Sunday, August 23, 2009

Five best books about trial lawyers at work

The trial lawyer John Quinn is the founder and managing ­partner of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges LLP in Los Angeles.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of books about trial lawyers at work. One title on the list:
Courting Justice
by David Boies
Hyperion, 2004

In "Courting Justice," David Boies captures the life of a business trial lawyer, especially the way it often ­requires the simultaneous immersion in multiple, unrelated ­proceedings and different casts of characters—all of which the lawyer has to keep straight. One of the most interesting cases he describes is the antitrust action that the Justice Department, ­represented by Boies, brought against Microsoft in 1998. Bill Gates, who might have been a powerful voice for the company, was effectively neutered as a trial witness, thanks to his overly clever fencing with Boies at his deposition. It's a basic lesson that all litigators learn—at least the successful ones: A witness cannot be credible at trial if he has not been credible at deposition. The book brims with such hard-won insights.
Read about the other four books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue