I want to give you an example of me against a big firm.

Some years ago, I was trying a case against the largest firm in Phoenix. This is a firm that has offices in multiple jurisdictions in the United States, and they were very condescending to me. They thought that they were better than me just because they’re big.

They had hired a Harvard economist to be their expert witness. And when we went to trial, they had six lawyers sitting on the other side of the courtroom, and it was just little old me and my paralegal and my client on the other side of the courtroom.

Well, those six lawyers on the other side of the courtroom— not a one of them had in their individual head the entire case. They’d broken it up into little tiny pieces, and so not one of them had everything assembled in their own head. Only one guy gets to stand at the podium and speak, and that one guy at the podium better have all of the case in his head or he’s gonna run into a chuck hole in the road. There’s going to be something that’s going to trip him up. He’s going to say something that he shouldn’t say.

So you can compete with the big law firm because with the computer you can match mastery of the documents. In fact, they were fishing for documents on the other side of the courtroom; they couldn’t find them. And they had stacks of paper over there that they were sorting through. I had my chronology. I knew where they all were.

And the jury didn’t know that I’m just a nobody, one-man law firm. All they could see was that I knew what I was talking about in the courtroom. You gotta seem to the jury like you know what you’re talking about. If you don’t seem that way, they don’t believe you.

I’m persuaded that jurors, particularly jurors today, aren’t searching for who’s telling the truth. They’re trying to decide which lawyer is telling the truth, because they don’t really assimilate everything that goes on in the courtroom over the course of a five, six, seven week long trial, which most of my cases are. So they’re struggling with what to believe.

And if it’s lots of documents and lots of experts and this expert saying that, you’ve got to be very careful with what you present and in a fashion that the jury can understand it. So the big firm, I think, is a disadvantage for the client as opposed to a firm like mine, because they know I’m going to have the case in my head, and they’re not going to have to worry about not having a person on their team who understands the whole case.

I often use a metaphor when I talk to clients, because you’ve got to make them—metaphors, similes, figures of speech—these all help juries and clients understand what happens.

I tell them: going to trial, you’re like going fishing. There’s a pier, you got a fishing pole, the hook. You need bait.

Where’s bait? It’s over there in the field of discovery.

So if you’re a big law firm with lots of lawyers, you have all your minions—all the lawyers, all the new lawyers—go to the field of discovery and start turning rocks over, looking for worms. I call those guys rock turners. They’ll go through that whole field looking for every worm they can find. And then when they filled their cans with all these worms, they go through it again, looking for more worms.

I tell my client: tell me where the worms are. And I go turn that rock over and find the worms that I need for the courtroom.

Because if you dump all those worms on the jury, who knows if they’re gonna latch on to your hook instead of what you’ve chummed the water with.

I get my can full of worms, bait my hook, and drop in the water—go to the courtroom. That’s what trial work is.