Latest / Coopers' Code / Tears, smiles, and trials with Clement Glynn

Transcript

Tears, smiles, and trials with Clement Glynn · Coopers' Code

0:00
I think the role of the trial lawyer is to be translator.
0:02
You know, you find a bunch of stuff that people tell you is
0:07
important and then you distill it, figure out what works, how
0:10
does it connect thematically? And most important, what are the
0:14
two or three take away points that you want the jury to latch
0:17
onto? Because it's all they're going
0:19
to take. In my view, the juries are
0:23
they're looking at big, tall mountains.
0:25
They're not looking at the hills.
0:27
That's what they're going to remember.
0:28
And so as a trial lawyer, you simplify.
0:32
Not oversimplify, but simplify so that it's easily understood
0:37
and easily retained juries. I think you get it.
0:40
If it's given to them correctly, they'll get it.
0:42
They'll get it right. Howdy, and welcome to the show.
0:47
Cooper's Code focuses on legal issues and noble practitioners,
0:51
distilling wisdom so we all achieve the best results for our
0:54
clients. I'm Miles Cooper and I'm
0:56
thrilled to share this conversation with Clement Glenn,
0:59
known to colleagues as Clem. Clem founded Glenn Finley in
1:03
1991 following an 18 year career at what was then Pillsbury,
1:07
Madison and Sutro. He's tried more than 50 jury
1:10
trials in state and federal courts in California, Florida,
1:15
South Carolina, Colorado and Hawaii.
1:17
His representative clients in everything from product
1:19
liability, toxic torts, employment, commercial disputes,
1:23
business torts, real estate, intellectual property, oil and
1:26
gas to eminent domain. He's been inducted into the
1:30
American College of Trial Lawyers and the American Board
1:32
of Trial Advocates. His clients appreciate his
1:35
practicality and ability to resolve cases efficiently and to
1:38
try them when that is not possible.
1:41
So please sit back, enjoy the stimulating conversation with
1:45
Club. Welcome to show Club.
1:50
Good to be here. I'm going to start kind of where
1:53
I, I typically deal with a little bit about your
1:54
background, where you grew up and and how you found yourself
1:58
on on the path to the law. Born in a city a lot more of us
2:03
than people think and lived on Divisadero in those days and
2:08
then some point ended up in the Richmond District. 10th and Lake
2:14
Star of the Sea got burned out of 10th and Lake and moved to
2:20
20, but literally by a fire and went to 21st and Lake and
2:25
transferred to Saint Monica's and was headed for either
2:28
Washington or SI. And then my family moved to
2:32
Marin County. And so I ended up at Centerville
2:35
High School, which turned out to be a wonderful part of my life
2:38
and where I met my wife and played sports and played school.
2:43
And we had just wonderful teachers that were all knew a
2:48
bunch of crop had come in. They were energetic, really
2:52
talented and got a good education and good
2:56
socialization. And that was 61 to 65.
2:59
So that is Vietnam was happening, but it wasn't
3:04
happening as it would start to really happen a few years later.
3:08
We were aware of it, but being in the suburbs in particular, it
3:12
was, there was some insulation and, and then by senior year it
3:16
was really starting to become a part of everyday consciousness
3:21
and the the nightly news with the body bags and all that
3:26
stuff. So the family was highly
3:28
dysfunctional. And I was one of six, the only
3:31
one to graduate high school and certainly the only one to go on
3:35
to advanced education. But as a result, I had no role
3:38
models, certainly no lawyer role models.
3:43
And I was in my senior year. Times have changed.
3:47
And one of my friends said to me, where are you going to?
3:50
Where are you going to college? And I said, I don't know, I
3:53
hadn't thought about it. And she said, why don't you go
3:56
to SF State? They've got a good journalism
3:57
program. Because I was big on journalism
3:59
in those days, said OK, So I went to SF State.
4:03
It was OK. But it was the the society was
4:08
very much in tumult. The students strike at State,
4:11
which many people will remember, obviously the Civil Rights Act
4:17
and the Voting Rights Act had just come online.
