If you are a lawyer, you may wish to consult with us about preparing for your own trial or hire us to try the case for your firm as your trial counsel. We cannot accept a case for trial unless we are engaged at least six weeks before the trial call.
William Markham has extensive experience trying cases and a superb track record in the trials that he has conducted over the years. With sufficient notice, he can become the lead trial attorney in a pending case and expertly try it to conclusion, using the firm’s proven system for organizing cases and presenting them at trial.
For small and even medium-sized cases, we typically rely on a spare team, sending to court only a lead trial attorney, a trial paralegal, and a trial technician. These three professionals must collaborate closely as a team and in a manner that calls attention not to themselves, but to the witnesses and the exhibits, save for special exceptions, when the jurors should be hanging on every word spoken by the trial attorney. In larger cases, we use the same approach, except that we can dispatch a larger team of professionals to trial, where each professional will have responsibility for specified proceedings and tasks.
The entire effort depends on a successful underlying strategy, the adroit use of trial procedures, and the skillful handling of evidence, and all of these tasks in turn depend on the proficient use of a properly prepared electronic trial notebook, which we deem necessary to competent trial work.
We enjoy taking our cases to trial. Doing so is an invigorating challenge each time. We have found from experience that judges and juries at trial tend to reach fair decisions on the merits after seeing for themselves what the witnesses and attorneys have to say about the dispute at hand. Our task at trial is to organize the evidence, present it skillfully, and make sense of it all in the manner that will best help our client to obtain the most favorable possible outcome under the circumstances of the case. If you wish, you can read more elsewhere on this site about our approach to litigation and the proper handling and presentation of evidence at trial.
In the end, conducting a trial is not simply a series of techniques (although this work cannot be done properly without a mastery of the necessary techniques). Rather, conducting a trial requires a spirit of justice, an ability to recount confusing or tangled facts in a way that makes everything clear, and a talent for connecting the dots in a way that holds everyone’s attention and wins their sympathy. It is all about telling your client’s story in a manner that is fully supported by the evidence and that elicits the understanding, approval, and compassion, or at least the lenience and forgiveness, of a bored group of restless, impaneled jurors, who by the end of the trial often wish only to go home, unless you have done your work well, in which case they will thoroughly understand the case and want to do the right thing because it is their duty and also in their power to do so. We embrace trials and always look forward to our next one.
If you seek trial attorneys, we welcome your call and will offer a free initial consultation about trying your case for you.