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March 25, 2006
Clients, Litigation and Discovery Disputes.
Evan Schaeffer in his The Illinois Trial Practice Weblog has a wonderful post "Don't Put Discovery Disputes On A Back Burner". It's about my 3 favorite subjects: clients, litigation and discovery. Or, more precisely, about clients in discovery disputes. Even allegedly "good" federal court lawyers have hopelessly poor grasps of how the federal discovery rules really work (so they "guess" or follow local folkways) and, if they do understand them, including the tough deadlines the discovery rules often impose, they readily bend the rules and the timelines for the convenience and schedules of the lawyers in the case. Discovery is not about lawyers. The best reasons to push discovery disputes ahead are that most cases are won or lost on discovery, and that the discovery rules are mainly about clients getting closer to a solution of their dispute. Evan's post is about promptness, which helps clients. Bravo.
Posted by JD Hull at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)
Nathan Burke: Thinking About Marketing Freshly PLUS Client Polling
Nathan Burke at LawFirmBlogging has a very fine "lawyer wake-up" post called "A New Way Of Thinking About Marketing". He succinctly offers us a new lens for a creative yet common sense "clean-slate" approach to marketing that ignores the status quo. As an example, Nathan gives an exercise in thinking about client interviews--which also contributes to the nearly institutional Hassett-Lamb-Kane-Golden-Collins-Hull discussion over the past months on the importance of client satisfaction interviews and methodologies to do them. In a larger sense, Nathan may be saying that we lawyers--risk-averse serial conformists who over-complicate things and "chew more than we bite off" (my characterizations)--should start thinking about client work simply, freshly and outside the way we've always done things.
Posted by JD Hull at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)