4:20
And so the activity in the civil rights arena was very, very
4:26
intense. And state was the scene of lots
4:32
of stuff, violence and this and that and literally was going to
4:38
school or going to classes, walking through mounted tax
4:41
squad officers who were there to maintain law and order.
4:44
And it was. So I was on the paper and it was
4:49
a very interesting time to be in that role, but somehow I made my
4:55
way through there. I did take a year off guess I
4:58
went into the Army Reserves and two months after I got married
5:02
in 1968, I was put on active duty.
5:06
My wife wasn't thrilled. Did you end up getting sent to
5:09
Vietnam? No, we, we in the reserves, you
5:12
know, you're subject to being activated and called and I, I
5:15
never was activated, thank God, but did miss a year of school,
5:21
which I the being in basic training and all of that was
5:25
actually a very good experience, very humbling experience.
5:28
You find out how unimportant you are as an individual and came
5:33
back was in my senior year once again figuring I would be a
5:37
journalist, whatever that was going to mean.
5:40
And it occurred to me that wasn't a good career plan.
5:44
So I decided, based really on a television program, that maybe
5:49
being a lawyer would be interesting.
5:51
And there are crossovers. You get to write in both
5:54
professions. You get to ask questions in both
5:56
professions. But in the law, I can make
5:58
people talk to me. And I like that because when I
6:00
thought of being a lawyer, it was all about litigation.
6:03
I didn't know anything else. I went to my wife, my young
6:06
wife, and I said I was thinking about going to law school.
6:09
What do you think? She says do it.
6:11
And that was the extent of our conversation.
6:13
So I ended up applying to Bolt Stanford and Hastings.
6:19
Stanford rejected me by return mail.
6:21
Bolt wait listed me and then quickly rejected me.
6:24
And then Hastings accepted me. And I'm glad it worked out that
6:29
way because the I thought the education at Hastings was much
6:32
more practical. And we had some fabulous
6:35
teachers, over 65 club. They call the people who had
6:41
been giants in the law and who got retired mandatorily.
6:47
They would come to Hastings, including Prosser and others
6:50
that are, you know, kind of household names for lawyers.
6:54
So I did that and I did well somehow.
6:58
And the first interview I had for a job was with a firm called
7:03
Pillsbury Medicine and Sutro. They liked me.
7:06
I didn't think they did, but they liked me and it got offered
7:10
a job as a summer clerk. Meanwhile, the other two
7:13
interviews I had signed up for before that offer came through,
7:16
I went through with, one was PG&E, which rejected me, and
7:22
they sent a guy who was barely older than I was and he wanted
7:25
to talk about how unusual my name was.
7:28
That didn't go over well with me.
7:29
And then the other was the the absolute worst one.
7:32
It was the US State Department. And by the time of that
7:36
interview, I had essentially accepted at Pillsbury.
7:38
But I went through the interview, I figured I owed it
7:41
because the timing was tight. And I just went casual.
7:44
And the guy from the State Department had the perfect
7:46
collar and the collar pin. And he took one look at me and
7:50
said, oh, crap. And we had a very nice brief
7:54
discussion. So I went to work at Pillsbury,
7:56
was there for 18 years, had a very good time there and and got
8:01
a lot of trial experience because of my own personality
8:04
and just the luck of the draw. And then became a partner, of
8:08
course. And then 18 years into that, the
8:11
call of the wild. I want to unpack your the 18
8:15
years at at Pillsbury a little bit because I know for a lot of
8:20
people listening to this program, getting trials, how one
8:25
got trials, how one got the confidence to be in trial, those
8:29
those are skills that that some people are either learning or
8:32
are lifelong learners learning. How did you find yourself in a
8:36
position at Pillsbury where you were getting out to trial?
8:39
Again, by luck, I was assigned to in those days was called the
8:43
Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company Group and PAC Bell.
8:49
That was before the breakup of the Bell system.
8:52
So it was one of the operating companies under AT&T and that
8:57
was my client, my sole client. So every day for however many
9:01
hours I've worked, and that was my client.
