For me I think the most rewarding part of my practice is coming to work every single day and doing my best to try to apply what I know and my ideas about how to resolve problems and questions to my clients’ problems. The intellectual challenge of looking at things in a way that you have to see both sides. You see both the side that our client wants to see and perhaps the lumps and bumps or the other side’s position on the case, and trying to fit a resolution for our clients that gets them to where they can most want to be at the end of the day.

It’s not necessarily, you know, what’s the best way to try the case, or what’s the best way to convince the judge to do something at any given moment, but to get the ultimate goals that our client is trying to achieve, which may be that things resolve beforehand, before a trial, or that they don’t resolve until after an appeal is completed.

I think the intellectual challenge and the ability to help people with their problems are for me the most rewarding things. It’s the things that wake me up every day, get me out of bed and get me here in the office.

The one thing that I find myself reciting for my clients when it comes to advice I think is to remember that at the end of the day you can’t control the way things are going to play out in the legal process. You can do your best to understand the exposures and the risks and the steps that you take along the way, but you never really know for sure what a jury is going to do. If your case is one where you’re going to have a bench trial in front of a judge instead of in front of a jury. And perhaps you have a little bit different type of certainty than you would in front of a jury.

But getting a client to the point where they can understand that there are a bunch of risks that they can’t control is one of the things, the most valuable thing that you can get a client to hear, I think. Many times clients come in and they think they have an understanding about the way things will play out without a perspective of what the law may be that applies to their case. Without a perspective of what the other side sees things to be, and without a perspective of really the kind of uncertainties that we see on a daily basis when you see the results of jury trials in the news, high profile cases. A lot of times people are surprised at the way they come out.

In most circumstances I would think people went into those cases where people were shocked about what the jury ultimately did. They went into those cases thinking I know what’s going to happen and this is going to be good for me to do these things, and it doesn’t always turn out that way. So you have to really manage expectations and understand there is going to be things along the way that you just can’t control.