It’s not so much struggling draft after draft, but it is intensively understanding the facts. Like a writer, you’ve gotta do your research. You’ve gotta understand what the facts are before you can begin to construct a narrative. Because the critical thing about the narrative is that it’s got to withstand attack.

Most people, when they write, they don’t have to withstand a concerted attack by really well-prepared and able advocates on the other side. When you’re doing the kind of cases that we do, you know that the narrative that you are going to come up with is going to be subject to intense scrutiny. So what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to come up with a narrative that both persuades but is also consistent with the facts so that it can’t be undercut.

So the first thing that you have to do is you have to understand the facts. I mean, really, in a sense, we practice facts more than we practice law. The law is important. The law sometimes gets argued very creatively, but more cases are won or lost on factual development than anything else.