Page 8 of Two Kinds of Stranger

She crawled forward, onto the street.

People passing by.

Knees and shoes and legs all around her, a blur, as she crawled toward the curb.

Voices. The sidewalk. And then the blue sky.

Elly saw a face before her eyes. She was lying on her back, and the homeless man she had given some money to was kneeling over her.

He looked concerned, and he was saying something, but Elly couldn’t understand a word. More faces appeared, obscuring the sky above.

Strangers.

Their lips moving. But Elly couldn’t hear anything.

Then black.

And a deeper, darker silence.

2

Eddie

I know two things about civil litigation.

You can win a case in the parking lot.

Civil litigation is anything but civilized.

Give me criminal law any day. With a prosecutor, you know exactly where you stand. They are going to try to bury you and your client. There’s no subterfuge. It’s two armies standing on opposite hills. They charge at each other and meet in the valley. There’s a victor and a loser and a lot of blood left on the ground.

With civil law, your opponent can behave like your best friend, your worst enemy, or they simply hide in the long grass with a rifle aimed at your head. The only thing you can be sure of is that when your opposing counsel opens their mouth, what comes out is anything but the truth. The high-roller civil defense attorneys who represent Fortune 500 companies, insurance conglomerates and pharmaceutical giants, wear five-thousand-dollar hand-cut Italian suits like plate-steel armor. They’ve all been in the wars. They’ve seen things. They don’t shake easily.

I’ve got a reputation as a trial lawyer, and before that as a con artist, but I’m still small-time compared to these guys. Oh, and by the way, they are nearly all guys. There’s more testosterone in a Wall Street civil litigation department than the locker room at the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

Yeah, civil law ain’t civilized in the least.

Then there’s the real battleground. If you can win a case without stepping into the courtroom, so much the better.

I liked parking lots for all major battles.

In every case ever tried, people make the decisions. Judges, or juries. You have to play the people and not the law or the facts.

All good lawyers know that you need a working knowledge of every judge’s personality. Judges are like violins–if you don’t know how to play them properly, they can make one hell of a racket. Great lawyers–they know a lot more. Like the best parking lot close to the courthouse. That’s where the real knowledge pays off.

It was a cold, sunny Monday morning and I was on my way to Kings County civil court for a case discussion with the plaintiff’s lawyers and the judge. My client was Morrie Sirico. He owns an Italian deli in Queens, passed on to him by his father, and his grandfather before him. The place opened in the fifties selling Italian cold cuts, cannolis, tiramisu, coffee and cakes. A sense of community grew around the deli. Old timers can be found there most mornings, blowing steam off their espressos and risking a dollar on the dominoes. Six months ago, the plaintiff, Neville Carmichael, is in the neighborhood and he happens to visit Morrie’s. He buys some good cheese and is on his way out the door when he slips on some prosciutto, which somehow found its way onto the floor, and he lands on his back, injuring himself. The paramedics are called to Morrie’s, and shortly after Neville goes to see a lawyer.

The lawyer sends a letter to Morrie claiming personal injuries for his client and seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.

A week later, Morrie lands in hot water with the insurance investigator. They’re not happy with Morrie’s paperwork, or his face, so they refuse to indemnify. Now Morrie was facing alawsuit for half a million dollars in damages for personal injury and he doesn’t have insurance cover.

Civil cases settle. The vast majority of them anyway. That’s not to say the settlement is fair or that justice has been done, but money has been handed over to someone who was wronged or injured. In civil law, it’s all about the money.

How do you get the most money for your client? Or, if you’re a defense attorney, how do you pay the least amount?

You play the game.

Sometimes that’s down to being a good attorney.