I went to my first meeting yesterday in over 10 years.

Believe me, I know my way around a meeting.  During my first career in the government, I did nothing but meetings:  budget meetings, planning meetings, team meetings, agency meetings, inter-agency meetings. Half of my day was spent planning for meetings. The other half was spent sitting in them.

Before being promoted into management, I had to be trained on chairing a meeting. It’s very straight-forward: you send out an agenda in advance, you start the meeting on time, you go through the agenda, and then you end the meeting at the time you said you would.  No around the table, what’s on your mind thing for me.

My favorite meetings were the inter-agency meetings chaired by the Department of State. I’m not quite sure why they called them inter-agency meetings because for the most part you felt as if you were eavesdropping on an internal State Department meeting. A representative from one of the offices at State would begin the meeting.  The chair would then turn it over to representatives from each of the other State Department offices to say their piece.  There would be some bickering between the offices because those guys could never agree on anything.  With ten minutes left to go, the chair would then say, I’m sorry, would someone else like to say something?  Treasury?  EPA?  Department of Energy?  Commerce?

Of course, before I ever went to one of these State Department meetings, I had to call a meeting within my own agency to help decide what our position would be at the inter-agency meeting.

Needless to say, when I resigned from the government in 2002, walking out of the Ronald Reagan building with my personal belongings in a cardboard box, I knew I was not going to miss the meetings.

I stayed at home with the kids for a year and a half.  Every day for the first six-months was like a snow day.  And the best part about it was that there were no meetings.

After the whole stay-at-home thing got old, I went to law school, taking classes during the day so that I could be there when the kids got home from school.  And, again, there were no meetings.

Thankfully, in deciding to become a criminal defense lawyer, I picked a legal career in which you rarely – if ever – have to go to a meeting. Yes, you may occasionally attend a conference or training session that involves sitting down and listening to someone else talk. And you meet with clients. But there are no occasions in which you sit down around a table with a group of other people (the bigger the committee, the less important its mandate), introduce yourselves, talk about things, and then spend the last half of the meeting planning the next get-together.

My ten-year streak of no-meetings was snapped yesterday.

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to serve on a D.C. Superior Court committee.  A judge asked me, and there are two other judges on the committee, one of whom I appear before regularly.   The committee is also focused on an issue that is near and dear to me:  the treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth within the D.C. family court system.

But even then I struggled with the decision.  One of the benefits to being a solo practitioner is that you live life on your own terms.  You are accountable only to the courts and to clients.  Unlike the millions of “stakeholders” I had as a government servant, a criminal defense lawyer has a constituency of only one:  the client.  As a result, you rarely have to do anything you don’t want to do.

My wife encouraged me to accept the invitation.  It will be good for you, she said. You should do it.

So I went to the committee’s first meeting yesterday, heading back into the city during rush-hour at a time I am normally sitting down for dinner. I arrived early only to have the start of the meeting delayed for 15 minutes so that the last invitee could straggle in.  It reminded me of waiting for the door on an airplane to close.  Find your seat, the flight attendant says over the intercom, so that we can pull away from the gate.

If I didn’t immediately regret my decision to participate on the committee, two things did occur to me as we went around the room to introduce ourselves.  The first was that, despite all my wife’s encouragement, I rarely see her going to any meetings herself.  She is probably the most time-efficient person you have ever seen, a person used to juggling family with a career.

The other conclusion – and the moral of this story – is that you should only go to meetings that you have called yourself.  Otherwise, you are nothing more than a hostage to other people.

I botched the investigation.

I went to the store on Upper Wisconsin Avenue in which my client was alleged to have committed a robbery.  While there, I neglected to look for a critical piece of evidence:  whether or not there was a surveillance camera over the cash register.  As a result, my investigator Wayne Marshall had to go back to the store to do the investigation right. I miss things that to him are second nature.

Marshall and I have been working together now for less than a year, mostly on court-appointed juvenile cases.  Both of us are relatively new to the area. Marshall gave up a career as a New York police officer after being shot twice in the chest. He drove himself to the hospital.  The triage nurse, busy with some paperwork, told him to take a seat in the waiting area.  “Just a moment, sweetheart,” she told him.  “I’ll be right with you.” He still carries around two bullets in his chest.

I am jealous of the time he devotes to other lawyers’ cases and I know that I can sometimes be difficult to work with.  I fret.  I send him late night text messages and emails that increase with frequency as the trial date approaches.  Fortunately, he too is an early morning person and we have often communicated several times before sunrise. That’s okay, he told me the other day when I apologized for my micro-management.  You keep me on my toes.

Marshall is a chameleon.  He is just as at home in the suburbs of Maryland and Virginia as he is on the streets of the District.  Yet it is his entrée into the lower-income homes on the east side of the Anacostia River that I value the most.  Many of the families there don’t quite know how to deal with an uptight middle-aged man from across town who still doesn’t know how to dress down.  With life pouring out into the street from row houses, and doors always open, their world is as unfamiliar to me as the green expanse of my world is to them.

Although the families and I will come to know each other very well by the time the case concludes, the first visit to a client’s home is often uncomfortable for both parties.  I will have already met the client and family at the initial hearing at which I was appointed.  But that meeting is brief and harried, done moments before we go before the judge.  The parents are angry and upset, and the child has just spent the night in custody.  When I walk over to the cell-block to introduce myself before the hearing, I am just one more person who will prod the child with questions.

The first time I visited a client at his home, I made the mistake of going into the home before Marshall had arrived.  The son and I sat on an overstuffed couch in the living room while the mother cooked bacon and eggs in the kitchen next door, all the while trying to keep an ear out on our conversation.  Then Marshall arrived, and the mother breathed a sigh of relief.  Thank God, she said.  I didn’t realize we had a brother working with us.

Marshall and I stick out a little bit more when I accompany him to the alleged crime scene.  We usually bring the client along with us if the child is not being held in secure detention, and the ride there is a good way to get to know the client in a more relaxed setting.  We discuss football and school.  Although Marshall and I do most of the talking, you can see the first signs of the client beginning to open up.  Our relationship with the client will be very different at the next court listing.

Marshall assures me I do not cramp his style during the crime scene investigations. “Not at all, Mr. Koehler,” he says when I first bring this up.  We always address each other formally while in the presence of clients.  It is an affectation he may have gotten from me.  “You give me credibility.  Otherwise I am just a guy with a camera.”

Like the work of a criminal defense lawyer, much of what an investigator does never sees the light of day.  You work and you work and, if the client eventually takes a plea, it is as if the work was never done at all.  You mark the file closed and put it into your filing cabinet.  It is like draining a bathtub so that you can refill it with something new.

But then there are the cases in which it all comes together on the day of trial.  Last week I watched Marshall, dressed in a shirt and tie because we thought he might be testifying, coming down the court hallway with two of our witnesses, and I breathed a sigh of relief for the first time in a couple of days.  Because you never know if the witnesses will actually come.  When I saw Marshall with the witnesses, I knew we would be ready.  So did he.

I am standing outside Judge Pan’s courtroom on the second floor of D.C. Superior Court with a man who has just been arraigned for felony assault.  Although he has been assigned a court-appointed attorney, he would like to hire private counsel.  I have a conflict so I refer him to my colleague and friend Michael Bruckheim.

Just as I am telling this guy about Bruckheim, I see Bruckheim walking down the hallway towards us, and I get his attention by waving at him.  On his way over, Bruckheim is stopped three times by people seeking to speak with him.

Bruckheim is a first-rate trial attorney, I tell the guy, but I don’t know how much he charges. He must be a good lawyer, the guy says.  Assuming I can afford him, I’ll hire him. Look at how many people he knows.

I am always amazed at the criteria people use to hire a lawyer.

There was a private attorney in Philadelphia who had a fantastic courtroom presence. Also a stand-up comic, he would have the entire courtroom laughing as he dressed down the prosecutor and ruled on the government’s objections during a preliminary hearing:  “Stop interrupting me,” he told one hapless prosecutor.  “You had your turn to ask the questions.  Now it’s my turn.”   Judges seemed to tolerate him, giving him far more latitude than they accorded the rest of us, and there was always a line of people asking for his business card whenever he walked out of the courtroom.

At the same time, not a single one of us in the public defender’s office (there were lots of us and we were in court every day) had ever seen this guy put on a case.  Not once.  He pleaded all of his misdemeanor clients out.  And he would take a client’s money to handle the preliminary hearing in a felony case and then drop the client.  The rest of us were left to deal with the mess he made.  Funny does not a good transcript make.

