How Leading Lawyers Think: Expert Insights Into Judgment and Advocacy

by Randall Kiser

In this book, 78 leading attorneys in California and New York describe how they evaluate, negotiate and resolve litigation cases. Selected for their demonstrated skill in predicting trial outcomes and knowing when cases should be settled or taken to trial, these attorneys identify the key factors in case evaluation and share successful strategies in pre-trial discovery, negotiation, mediation, and trials. Integrating law and psychology, the book shows how skilled attorneys mentally frame cases, understand jurors’ perspectives, develop persuasive themes and arguments and achieve exceptional results for clients.

Genres: Law

293 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Nouman S. Ghumman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading How Leading Lawyers Think is the next best thing to following lawyers like Gerry Spence, David Boies, Michael Tigar, Clarence Darrow, and John Edwards around for six months. In this superbly organized book, Randall Kiser shares the results of an extensive study of how 78 top litigators do their work. We learn what they do and how they do it in all areas of litigation practice, from the first meeting with a prospective client to final judgment in a case. In five major parts, the author shares summaries and extensive quotations on the roles and responsibilities of attorneys, frameworks and connections, feelings and traits, techniques and strategies, and learning and advice. Because it is not possible in a short review to do justice to the richness of insights and scholarly material in the book, I will select a few topics that illustrate the quality of the whole.
Case valuation—my own area of expertise—is discussed at length in Part IV (Techniques and Strategies). Beginning lawyers may be surprised to learn that the legal and factual merits of a case constitute only a part and not always the most significant part of the study lawyers’ assessment of a case. Client likeability and credibility can be decisive factors not only in the value of a case but also in whether the lawyer accepts the client in the first place. The knowledge, skills, and experience of the lawyer on the other side is a major factor. Other factors include, the type of case, the severity of the injury, the degree to which the jury might react emotionally for or against one side, and where the trial takes place. We learn that poor case evaluators leave money on the table and, conversely, often do worse when they take cases to trial that they could have settled for a larger amount than the eventual verdict. (This latter problem is the subject of much of Kiser’s first book, Beyond Right and Wrong.)
Mistakes and Oversights. Books of lawyer success stories abound. I’ve never seen even a thin volume with the title, Mistakes I’ve Made. With me, such a book would consist of hundreds of pages of blunder after blunder. Can I take a Mulligan? Admirably, the study lawyers shared their own thoughts not just about specific mistakes made but about the types of errors lawyers make. Inappropriate attitudes, including aggressiveness, overconfidence, overvaluation, exaggeration, undue emotional involvement, lack of objectivity, premature assessments, and intransigence are all discussed in detail. Inadequate skills, bad habits, the failure to prepare, and more are examined as well. A large part of lawyer shortcomings can be summed up in the phrase: Lazy lawyers lose lawsuits. But even hard-working lawyers fall short more often than they should, in part because they don’t know how to do it right. For those lawyers who want to get better and have their hard work pay off, this book is a treasure trove of insights and advice.
Legal risk management is a statistics stepchild in the era of Big Data. The amounts and kinds of relevant information that we need to assess where legal risk resides, how to measure and reduce it, or even how much it costs individual companies and society in general are largely unavailable. Randall Kiser is among the stalwarts who are doing something to improve that sad state of affairs. I recommend that every lawyer who wants to do right by her clients buy, read, study, reread, and put into practice the lessons of How Leading Lawyers Think.