9:04
And until the California Public Utilities Commission disallowed
9:09
it in a rate case, all you put was PT and T general 8 point O.
9:14
That was my timesheet. On the plaintiff side, you don't
9:17
have these issues so much unless you're in a fee case.
9:20
But on the defense side, you know, we're we're grinders.
9:24
We have to put all of our time down and nowadays in 10th of an
9:27
hour increments, which is the least pleasant part of
9:31
practicing law. So the telephone company being
9:34
what it first of all, it's a target.
9:37
Utilities are generally not liked for sometimes good reason,
9:40
sometimes for no reason. And they had cases from soup to
9:45
nuts, from little tiny cases to very, very big cases.
9:50
And so because of that, I got a whole variety of cases, personal
9:55
injury, property damage, contract, whatever that were
9:59
small to moderate and was given a lot of autonomy and running
10:02
the cases. I had great people.
10:04
I worked with really wonderful people.
10:07
I think in the first year or two, I was convinced that I
10:10
didn't belong there. The there were some people there
10:13
that were just giants in the law and, you know, a lot of Ivy
10:18
League and blue blood and all this stuff.
10:20
And I had kind of a, you know, blue collar working family, San
10:28
Francisco State, you know, how did I get into Pillsbury with,
10:31
you know, my credentials? But then after about two years
10:34
or so, I started thinking, you know what?
10:37
I got tools that I can use, that there's people here who don't
10:40
know about, they don't know the street, they don't know things
10:43
that they didn't have to struggle.
10:44
And I always, I've always believed that people have to
10:47
struggle in life in some particular way.
10:52
It doesn't matter. They build muscles that other
10:55
people don't build. And you know, in our business,
10:59
our profession, it's highly stressful.
11:03
We, you need to be able to not go to pieces.
11:07
And so if you've been through adversity, if you've been
11:10
through things that test you, I think you have often, I mean,
11:15
you can get broken by it, but assuming you survive it, you're
11:19
able to navigate it better than people who've never really had a
11:25
tough one to deal with, you know.
11:27
So I see that in people even to this day, you see some terribly
11:32
smart, well educated people who are kind of useless when it
11:36
comes to hard stuff. You mentioned having a
11:39
dysfunctional family, you mentioned the fire.
11:42
Was there anything that you feel in particular that you felt
11:46
helped you? The positive struggles I guess
11:52
would be a way of putting it. I think all of the struggles are
11:55
positive if you survive them. You know, the dysfunction came
12:00
from, you know, my parents were divorced before I had memories
12:03
of my father. My mother was borderline
12:06
personality disorder, undiagnosed, but she was.
12:10
And so I tell people I was raised by a terrorist, and every
12:15
day was a new day to survive. Yeah.
12:21
I won't tell you the particulars, but I there were,
12:24
there were lots of things. And you know, the good news is,
12:27
is she, she didn't die that many years ago.
12:29
She lived in 96 proving again, you know, only the good die
12:33
young, but she was, I forgave her and and, you know, figured
12:39
it out and, and all of that. So I wasn't scarred that way.
12:43
But I mean, she had major impact on helping me develop survival
12:48
skills. One of the things that comes
12:49
from that is you can compartmentalize, and in our
12:53
profession, being able to compartmentalize can be really
12:55
good. Doesn't mean you always sleep at
12:57
night well, but it does mean you can maintain unpleasant things
13:02
in the background if you have to.
13:04
Were you the oldest? Youngest.
13:06
I was one of six, I had two above, 3 below.
13:09
I was the only boy. And so as a result, they could
13:13
hit me and I couldn't hit the and they were encouraged to so.
13:19
So part of his luck of the assignment and part of it is
13:21
personality. Because in the big firm in
13:23
particular, people are culturally worried about taking
13:27
a loss and because it may be held against them.
13:32
I think in smaller firms where people all are trying cases,
13:36
that doesn't happen the same way.