Bruckheim is a former supervisor at the Office of the Attorney General (we kid him every time we tangle with one of the prosecutors hired during his tenure).  Although he has also turned out to be a great defense lawyer, his qualifications have nothing to do with the number of people who stop him in the hallway.  Nor would Bruckheim ever commit the ethical violation of suggesting to a potential client that he could use his contacts to curry special favor with a judge or prosecutor.  There are many lawyers in the D.C. area, I have found, who could learn from his example.

I will remember this.  This is what the prosecutor promises you.

In another context, she could be intending this as a threat.  As in:  I will get you back for this.  In this case, she is trying to entice you into making a concession, and she is putting you on notice that she has a long memory.   She knows –and knows you know — that this can cut both ways.

Counsel for the co-defendant has come down with pneumonia, and has asked that your joint trial scheduled for next week be postponed.  The prosecutor doesn’t want to sever the case; that is, she doesn’t want to have to try your client next week and then put on the exact same case later.  She is now drafting the motion to continue the case, and she wants to know if you will oppose it.

Although you decided long ago that a joint trial is in your client’s best interests, you think quickly of ways you might be able to use a concession to your client’s advantage. Unable to come up with any ideas, you tell her instead that you will need to check with your client and get back to her.

No matter how this particular issue is decided, the question the prosecutor has put to you raises an interesting ethical dilemma for defense lawyers who face the same prosecutor again and again:  To what extent, if any, do you hold back on your duty of zealous representation on behalf of one client with a matter currently before the court for the benefit of future clients?

The answer should be simple:  You never do.  Your duty is your duty, feelings of others notwithstanding.  You take one case at a time and you worry about future cases when they arise.

But how about if you are a public defender representing multiple clients before the same court on the same day?  In this case, antagonizing the prosecutor or the judge for the benefit of one client might directly impact the interests of every other client you have that day.  Because let’s face it:  some judges and prosecutors can hold a grudge.   And they can take out their anger at a lawyer on the lawyer’s client.  I was astounded one time in Philadelphia when a particular judge – “Grumpy Santa,” we used to call him – refused bail for a defendant solely on the basis that he didn’t like the lawyer who represented the person.

There’s also a flip side.  No matter how carefully you cultivate your contacts with judges and prosecutors in order to advance a client’s interests, a lawyer only has so much capital he can expend on behalf of clients.  For example, standing outside the courtroom in full supplication mode, you look the prosecutor in the eyes and ask her if she couldn’t – just this one time – cut your client a break.

This is easy to do when you are a privately retained lawyer facing multiple prosecutors on behalf of a limited number of clients.   But a public defender – again representing multiple clients on the same day against the very same prosecutor – doesn’t have this luxury.  You can only ask for some many favors on behalf of a client.  After a while, the till is empty.

Somebody who reads this blog regularly asked me recently what it is I have against public defenders.  The answer is that I only have the highest degree of respect for public defenders.   The three years I spent at the public defender’s office in Philadelphia – my introduction to the practice of law — continue to inform everything I have ever done since.  When I found out yesterday morning that a person I know only from random musings on Twitter was a public defender, my respect for that person skyrocketed.  Only someone who has experienced it directly can understand the dedication it requires to work as a public defender, how it feels to deal with the workload and continual disrespect from clients and, yes, courts.

At the same time, during my still limited experience as a retained lawyer, I am continually struck by the differences between private practice and working as a public defender.  The sad fact is, you can work 24 hours a day seven days a week as a public defender and still not be able to devote the same amount of time to a case as a private lawyer can.  You can turn down cases and manage your workload as retained counsel.  Public defenders don’t have that luxury.

Opposing counsel’s praecipe arrives in the mail.  I am representing the respondent in a civil protection order hearing; he the petitioner.

I google the lawyer’s name to find a self-made website and a less than professional photograph of the lawyer, taken by somebody with the same last name.  In the photograph, the lawyer is standing in front of an ornate, legal-looking building. His name in the masthead is followed by “Esquire,” and there are 20 words in his law firm motto, something about “trusted adviser” and “turning to the attorney other professionals turn to.”

I am even less impressed when I meet him in person.

On the morning of the hearing, he tells me that he has been doing these things for 30 years and that he and the court clerk are very good friends.  I am not quite sure what I am supposed to do with this information.   But I do my best to look impressed.

A bomb threat empties the courthouse and then the judge has to leave the bench for a funeral.  So the hearing is continued.

