- Quickdraw McLaw
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A simple question today: which practice area spends the most amount of time in court? As a corollary, which practice area spends the most amount of time in trial?
Most Court Time
- Law
- Posted on 7 years ago
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Criminal law practitioners spend, by far, the most time in both court and trial. And to break it down by category: prosecutors spend the most time, followed by indigent defenders, followed by privately-retained defenders.
I would agree with 8:33. I always tell law students and my mentees, if you want court and trial experience, start out doing criminal work.
Speaking strictly from a recruiting perspective, I cannot recall a general commercial law firm client who would accept criminal experience as a substitute for civil lit experience. Now some of this may be part of what I've described in the past as the legal class system, but I stand by my experience on this. Understand I'm not judging one way or the other just communicating the wishes of my clients over the years, irregardless of whether it's right, wrong, or indifferent.
Not having practiced criminal law, my understanding is that there is a very limited universe of cases you draw from and a lot of the courtroom work is thinking on the fly within that small universe. That doesn't necessarily translate well to dealing with complex civil litigation.
Except white collar or big conspiracy defense work in federal court:electronic voluminous document discovery, working with a team, complex appellate and difficult evidentiary issues. Most trial AFPDs have terrific experience with complex litigation that would translate well.
Your clients are shortsighted. And that probably is because most of them are lifetime civil practitioners.
Few lifetime civil practitioners ever become truly good good trial attorneys. Most of them piss their pants at the sight of a courtroom. But many criminal practitioners become good trial attorneys. A smart lawyer can easily make the transition from substantive criminal law to most areas of substantive civil practice. He or she becomes a real weapon with good trial training from criminal law experience. It's easier to turn a smart criminal practitioner into a civil lawyer than it is to make a lifetime civil practitioner competent in the courtroom.
As the hiring partner for a commercial law firm, people with extensive but exclusive criminal experience do not get a second look. You litigated in the DA's Office. That is nice but not what we do here. The exception is you are coming from a white collar criminal defense firm that has overlap in commercial litigation and regulatory matters.
If posters here are using "civil" just to mean PI or ID or something, I can see this experience mattering. Trial skills are really far down the list of attributes I use to evaluate the talent of opposing counsel in commercial lit though. Trying a bunch of slam-dunk DUI's your first three years of practice is not going to give you some leg up in a four-month long shareholder derivative trial you third chair as a seventh year.
Third chairing a four month long shareholder derivative trial would likely cause me to quit the practice of law, or at least devolve into behavior that warrants concern from LCL. Only thing worse would be a year-long CD trial.
I have never done Criminal, but I worked for an attorney who did both Criminal and Civil. You become very familiar in the Courtroom and get to know the Judges and Staff. The evidence rules and procedures are essentially the same and the proof is lower!
Start as a law clerk for a state or federal judge and then become a prosecutor or a public defender. You learn how to put on a case and how to think on your feet.
Most time in a courtroom: Agree with the criminal defense angle.
Best path to becoming a civil lawyer: Agree with the law clerk. Disagree with the DA/AUSA route because you get a false sense of security regarding how easy it is to win in the real world. And those trials are not exactly the same as civil. It was a shocking wake up call for me when I left that world. Best advice if you want to be a good civil trial attorney: find a mentor who is a great civil trial attorney and second chair the heck out of those trials.
Hey, did you all hear about Claggett's $20M verdict? Just kidding. Happy weekend bitches …
For as much grief as bank and HOA attorneys receive, they are receiving trial experience.
What trials? It is all motion work.
It should all be motion work. Some judges aren't granting dispositive motions.
From what I gather sitting in the peanut gallery during many calendar calls and status checks, most of them are 1-2 day bench trials, which is basically a glorified arbitration.
Depends on who opposing counsel us. Some (more than a few), can last an entire week.