13:38
I mean, unless somebody took the loss because they really did
13:40
something horrible. But you know, one of the things
13:43
I like about Aboda, for example, or the American College, these
13:47
are people who have something in common with, you know, you have
13:50
that shared background of knowing what it's like, not just
13:55
judging people who are involved in it, but you're involved in it
13:57
too. And it's one of the reasons I
14:01
end up liking lawyers is because of that common background and
14:05
that shared life experience that we have.
14:08
And that's true regardless of whether we're plaintiff side,
14:11
defence side or, you know, if you go in the trenches, then you
14:15
understand. And so I was willing to and I
14:18
didn't, I wasn't afraid to lose and I didn't lose a lot in the
14:23
early days. Over time, you know, you pick up
14:26
a fewer. I've, I've won cases I should
14:29
never have won and I've lost cases that I thought I had won.
14:34
But my personality was such that I was willing to take risk.
14:37
And by the time I was a fifth year associate, I was involved
14:43
in a very big case that had implications across the entire
14:47
bail system, Equal Pay Act and job evaluation issues and
14:53
discrimination issues. And it was really a big deal.
14:57
And the on that case, I was second chair, which was unusual
15:01
for me. Thank God and the partner who
15:04
led it suddenly, while the case was pending, decided to lateral
15:08
to Morrison Forrester, in those days known as Morrison
15:12
Forrester, Holloway, Clinton and Clark, those of younger
15:16
generations have never had the treat of that musical name.
15:19
I. Think Mofo is the way that that
15:21
firm is differently referred to. Yeah, it's it's Mofo now, but
15:24
used to be Morrison, Forrester, Holloway, Clinton and Clark.
15:28
So he goes and Pillsbury let me run, and I took it to trial for
15:33
Bill Schwarzer and got a good result.
15:39
It used to keep me awake because I just knew if I took a loss for
15:43
reasons that aren't worth going into, it was going to have
15:45
implications all across the Bell System throughout the United
15:49
States. And I just thought, so why they
15:51
let me do it? They saw something, I guess,
15:53
that I was willing to do it. They thought I could do it.
15:56
And then I had. I've tried, you know, a lot of
15:58
cases and tried a number there and then 19 years into it for
16:04
all sorts of reasons that are probably boring, the call of the
16:08
wild called and I thought, I'm pretty good at this.
16:11
Why don't I start my own firm and then I don't have to be on
16:14
any more committees. And so I did, and we, because
16:22
for a while, I guess I skipped a step for from 86 to 91,
16:28
Pillsbury had opened up an office in Walnut Creek and I got
16:31
to manage that. And we were about 10 or 11 or 12
16:35
lawyers, but we had the big firm name.
16:37
We had artillery we could call in if we needed it.
16:41
We didn't do that much. We had our own, you know, we
16:43
were able to put down fire. So it was a great thing.
16:47
And then when we left, I left with a couple other lawyers.
16:51
We, we started a firm in Walnut Creek and we've always been
16:55
about that size. We've stayed about that size,
16:57
but, and I've done that since 1991.
17:02
And obviously the clients I was exposed to while at Pillsbury
17:07
and the things I learned there allowed me to do that because
17:13
otherwise I would have been leaping into an abyss with no
17:16
rational hope of doing anything. But I had clients that like me,
17:20
came with me and and then, you know, I've kept trying cases in
17:26
the new firm. So it's been a good ride.
17:29
If you're enjoying what we're doing here with Cooper's code,
17:31
please help us extend our reach by giving us a five star review
17:34
on Apple Podcasts and consider sharing an episode with a
17:36
friend. Additionally, we want to know
17:38
who you want to hear on the show.
17:39
Have an interview suggestion? E-mail us at podcast at Cooper's
17:42
dot Law as you started got the the new firm underway.
17:49
Are you a generalist? Are there particular types of
17:51
cases that you tend to handle more of?
17:53
A generalist in litigation. I mean, when people ask what do
17:57
you do, I usually say what I don't do because, you know, the
18:00
PT and T days were that was it. It was the generalist and some
18:05
very arcane stuff under the Public Utilities code, but other
18:08
general stuff that transfers over.
18:11
I did want to ask you about telephone directories because I
18:14
understand one of your trials was a telephone directory case.
