I’ll take “Gimmick Blog Post Titles That Will Defy the Odds and Be Worth Reading, I’m Serious, Just Give Me a Chance” for $400 please, Alex.
Tied for first at the top of Knick players who have had 20 points and 7 assists with 6 consecutive games is Jeremy Lin. As little as three weeks ago, if you were taking odds, you would have bet the Knicks would cut him so they did not have to guarantee his salary for the season. The odds of going from there to this are roughly the same as Barack Obama calling you today and telling you he is dropping Eric Holder, and he desperately needs you to be the U.S. Attorney General. Seriously, the last time I enjoyed a sports story this much was when Mark “The Bird” Fidrych burst onto the scene in 1976. And that was only because I was 7 years old. Jeremy Lin is actually a better story.
There are a lot of Jeremy Lins out there in our business – great personal injury lawyers that are obscure and handling Yorkshire Terrier dog bite cases. Their first problem is the lack of opportunity. Trial lawyers can only do so much with the facts they have. If you don’t have good cases, you will struggle to get consistently great verdicts even if are channeling your inner Gerry Spence.
(The same is true for defense counsel. I’ve tried cases against lawyers considered to the best in Maryland that I thought they were awful or I caught them
on a bad day. I’ve also tried cases against lawyers I thought were brilliant that I know have a very hard time chasing down $120 an hour auto tort insurance clients. It is even harder for defense lawyers in some ways because they don’t get paid and recognized for good results like personal injury lawyers do… unless they really know how to spin their successes.)
They key when you are in this spot is to Jeremy Lin it. (Yes, I’m using his name as a verb, too.) Do the best you can with what you have. Shortly after we started our practice, we tried a case in Baltimore County where a woman was in line at the drive-thru at the bank and got in a rear-end accident. The uncontested testimony was that the at-fault driver was going one mile an hour. Laura and I tried the case together. We threw everything and the kitchen sink at it and we got a $125,000 verdict. We had had better verdicts, but this was our signature verdict. LawyersWeeklyUSA did a cover story on it. We got some attention, more lawyers started referring us cases, in we built from there.
(Looking back, almost 10 years later, I look at all differently. Man, I wish I could not see so many shades of gray. First, I’m a little embarrassed we even took the case. How pathetic is it, on some level, to take 1 mph bumper tap case, anyway? And we are really bragging about getting $125,000? My law firm would never take that case in 2012. Yes, I believed the plaintiff was hurt from the car accident and still do. It was one of those rare, fluke things that happen. Still, we turn down cases all the time where I think the person may have gotten badly hurt from the accident but we don’t think we can prove it. Also, the unspoken implication was that we were such great lawyers we could turn a garbage car accident or another personal injury case into a case just because we were the attorneys. It is a false premise, although a lot of lawyers full of themselves would swear otherwise.)
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