Part 1 in the series
In a 1999 article for the American Board of Trial Advocates Journal I wrote:
“I sometimes feel like I am a dying breed – soon to become extinct. I am a trial lawyer who has spent 37 years in the courtroom. I have tried over 150 jury trials to verdict. I have been in ABOTA since 1976 when I certified that I tried 100 jury trials after about 15 years of practice
But times are changing. Good trial lawyers today who have been in practice for as long as twenty or twenty-five years will have tried significantly less cases than those of us who started our practices in the 60s and early 70s.”
Why Fewer Jury Trials?
- Opportunities: there are simply less jury trials being tried
- Arbitration: more cases are being arbitrated
- Mediation: everything goes to mediation.
- Skill Sets: our negotiation skills are becoming more important than our trial skills
10 Years Later: Concerns Are More Acute Now
With a lack of trial experience comes a lack of ability to easily and competently try a case before a jury. Judges complain frequently that lawyers are not only inexperienced, but frankly ineffective and sometimes woefully inept in the courtroom.
Younger Lawyers Lack of Experience
A byproduct of this problem is the lack of civility between lawyers. One factor in this civility problem is that younger lawyers don’t have the experience of really understanding what a jury trial is like and hence have a great fear of going to trial.
Ultimately, they mask this fear by aggressive litigation tactics in the hope that they can bluff their way out of actually going to trial.
