer’s ultimate satisfactions.

The satisfaction also derives from winning artfully: without bravado, treating the opponent with appropriate respect, and having the strategic sense to know when victory has been achieved.

Not all cases go to trial; in fact, few do. But the full potential of a case will not be realized if there is no lawyer willing to enter the ring on behalf of the client’s cause.

Bob Schuster is a trial lawyer and Robert P. Schuster, P.C., is a trial lawyer firm.