When I was about 11 somebody said I was a good talker and I ought to be a lawyer. And having nothing else to seize on, I followed that. And I always thought being a trial lawyer was a better thing than just being a lawyer and that’s not to cast aspersions on our corporate department or people who don’t try lawsuits. But the thought was if you could really take a case from the beginning to the end and learn from how those experiences worked that if you represented a client, particularly some of our clients, I mean a lot of them are fortune, 20 fortune 500 companies. If somebody has a claim against your client sometimes for huge amounts of money or huge principles, and the attorney on the other side is known, that would be us, is known to be willing to try a case if it needs to be tried and where the results are normally favorable to the large company where other might think that he plaintiff or vice-versa is entitled to win or there’s great sympathy, or there’s concern.

If you’re a law firm and you represent significant entities, they want you to be gracious on their behalf and they want the people on the other side to know that if the settlement isn’t reasonable, we’re not going to walk away from it, we’re going to try the case. I’ve started to try a case tomorrow morning and you know, think it’s going to turn out just great. If you’re going to be a lawyer if you can be a trial lawyer, my opinion, then you have a perspective so you know how things are going to turn out. A lot of these things are very important to our clients. We’ve been out in front, we do mass actions and class actions and that kind of stuff. And people say oh God, you can’t try a mass action or a class action on behalf of an insurance company or a bank or something. I say well, if we’re right, we can do that and we can win. And we probably can get a good settlement if we want one because people know that we have that attitude.

One of the things that I think is important in terms of advice for the clients is to look at the case realistically, accept the practical and the experience view of what is probably going to happen. But you have to bring everybody to the middle ground so that they can make a decision as to what they want to do. You know, you just have to say to the client I wish that this was going to work out the way you just suggested but there are some real difficulties in that and here’s what they are. The advice is to look at things realistically and practically and from a standpoint of the lawyer not just say what the client wants to hear.