I’ve always been a writer in addition to being a trial lawyer, of course, being a trial lawyer has consumed most of my time but the very essay I wrote was in defense of lawyers. It was in 1979, first essay I had written and The New York Times published it, and I still like it. It’s called If You Hate Lawyers Read This. And I thought it was an extremely supportive essay for my profession. And over the years I’ve written another 100 or more articles and essays, I’ve been published a lot in litigation magazine.

Around 1999 or 2000 I decided I wanted to write a book about trial skills and it took me – I am a writer who needs an editor and I’m an incredibly slow writer. I have the audacity to think that I’ve never written a sentence that I can’t make better so I write very slowly. I also read slowly, which is another issue and we can visit that at a time when you’re talking about disabled lawyers.

Anyway, so it took me five years and I got that to the ABA. I was going to do an update of the book, a second edition, which was due in September of 2015. I was going to do an update recounting the procedural hurdles and how they cam about. And I studied everything from the field code to the 1937, I think ’37 federal rules of procedure and how everything _____. And I read it in September when it was due of 2015, truly the most boring thing I had ever read. Horrible. So I didn’t send it in.

And then, at Christmas Joe Jamail died. I don’t know if everybody knows who Jamail was but at the time he got the largest verdict in the history of the country in the ’80s. He was a real character. They didn’t like him in Delaware. He was a Texas lawyer and they didn’t like him in Delaware and banned him from practicing there when he insulted a witness during a deposition. But Joe was a great lawyer and he passed away and, in a few months, I decided as part of the second edition I would examine the 25,000-page transcript of how he won a case called Pennzoil versus Texaco and got an $11.5 billion verdict. And it would describe his extraordinary talents as a cross examiner and teach along the way.

And then, I also added my long excerpts from two of my cases, one of them the case that I tried for Ackroyd and John Alexander about on Crystal Head vodka. And so that came out in November of 2018 and I’m told by the Bar that it’s selling well and among the top sellers on litigation. Each chapter is devoted to a trial skill and it’s all preceded by how to get ready for trial and how, in my mind, the most important rule of persuasion is when you get a case think inside the box. Always think about the evidence that you get put together, the answers you get in depositions and so on, how is it going to affect those jurors?