Whiskey or Wine: What’s your Comp Attitude?
Texas comp lawyers try cases. The unique statutory prohibition against most settlements in Texas requires that most contested disputes be resolved by an administrative law judge. Accordingly, Texas comp lawyers don’t spend a lot of time engaging in discovery that is designed to position the case for a settlement.
This article, from New York lawyer John Balestriere captures the spirit demanded by the Texas system.
And apparently being a whiskey drinker makes me what I am: a trial lawyer. I am not simply espousing a principle of natural law (or, at least, what seems to me to be such). A judge herself, South Dakota Circuit Judge Cheryle Gering, recognized the different kinds of lawyers we can be, and recently outright ordered the attorneys before her on trial not to lose themselves in what she characterized as fussy, even wasteful litigation practice, as opposed to the real trial practice needed in her courtroom while those lawyers were on trial. Showing genuine prudential judgment, and in a self-deprecating manner, the Court noted, “You need to be trial lawyers. A litigator drinks wine and takes depositions. A trial lawyer drinks whiskey and tries cases.”
What’s your attitude? Wine and settlement or Whiskey and trial?
FOLIO
