I'm back.

Sorry about the delay -- I had a trial last week, which means that I was slammed the week before getting ready, and slammed this week cleaning up all of the messes that my other cases turned into while I was busy doing my best Clarence Darrow impersonation.

Trials are a funny thing for lawyers. Contrary to the impression you might have from a lifetime of watching Perry Mason or Alan Shore, most of us law job guys and gals tend to have more than one case at a time. On any given day, you might learn that favorite client (they don't argue about your bills and they pay within 30 days) Finklestein Industries has just been served with a lawsuit, and you start preparing a motion to dismiss. But you have to stop work on the motion at 3 o'clock because you have a hearing over in Beaucoup Egypt on a discovery dispute in the Acme Manufacturing/Coyote Consulting litigation. And meanwhile, that cute court reporter is on the phone wondering if you want to buy the transcript from the MacGillicuddy deposition, and you are hoping that she left in all of the "uh's" and "um's" and incomprehensible mumbles of the idiot questioner who wasted five hours of your life eliciting approximately 15 minutes of useful testimony, and you know you need the transcript, but the client is going to whine about paying $600 for it. And so you walk into the kitchen and stick your head in the microwave to end it all.

Anyway, real life is nothing like your trial practice class in law school, where the climax of the semester was that one, single, solitary trial -- all about how to get those bastards at Mismo Fire Insurance to pay the Flinders Aluminum claim. That rocked. You were on fire (hah!) to try that case, and you lived breathed ate drank fucked that case, and everything was a complete rush. You owned the courtroom, and all of the witnesses sang the song you taught them. And you beat that insurance company (always so happy to cash the premium checks, yet so reluctant to pay claims) like a red-headed stepchild.* And you knew that this trial thing rocked.

But, alas, here in the real world, we have many more than one case to worry about. Which explains, in part, why so many so-called trial lawyers don't try cases. They can't afford to be out of the office for weeks in trial on a single case at the expense of neglecting all of their others. And so we settle cases -- probably 90% of them.

It's weird, really. Litigators like to think of themselves as surgeons -- they come in, fix the problem, and then go. Transactional lawyers, we sniff, are the internists of the legal world -- dealing with the day to day stuff like contracts and real estate and reporting and all of that other stuff.

Except surgeons, on the day that you are scheduled to have that tumor removed, don't come into your hospital room and say things like "listen, Ted, I just got off the phone with the tumor, and he's agreed that he won't spread into your lungs if you let him take the bones. I think that that's a reasonable offer -- we could go in to take him out, and you could die on the table. Plus, there's always the risk of infection. The tumor pointed out that this hospital had a real problem with staph a few years ago. What's that? Yes, I do remember telling you that I had completed several successful surgeries against this type of tumor, But that was before I found out that you concealed a 50 year history of smoking. When that came out, well, it changed things. Yes, I think that we can make a counter -- maybe tell him that we don't agree to him taking the bones, and if he's stubborn about it, we can just threaten to zap him with some radiation . . . "

*Apologies to red-heads. I am a huge fan of Nicole Kidman in "Moulin Rouge." And apologies to step-children. I was a step-child, twice. I was going to use ". . . like a rented mule," but I was afraid of the inevitable PETA protest. Those fuckers are mean.