On Tuesday, November 27, Stephen D. Susman, founding partner of Susman Godfrey LLP, delivered the 25th Annual Irving R. Segal Lecture on Trial Advocacy to a full audience at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. In his presentation entitled “The Joy of Lawyering: Partnership Agreements, Fee Agreements with Clients, and Pretrial Agreements with Opposing Counsel,” Susman spoke about his experience in founding Susman Godfrey, the reasons for his innovative fees and pre-trial agreements, and his passion for litigation. Visit the Susman`s Trial by Agreement website: www.trialbyagreement.com.Download Bennett`s Supplemental Trial Management Order (pdf). The whole concept of “consensual procedure” is based on the principle that a jury can judge the case on the merits. We identified the following practices that should be considered for each study: (1) probationary period delays; (2) the jurors` questions; (3) intermediate arguments; (4) the preliminary substantive instructions of the jury; (5) the discussion of the evidence by the jury before the end of the proceedings; and (6) jury questionnaires. Each of them allows a jury to decide a case smarter and more efficiently. It is important to reach agreement on such issues from the outset before either party recognizes a tactical advantage in rejecting such a request. However, by including some or all of these agreements in your Rule 26(f) conference with opposing lawyers, you can likely reduce the amount of avoidable discord in your case, reduce investigation costs, and improve your reputation in court and the opposing attorney. “This website becomes a forum where litigants, in-house counsel, clients and judges can discuss pre-trial and procedural agreements, including what works and what doesn`t,” Susman continued. “We believe there is always room to build a better mousetrap.” To encourage collaboration, many courts incorporate some or all of the “Susman Agreements” of Susman Godfrey`s prominent lawyer, Stephen D.
Susman, into their case management orders. Susman Godfrey publishes on its website “Susman Agreements” for pre-litigation and judicial proceedings, trialbyagreement.com and offers versions of Word that lawyers can easily download for use in their own cases. Inefficiencies in litigation are not harmless when a case is actually brought before a jury,5 when such tactics “manifest as excessive use of exhibits, unnecessarily lengthy testimony, and a inflated interrogation process, which in our experience leads to the most frequently repeated comment by jurors after a trial has ended: “There have been too many repetitions.” 6 “This website shows that lawyers have the tools and ability to contain the prohibitive costs and fierce battles that are part of a legal battle,” said Stephen Susman, founding partner of Susman Godfrey. “Over the past few decades, my firm has taken the lead in developing pre-trial and pre-trial agreements to create a more efficient and cost-effective review process. This website allows us to share these successful agreements with the entire legal community. Many lawyers tend to live by the assumption, “If the other party likes it, I don`t like it. 8 Litigation is slow and costly because lawyers waste a lot of time fighting. This puts a strain not only on clients` paperbacks, but also on the courts, which do not have time to resolve disputes arising from the pre-litigation procedure.
TrialbyAgreement.com, a dialogue on pre-trial agreements and contentious agreements will begin. These agreements are ground rules for the pre-trial and trial practice that the lawyer carries out at the beginning of a case, before the start of the investigative process or before the opposing lawyer begins to defend his or her territory. Agreements make litigation faster, more efficient and more cost-effective. Susman`s pre-litigation agreements include a dozen common-sense agreements that promote cooperation, reduce costs, and avoid common problems. Each of the following Susman agreements is related to Susman Godfrey`s full description of why such an agreement should be made, which is incredibly useful knowledge for a young lawyer trying to negotiate with the opposing attorney: In addition, Susman described various forms of pre-trial agreements and trials with opposing lawyers. Explaining the benefits of agreements, Susman noted, “I found that getting by with opposing lawyers by meeting and abiding by agreements meant a much less stressful life. It also leads to a better result for your client. You can better keep an eye on what`s important if you don`t get angry when arguing with opposing lawyers.
Examples of such agreements include the establishment of testimony procedures, the requirement that all documents be provided by email, and the prohibition on either party detecting a communication with a lawyer or a draft expert opinion. For more examples, see the TrialByAgreement.com. We have already noted that “lawyers have driven up the cost of litigation due to unnecessary filing practices, unnecessary discoveries, and the inability to seek cost-saving agreements and protocols.” 2 These practices make the prospect of jury resolution more costly, faster and therefore less likely.3 We believe that unprofessional and ineffective litigation is one of the main causes of the disappearance of jury trial.4 Endless disagreements, objections and strategic disputes for themselves prevent the parties from reaching the merits of the case. This leads to greater distrust of lawyers and the civil justice system. He created a website, Trial by Agreement, that provides a kind of repository at 0pen source of pre-trial agreements that lawyers can use to reduce the often unnecessary cost of eDiscoveries, testimony, and retaliatory requests. Susman himself has used these deals for years, including in a 2009 trial that resulted in a $179 million jury verdict for his clients against billionaire Harold Simmons and his nl industries. He wants lawyers to download, modify, and adopt them for free to speed up litigation and hopefully slow down the transition to arbitration and other cheaper ways to resolve disputes. For many years, we have been committed to better conduct of civil proceedings. Together with some of our colleagues, we have ensured that the trial process, particularly the jury system, is an effective and preferred tool for conflict resolution and is used to promote the efficiency of a jury trial by introducing a process known as the “agreement process”.
1 To do otherwise means waiving our constitutionally protected right to a jury trial in favour of private arbitration. While a number of recent changes to the federal rules of civil procedure have unintended consequences of rising costs and delays, Trial by Agreement – drafted and developed by Texas attorneys Steve Susman and Thomas Melsheimer – achieves the opposite result. This is such a crucial innovation that Justice Mark W. Bennett included it in his supplementary litigation management order, which was filed early in every civil case. Lawyers in all civil cases filed are required to read about the trial by agreement, discuss it with their clients and file an affidavit in this regard. Susman also discussed his company`s innovative fee agreements with his clients. “Our firm is proud to have pioneered the creation of fee agreements that reward lawyers for their results rather than their efforts,” he said. “On the plaintiff`s side, it`s usually a contingency fee agreement that is heavily negotiated and carefully drafted. On the defense side, we have developed similar agreements that distinguish us by result rather than effort: a fixed monthly fee that covers part of the value of our projected time, as well as a variety of bonuses that depend on different outcomes, such as . B to receive a dismissal or summary verdict, or to settle the case within a short period of time or for less than a certain amount. “Both pricing structures reduce incentives to waste time, duplicate tasks or bill earlier than expected. See Patrick E.
Higginbotham, The Disappearing Trial and Why We Should Care, Rand Review (2004), available from www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2004/28.html (last visited September 8, 2015) (“Because judges and lawyers are increasingly inexperienced and inexperienced in the mechanics of a trial, the measure of what is relevant in the discovery itself is unclear at best.”). Experienced litigants know that the vast majority of discoveries never make it to court, which is another way of saying that most of what happens at the discovery is not important to the outcome of the case.7 Yet too much effort is put into and too much money is spent on the discovery. .