He talks more about himself as we walk out into the hallway. He also gives me a preview of the case he has built against my client. Seventeen exhibits!  He says something vaguely derogatory about my client and speaks in glowing terms about the petitioner.

Save it for the judge, is what I want to say.  I nod instead.

Years ago, back when the children were little and we lived in Arlington for the first time, we decided to go to the circus.  I drove over to the baseball field in Ballston earlier in the day, and bought the tickets from a young Hungarian woman working out of a trailer.  It was a small, family-owned circus with one ring, a couple of clowns, and a tiger or two.  Elephants were being used to raise the tent when I arrived.

When we returned to the tent later that afternoon, the same woman took our tickets and escorted us to our seats.  A couple of hours after that, the very same woman appeared in make-up and costume as the trapeze artist.  We saw her a final time at the end of the show, back in her usher’s uniform, when she re-appeared to help direct people to the exits.  She was standing next to a man who looked an awful lot like the guy who had just been shot out of a cannon.

I have often felt that solo practice – or at least my solo practice – is a little bit like that circus and that my role as a solo practitioner is similar to the trapeze artist’s.  No, we don’t face the same risk of death or bodily injury.  But we don’t have – dare I say it? — a safety net either.  After all, last month’s success in bringing in new clients is no guarantee of future business.  And we don’t have the luxury of colleagues to carry us through lean times.

I share my wife’s office in Georgetown, which has all the trappings of a fancy law office. We have a receptionist and support personnel, large offices, a kitchen, two bathrooms, and a spacious conference room.  Note that I say “share.”  It is actually my wife who pays the rent, who hires the staff, and who makes all other decisions affecting the office.  I rarely use the office set aside for me, and do most of my work out of my study at home or from the courtroom cafeteria, library, and hallways.

Assuming things go according to plan, I will eventually be forced to hire my own support staff and potentially an associate or two.  I am already having trouble covering overlapping court appearances.  At some point, I may also want to move my office across town so that I can be closer to the D.C. courthouse.  However, for the time being, having spent my first career as a federal manager, it is remarkably liberating to be entirely unencumbered by the hassle of worrying about other people:  Are they gainfully employed?  Are they getting along?  What would I do if they decide not to come to work that morning?

The flip side of all of this, of course, is that, like the Hungarian trapeze artist, I have been forced to become a jack-of-all trades:  office manager, paralegal, book-keeper, part-time investigator, chauffeur, and, yes, criminal defense lawyer.  But even here, there are many advantages.  Back when I had my own dedicated secretary in government, I allowed myself to become wholly reliant on this secretary and would find myself at a loss whenever she called in sick or took some vacation time.  Not so here.  Having gone through the trouble, for example, of developing an accounting system that works for me, I know every detail of the system. Self-sufficiency is empowering.  I cringe at the thought of having to train someone else to take this over from me.

I write this on a day in which I have no court listings or other commitments.  So today, facing a mountain load of clerical work that has piled up on my desk, I take on the office manager/paralegal/book-keeper role of my practice, not something I cherish, and remind myself – once again – that there are many advantages to being a solo practitioner.  Yes, liberating. Empowering. Woo hoo. Soooo many advantages. If I thought about it a little longer, I am sure I could think of some more.

Judge Milton Lee of D.C. Superior Court takes the bench at 9:00 am. Promptly. Every morning. Without fail.

One of my biggest complaints about the Office of the Attorney General in D.C. is that its prosecutors often waltz into court well after 9:00 am every morning, usually minutes before the judge takes the bench.

This can make life difficult for defense lawyers.  Your case is often called before you have had a chance to talk to the prosecutor.  At best, you find yourself trying to get the harried prosecutor’s attention during the call of the list.

This morning I was surprised to have my robbery case called for status before the prosecutor had arrived.  No government representative, the judge asked?  Case dismissed.

The mother of my client hugged me afterward in the hall.  It was the first time I have ever seen her smile.  I had to tell her I hadn’t done a thing.  She should really be thanking the prosecutor for failing to appear.  She should be thanking the judge for having the guts to throw the case out.

I am thinking the judge was sending a message.  I am thinking this message has been received.  And I pray that they don’t re-arrest.

