By Thomas G. Glick
I attended and graduated from a public school and I received an excellent education. However, I am often struck by the fact that of all the lessons I learned in high school, the vast majority that I use in my everyday life, flow not from the curriculum but instead from an extracurricular activity, speech and debate. This is true in the most intuitive way in that my duties as an attorney bring me to a courtroom where public speaking skills are beneficial. Moreover, my recent term as President of the Bar Association required that I make frequent public presentations. However, focusing only on the public speaking experience gained from high school speech and debate competitions (and later in college) overlooks the most important lessons I learned from speech and debate; the ability to critically think.
Most people are familiar with the famous line from the movie, The Paper Chase when Professor Kingsfield (John Houseman) states that the purpose of law school is primarily to teach you to “think like a lawyer”. My interpretation of this phrase is that law school is about learning critical thinking. It is having the ability to not just know what the legal precedent is but being able to ascertain, then present, the respective value of potentially conflicting legal precedent. This skill, more than any other, was highlighted throughout my education as well as during my participation in speech and debate. Speech and debate required that I research form and enunciate arguments on both sides of any given question including arguments that I did not personally believe in.
In retrospect, I think that this was the greatest educational benefit I learned in high school. (I do not intend to devalue much of the other education I received from my high school as much of it serves me well in a more practical context. I would also acknowledge that critical thinking skills were taught in high school but speech and debate made it so the lessons had to be learned in order to excel in head-to-head competition and not merely in the more ephemeral competition in achieving good grades.)
05/4/11 12:57 PM
Uncategorized | Comments Off |
Permalink
High School Speech & Debate For Future Lawyers; Not Just Public Speaking Skills
By Thomas G. Glick
A lot of clients call me looking for contingency fee agreements. You hear a lot of talk about contingency fees. In part because of lawyers that are advertising them. Lawyers that use contingency fee agreements typically advertise as “if you don’t win, you don’t pay any attorney fees” (though you may pay costs). The problem with contingency fees is that lawyers take on additional risk for them. Many clients think of contingency fee agreements as an excellent opportunity for people who would otherwise not be able to afford a lawyer to gain access to the justice system, and they are. However, it is important to recognize that there is also a down-side to contingency fee agreements for clients.
As a rule, in my probate and trust practice, I do not take contingency fee cases for a variety of reasons. Clients are often let down by this because they wish that I was able to do that in order to represent them. In a contingency fee case, a lawyer is taking on more risk in representing a client. That is, the lawyer that takes on a contingency fee case, knows that if he loses he does not get paid. All risks have costs. He might well spend hundreds of hours working on the case in order to prepare for trial or even prepare settlement negotiations. The risk that they won’t get paid causes lawyers to increase their percentage fee. For this reason, contingency fee cases result in higher fees for attorneys.
In order to run a successful overall law practice, attorneys that rely on contingency fee cases must collect enough in the cases they win to make up for the cases that they lose. This means that if you have a case that you can win, you pay more money to your lawyer in order to achieve that victory because of the risk that you will lose.
Instead of contingency fee cases, I try to set my hourly rate at a reasonable level in order to assure that my clients are paying appropriately for my services and enough so that I can pay my staff and other overhead costs, but without the need to cover any additional risk.
If you want to learn more about contingency fee agreements from the lawyer’s perspective, in order to gain a better perspective from the client, you may wish to read the following articles from the American Bar Association and The Missouri Bar.
04/13/11 8:50 AM
Litigation, Probate, Uncategorized | Comments Off |
Permalink
Contingency Fee Agreements – The Part They Don’t Tell You