18:17
And for those who don't know, there used to be a large, heavy
18:22
thing called the telephone directory that had all sorts of
18:25
information in it and people would pay to advertise in it.
18:29
And as I understand it, one of the jobs you had it at least for
18:33
one trial involved that situation.
18:38
Actually that was a steady part of our arcane part of our
18:42
practice, but called directory error cases.
18:45
And so every year the telephone company would publish the
18:49
telephone book and there were the white pages which had
18:52
residential one line listings. And then there were the Yellow
18:56
Pages where people could purchase ads, display ads of
18:59
various sizes and they're dealing with thousands and
19:04
thousands of entries. And invariably there would be
19:08
errors, either errors of complete omission or errors of
19:13
of a different type, maybe misplacement.
19:16
And so the very first case I tried was a directory error
19:20
case. And there was a tariff that
19:22
protected the telephone company. So if they if they were guilty
19:25
of ordinary negligence, they owed nothing.
19:27
It could harm the business because in those days, unlike
19:30
the Internet days, telephone directory wasn't an advertising
19:34
source for people. That's how you found, you know,
19:36
plumbers. And if you could prove gross
19:39
negligence, then you could recover your damages up to, but
19:43
not exceeding $10,000. And so I went out on a case
19:48
where a psychiatrist, which is a medical Doctor Who is listed
19:53
under psychologists, and he was furious and he went down the
19:59
next year and hand carried his ad through the process, insisted
20:02
you people messed me up and I'm not.
20:05
So he did that and they managed to completely omit him that
20:08
year. So he shouldn't have gone down.
20:11
And so we go out and try the case and I win the person on the
20:17
other side, the law on the other side.
20:18
He was pretty young, too. I think I mentioned to you in an
20:21
earlier conversation I, you know, I just felt exhilarated.
20:24
I want to know. And this is great.
20:26
I knew I could do this stuff. And I, I next morning, I'm at
20:30
the office, you know, strutting around the hallways and making
20:34
sure everybody saw me. And I'm exaggerating a little,
20:37
but probably not completely. And my secretary comes in and
20:40
says, judge so and so is on the line.
20:41
And it was a trial judge. And my reaction was, damn, I'm
20:46
in the club. The judge is going to call me to
20:48
tell me what a wonderful job I did.
20:50
Oh, I just love this. And you get on the phone.
20:53
Good morning, Your Honor. Mr. Glenn.
20:56
Judge. So and so.
20:57
Yes, Sir. Good.
20:58
Good to hear from you. I have two things to tell you.
21:01
Yes, Sir. I couldn't wait.
21:04
First, it's possible to be overly prepared for a case.
21:11
So he's telling me I overdid it a little.
21:14
And then and then And second, never, ever, ever address a
21:19
juror by his or her name. And because I didn't, you know,
21:24
we didn't have litigation training in those days.
21:26
We didn't we, I learned by doing.
21:29
I had in a closing argument said, well, Mr. Cooper, how
21:32
would you yourself feel if it, you know, and and of course I
21:38
know now and knew from that moment on you don't do that.
21:41
You don't get to talk to them as buddies or people that at the
21:45
bar with you. That was the sort of illustrious
21:50
start of it all. But that was when I'll never
21:52
forget. So was over preparing a, was
21:56
that just a one off there or was that kind of a theme for you in
21:59
terms of your ability to prevail on cases?
22:04
Any trial order knows that preparation is the secret, not
22:10
moments of divine inspiration. Every now and then we get one
22:14
where we say I'm going to go there.
22:17
But you know, we're taught if you're going to cross examine
22:19
somebody, know the answer, be able to prove what it is.
22:22
Don't don't hope you can get an answer.
22:24
And I think what the judge was commenting on is, you know, just
22:28
that I overkilled it. It wasn't that the amount of
22:31
preparation I had done as much as the amount of his time I took
22:36
on a simple case. And you know, I had no
22:41
perspective. I had, no, I just knew I wasn't
22:43
going to leave any argument behind.
22:46
I was going to go for it. And he put me in my place.