Kris Henning of the Georgetown University Juvenile Justice Clinic

One of the things I liked best about the Philadelphia public defender’s office – in addition to the camaraderie and sense of shared mission — was the support you got from other lawyers.  If you had a legal question or wanted feedback on a possible trial tactic, you could step out into the court hallway or into the office next door to run it by a colleague.

Whenever there was some new development or change in the law, the handy-dandy guide provided to us by the office made us the envy of the private criminal defense bar.  We had in-house experts on immigration, probation, the sealing of criminal records, and sentencing issues.  And if you had a more detailed question about a point of law or a particular case, you could consult an appellate attorney, in some cases the very person who had argued the case in front of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Similarly, Keith Lee over at An Associate’s Mind writes about the support new lawyers receive at a law firm:  “My failures never leave the office.  They are purely internal.  My work is reviewed, scrutinized, edited, and improved.  I’m sent back and told to try again.  I receive advice on how to handle matters.  I have fellow associates with who I can commiserate and bounce ideas off of.”

Sadly, solo practitioners do not have this same support network.  Upon moving back to the D.C. area in 2009, I had hoped to hook up with the public defender’s office in D.C. or a law firm specializing in criminal law to help bridge the gap between my experience in Philadelphia and my plan to start my own defense practice.  I was looking for an apprenticeship to ease my transition to a new jurisdiction. Failing that, I was forced to accelerate the timeframe for hanging out my own shingle.

In a couple of days, I will celebrate the two-year anniversary of my firm, and I have to say that, despite all the benefits, solo practice has not always been easy.  You can spend hours puttering around your office until the calls start to come in.  It is hard to get excited about a legal issue when it is still in the abstract.  And, if you are new to the jurisdiction and go over to the courthouse to observe, you can find that the lawyers there are referring to strange case names and using short-hand terms that sound to you like a foreign language.

Fortunately, there are many places a new lawyer can look in order to build a support network outside an established organization. The sources of support are there. You just need to work harder to access them.

For procedural issues and trial tactics, I begin with my colleagues.  As Paul Kennedy of The Defense Rests puts it:  “That’s the thing about criminal defense lawyers – we’re all on the same side.  Each of us takes our duty to defend the Constitution very seriously and we know that working together and collaborating allows us to do it that much better.”  Other lawyers can in fact be a valuable source of information on navigating the court system, dealing with particular prosecutors, and predicting how individual judges will react to an issue.  Most lawyers are only too happy to help out a newbie, and the initial contacts you make through these consultations can often turn into friendships.

Unlike any other jurisdiction in which I have practiced, the D.C. Public Defender Service (PDS) takes an active interest in the quality of representation from all lawyers representing indigent defendants in the District; it is not just interested in its own lawyers.  The PDS lawyers who participated at the Juvenile CJA Panel training offered their continuing support for whatever we might need, and I have taken full advantage of this offer.  This past week alone, for example, I consulted Nancy Glass, Mani Golzari, and Hannah McIlhenny on trial strategies for different cases.  Hannah McIlhenny, who is deputy chief of the Juvenile Division at PDS, took my call one evening on her cell phone as she ferried her children from one commitment to another.  PDS and the D.C. Bar also host a number of training courses open to all criminal defense lawyers, including the Criminal Practice Institute (CPI) seminar held every November.

You can often find Tim Curry of the D.C. Law Students in Court program or Kristin Henning of the Georgetown University Juvenile Justice Clinic in court supervising students.  Both of them are only too happy to help out.  After all, working with new lawyers and giving advice is what they do.  I warned Tim Curry the first time I met him that he was going to very much regret giving me his business card. He chuckled.  He didn’t realize I was serious.

As proof that Temple University is committed to helping its students even after graduation, I consulted my former criminal law professor, Professor James Strazzella, on a recent gun case in Virginia.  I have also benefitted from the network of support I have developed through the criminal law blogosphere and other social media sites.  For example, you can’t beat the advice you can get from an experienced trial attorney like Norm Pattis.

While I have already discussed the potential dangers of relying too heavily on the advice you will receive on a listserv, I believe it would be malpractice not to at least monitor the Superior Court Trial Lawyers Association (SCTLA) listserv in D.C. The listserv run by the National College on DUI Defense offers you immediate access to some of the best DUI lawyers in the country.  And the ABA listserv Solosez has helped me considerably with the mechanics of setting up a law firm, including providing me with information on websites, professional liability insurance, billing, and marketing strategies.  My approach with that listserv has been to take what I can use and to leave all the rest.

