From Filth & Mud Read Online Free PDF Page B

lawyers never learned that clients are like toddlers; if you promise them a cookie, they will remember that to the exclusion of everything else, and will expect you to deliver that cookie. The biggest no-no of all is throwing out a number. Once a client hears a number, for example $10 million dollars, then $10 million is what the client expects regardless of whether or not the lawyer preempted the figure with a caveat such as “possibly as high as…” or realizing his or her mistake, tries to backtrack a little by adding, “Perhaps not as high in this particular case”. It does not matter; the client now expects the full $10 million. So in the extreme likelihood and near certainty that the case were to begin settlement negotiations, the client will be perplexed that the lawyer who had promised $10 million dollars is now begging the client to take a much lower sum. At best, half of the promised amount and usually a quarter or less.
    The failure was on the lawyers for mismanaging the client’s expectations because of a rush to secure their business. Failing to prepare clients for the 97% likelihood that their lawsuit would either settle or be dismissed outright was not malpractice by the definition of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct, but just as bad in her eyes.
    Sarah favored the counseling role of the attorney―not that she did not enjoy a good trial or oral argument―but she found that with performance art, the hard work took place prior to the event, offstage. Flawless preparation was where you honed the craft of flawless performance. Her curtain call would be a bench or jury verdict for her client. Sarah’s preparation began at the very first meeting with a potential client. She avoided all of the pitfalls of an overeager attorney that a confused, ignorant client could manifest. She began every meeting in her counseling role. She would listen intently to her client’s story. There was always one. She would ask rather light questions, probing her client’s veracity, willingness to divulge information and to see if he or she would stray from the prepared monologue. Clients always told one-sided stories. They liked telling their side of the story and often saw lawyers as a stranger whom they had to convince.
    The first run through their stories always painted the client as the innocent victim and the other party as the evil bastard who owed them money. Black and white. I am right, the other side is wrong! Now win me the case. Sarah had a knack for getting past those barriers. She was a naturally kind-hearted, easy-talking, girl from everywhere. Her parents were both U.S. Navy career officers, which meant that there wasn’t a place on this earth that she hadn’t visited or lived in for some period of time.
    Sarah was a California girl at heart, growing up in the laid back culture of San Diego most of her formative years. People described her as many things; smart, tough, bitchy, kind, and enchanting, but she was a surfer girl above all. She’d first taken to the water when she was a baby living in Okinawa, Japan. Her father was a promising young lieutenant assigned to the USS Humboldt. He was the ship’s Fire Control Officer, following in a proud, ten-generation long lineage of Deveraux’s men to serve in the Navy. Childers Deveraux was the first. He had served as a Negro deckhand and cannonier in the Continental Navy, and so the tradition passed on down to Sarah’s father, Jackson Childers Deveraux, the latest, and probably the last, to carry the Deveraux flame.
    Sarah’s mother was a young orthopedic surgeon stationed at Kadena Air Base in the heart of Naha, Okinawa.  She had finished eight years of surgical residency after which she had entertained offers of employment from the finest medical institutions, including Massachusetts General Hospital, Johns Hopkins, and the National Institutes of Health. However, after so many years of monotonous hospital settings, Emilia Estrada was tired of being