22:51
And you know that you. You we've all, if we try cases,
22:55
we get bumps and bruises and we say the next time I don't want
22:59
that one again. I remember what that felt like
23:02
and that's what we learned. I marvel at it really, given all
23:06
of the tools available to people today, whether it's be Cle or
23:10
seminars or whatever. In those days we really didn't
23:13
have that. And Pillsbury later had
23:15
litigation training programs and I'd be on the panels and so
23:18
forth. And we didn't have those.
23:20
And I didn't even sit down with anybody before that first trial
23:23
and say, OK, now what do I do here?
23:25
I'd never seen a trial. I'd never been to 1, so I didn't
23:28
know how they worked. And so I I learned, but some of
23:33
it the hard way. You mentioned that it was a
23:36
television show that caused you to shift from wanting to be a
23:39
journalist to wanting to be a lawyer.
23:41
What was the show? The show didn't make me change.
23:45
It identified a profession. I see.
23:49
The change was inspired by me thinking, OK, what does a cub
23:53
reporter typically get to do? And the answer is you go to
23:58
Modesto or Coalinga and you attend City Council meetings
24:02
until midnight and then report in two paragraphs on what
24:06
happened. Or better yet, you can do the
24:09
obits for Elmer and and Lenore and all the people that are now
24:14
on the wrong side of the grass in your community.
24:17
So that got me thinking. And there was a program.
24:24
You can still see it on YouTube. Anybody who's happens to listen
24:27
to this called Run for Your Life.
24:30
And Run for Your Life starred an actor named Ben Gazzara.
24:34
And for movie buffs, he was the accused in Anatomy of a murder
24:41
with Jimmy Stewart. What a young Ben Gazzara.
24:45
And then he had a long and rich career in this one.
24:49
He's probably he plays a San Francisco lawyer.
24:52
So I got my attention who had been dying in the very
24:56
beginning. They, you know, as they're
24:57
running the credits, he's, you're hearing the voice over of
25:00
his doctor tell him that he's got six months to a year to
25:04
live. And, and, and the doctor says,
25:07
well, what are you going to do? And Ben Gazzara says, well, I've
25:10
never taken a day off from since law school.
25:13
I guess I'm going to go, you know, see the world.
25:16
And in every episode, Gazzara's legal training somehow came into
25:25
play to allow him to protect himself or protect others.
25:31
You know, I remember there's one episode where, you know, there's
25:33
a redneck sheriff who had, you know, busted him for something
25:36
and they were going to. And so he knew that he knew the
25:39
ropes. And that really appealed to me.
25:41
It was more than the economics, although I figured they'd be
25:43
better than journalism. But it, that really appealed to
25:47
me because I had a kind of a instinctive distrust of
25:52
authority. I, I was never particularly
25:54
rebellious or anything like that, but I, I did feel that
25:57
there were people out there with a, would take unfair advantage
26:00
of me if I couldn't defend myself, whether it's in the
26:03
government or somewhere else. I just figured better to know
26:07
your way around. And so that was my role model
26:12
that was and it's pathetic, but it worked out, worked out pretty
26:16
well. Certainly seems like you have
26:20
learned your way around. Yeah, yeah.
26:22
I'm still running for my life. Yeah, I took you down this path
26:26
in part because I, I, I thought it'd be kind of fun to to hear
26:29
about that first, first trial. But also you, you're talking
26:33
about being a generalist and it was easier to list the things
26:37
that you don't do. So nowadays with the firm that
26:42
you're, I would say running. Fortunately, I don't run it as
26:48
much as I used to. It's good for the firm.
26:51
Well, and, and maybe that's a, that's a good direction to go.
26:55
How? How do you spend your days at
26:57
this point in your career? There's not a lot of firm
27:00
management. Our firm, we, I'm blessed, I
27:02
have partners that are all younger than I am and they all
27:05
we, you know, we're very different people, but we value
27:09
each other. And so decision making is pretty
27:12
simple. I mean really simple.
27:15
We've never had a fight over money.
27:18
We've never had a any fight and we've rarely had anything
27:24
despite our really significant differences politically and
27:27
otherwise. We never had an argument.