Continuing Legal Education (CLE) classes provide a good excuse to get up-to-speed on an issue of interest to you, while broadening your contacts within the legal community.  And both D.C. and Virginia offer hotlines that provide you with immediate access to lawyers who can answer any question related to professional ethics.  For example, I emailed the Virginia contact with a couple of questions on my website when I was admitted to practice in the Commonwealth and had a very helpful answer back within a couple of hours.

Finally, at least for me, there is my wife.  Although as a civil litigator she has never practiced criminal law herself, she has a lawyer’s grasp of the issues I am dealing with. Naturally biased in favor of the prosecution, she also has an uncanny ability to zero in on the heart of any issue and to predict how a judge will respond to the arguments I am considering.  I have found that if I cannot convince her on an issue, I will never be able to convince the judge.  And that, finally, is the most important advice of all.

A supervisor at the Philadelphia public defender’s office used to tell us all the time that we were representing people, not files.  This really got on our nerves.  As one colleague put it:  Maybe he needs to be reminded of that fact.  After all, he sits in his office all day doing nothing more than reviewing the files we turn in.  But no one needed to tell us that we were dealing with living and breathing people.  If anything, sometimes handling matters for up to 30 clients a day, we were all too familiar with the humanity of our sometimes angry, frustrated, and scared clients.

A client does in fact start out as a disembodied voice on the telephone, a name in a police report, a stranger standing outside your office in the lobby. Over the course of the representation, however, you visit the client in jail, you meet with family and friends, and you sit together through the heat of battle at trial. It is fair to say that, when all is said and done, you come to know the client pretty damn well.

And then suddenly the verdict is delivered and the case is over.

Clients often promise to stay in touch, and some do. If the client was in custody pre-trial, it is strange to talk with the client on the phone unconcerned about having the conversation monitored. It is even stranger to see the client in person, unshackled and in street clothes.

At the same time, most clients want to move on with their lives. They want to put the whole unfortunate experience behind them.  And you are a part of that experience. So you write out the disposition of the case on the file and scrawl “closed” in black ink across the front of it. You put the file into a locked cabinet. And then you move on to other cases — other people — by closing the drawer.

Although Virginia juries have a reputation for being unforgiving, I have also been told that juries in Prince William County can be pretty unpredictable.

Going into trial yesterday, my client was facing a mandatory 5-year sentence for being a violent felon in possession of a firearm.  During execution of a search warrant at his home, police had recovered a firearm at his home.  The government also had my client’s sworn testimony that he put the firearm there.

The jury acquitted my client of being a violent felon in possession of a firearm but convicted him of the lesser-included charge of being a simple felon, a surprising development considering we had not challenged his previous convictions. They apparently decided that he was guilty but not that guilty.

My client’s acquittal as a violent felon eliminated the five-year mandatory and since his other felony was outside the 10-year-timeframe, the two-year mandatory was also gone. The jury then sentenced my client to twelve months, the judge reduced this to time-served, and my client walked out of the courtroom yesterday a free man.

The prosecution called eight witnesses to testify to things we conceded in our opening statement.  (We challenged the “knowing and intentional” part of the possession, not the possession itself.)  Of these eight witnesses, we asked a grand total of two questions on cross-examination.  I tell you, there is no better thing than that ability to say:  “No questions, Your Honor.”

But my favorite part of the trial – if you will indulge me yet again– came when, during his closing statement, the prosecutor forgot to include the “knowing and intentional” language from the statute when reviewing the law.  It was like he couldn’t bring himself to actually utter the words. After I made a big deal about this during my closing, the prosecutor got up for his rebuttal . . . and then referred to “knowing and intelligent” possession.

Yes, an outright acquittal would have been far better for my lawyer’s ego. Two other lawyers recently got my client acquitted on other charges. Referring to ourselves as his crack legal team, the three of us have gotten to be good friends, with all three of us attending each other’s trials for moral support, and I wanted to join that exclusive club of lawyers who have beaten cases on his behalf.

But today, as I clean up the papers that have sat on my office floor for the last six months, I decide I will have to settle for what we got.  I think of my client’s 10-year-old nephew who walked up to me in the hallway during the jury’s deliberations.  It was very important for him to know which car his uncle would drive home in – his mother’s or his sister’s – if the jury decided to let him go.  I guess we lawyers are supposed to know these things.