27:29
We had one occasion where we were trying to figure out what
27:32
should our policy be for paid leave, for jury service.
27:36
You know what if somebody goes out on a 2 month murder trial
27:40
and the majority of us, you know, with a lot of thoughts,
27:43
well, you know what, we're small, firm, let's, you know,
27:46
maybe cap it at 2 weeks. And then one of our partners
27:48
said we are in this system. How can we expect the system to
27:55
be there for us if we don't support it?
27:57
And if we have somebody who's gone for two months, we got to
27:59
do that. And we instantly kind of looked
28:02
at each other and said he's right.
28:03
That was the argument, you know, it wasn't right.
28:05
So management's very simple. My days are I used to be in.
28:09
Even when I was in the city, I was usually in by 6.
28:13
Really. Oh yeah, And?
28:14
And that's still true now. Yeah, I get in about 7.
28:18
I'm 76. I got to take it.
28:19
It really had changed because of the pandemic.
28:22
The pandemic started just my routine changed.
28:25
And so I used to get up, get in the shower, wash my hair, brush
28:30
it, take my vitamins, and off I'd go.
28:32
And I, I mean, I'd literally get up and be out of the house in
28:35
under 30 minutes and be at work 15 minutes later.
28:39
And that's when I was in Walnut Creek.
28:41
When I was in the city, it was, there was Bart in between me and
28:44
the city. Then when the pandemic came,
28:46
either, you know, we were doing more stuff remote, although I, I
28:50
was really back to the office within two weeks of the
28:52
pandemic. I was an essential worker and
28:54
there was nobody else around me. So it was a safe place.
28:57
There are two of us that used to go in and but I just got a
29:00
different rhythm. And so I'll get up now and have
29:02
coffee, I'll go online, I'll look at emails, whatever I
29:05
might, I might be doing work related stuff beforehand, but
29:09
just change the rhythm. And so I go in at 7 and, and now
29:14
I go and you know, it depends what's going on.
29:16
If there's a deadline or something, it's a different day,
29:18
but standard day I might leave 330 for don't.
29:22
I don't stop for lunch. I just keep going.
29:24
And in my cases are they vary. I mean, I've done every, I've
29:28
done a bunch of employment trials.
29:30
I've done personal injury, I've done contract, I've done eminent
29:34
domain trials. I've done what I, what I don't
29:39
do. I don't do any hardcore
29:40
securities. I don't do any hardcore, any
29:42
trust. I don't do patent or you know,
29:44
hardcore intellectual property. We dealt with trade secrets, of
29:47
course, and other issues. So and I like being a generalist
29:53
because I think the role of the trial lawyer is to be
29:55
translator. You know, you find a bunch of
29:58
stuff that people tell you is important and then you distill
30:02
it, figure out what works, what's a, how does it connect
30:06
thematically? And most important, what are the
30:09
two or three take away points that you want the jury to latch
30:12
onto because it's all they're going to take you.
30:15
You know, you want to give them thematic files that they can put
30:19
stuff in. But this is the over preparation
30:22
thing. As trial lawyers, we want to
30:23
know every single thing. We get it and we've got it all.
30:27
And we worry about all the things and lemonade and all
30:29
these other things. And then you get into the
30:32
courtroom and the juries, in my view, the juries are they're
30:36
looking at big tall mountains. They're not looking at the
30:39
hills. That's what they're going to
30:41
remember. And so as a trial lawyer, you
30:45
simplify, not oversimplify, but simplify so that it's easily
30:50
understood and easily retained. And then you keep hammering at
30:54
it so that throughout the so that stays retained because you,
30:59
you may be there and, and that's your everyday world, but it's
31:04
not there. So, you know, we, we give
31:07
juries, I think you get it. If it's given to them correctly,
31:10
they'll get it. They'll get it right.
31:12
Thank you for listening and please join us next week as we
31:14
continue this conversation. Like what you heard?
31:18
Share us with a colleague and leave us a five star review on
31:20
your podcast platform of choice. To all of you doing justice out
31:23
there, happy hunting.