Quote Quoting Harold99
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Disclaimer: I may be wrong about you because our relationship is very disconnected. So if I have you wrong, my apologies. You offer a lot of good stuff here and kudos for not bashing like the 5-10 trolls do.
The thing is that what you see on these forums is not what you see in litigation and trial. People here generally ask what is is legal to do or what the law allows. For that, the statutes, regulations, and case law that tells you what the law is matters greatly. Most people, to their credit, want to do things the right way and want to follow the law. So for that, they need to know what the law is.

Moreover, what the law is always important to any trial. A trial lawyer who ignores that and thinks he or she can simply bluff a jury does so at his/her peril. Of course persuasion and making the most of the evidence that favors my client is important, but to be truly successful a good lawyer has to tie that in with the law. Among other things, that matters because should the case go to appeal, it won't be a jury reviewing it. It will be a panel of judges looking at the trial record and those judges are very much focused on the law. You have to keep in mind that litigation does not end with the jury verdict.

I get that you are going off what you have evidently seen in a few trials you have been involved with or attended. But what you see there is only a fraction of what goes into litigation. Most nonlawyers watching a trial miss the significance of a number of things that they see at a trial, and they of course have no idea what takes place before and after that trial. Litigation is the whole process, from evaluating the case when the client comes in the door to the final appeals decision, and not just what you see at the trial. But the impression you have of what litigation involves isn't quite accurate. You seem overemphasize bluffing a jury. The law and facts do matter. Simply being an eloquent speaker to try to win the hearts of the jury is not enough to succeed. It's certainly useful, of course, but you need more than that. You are putting too much stock in that and not enough on the law and evidence that is the foundation of any trial. You need persuasion, evidence and the law to succeed in trying cases. That's why so much effort is put by lawyers on framing the evidence they have to line up with the law. If you watch good lawyers in trial, you will see that is exactly what they do: they set up their case — the story they tell and the evidence they present — to match up with the law. So yes, I tell people in this forum what the law is because that's the starting point for any legal matter. How things might play out in trial is another matter and the outcome of which is impossible to guess from just what is put in forum post. But perhaps I need to make that distinction more clear in the future given your comments.

You can't get a sense of what a lawyer does in litigation from posts here. This is not courtroom after all. You have to see what the lawyer does in litigating cases — and that means far more than just seeing a trial, btw — since much of litigation takes place outside the trial and moreover more than 90% of all cases, civil and criminal, settle and never reach trial.

Think of it this way. There is no way I could really assess your work as a contractor without actually seeing it. If you had a habit of posting truly wrong information about contracting then I might see that you weren't good. But apart from that, I'd have to see your work and be knowledgeable enough about contracting to know what to look for to know if you were truly good. Same thing with a lawyer. To know how well a lawyer does in litigation you need to actually see what he/she does in litigation and have enough knowledge about litigation — the entire process — to be able to know what to look for and how to judge what the lawyer does. Seeing posts on a message board isn't going to be helpful in judging either the contractor or the lawyer. All I'm suggesting here is that you can't say whether I'm good or bad at trial work from these posts. I'm certainly not asking you presume I'm good. I know that you can't make that determination as you've not seen what I do in litigation. I'm simply saying you shouldn't presume that I'm not good for the same reason — you've not seen what I do in litigation.

And I thank you for your comment that I offer a lot of "good stuff here" and recognizing that I try not to bash people. That is ultimately my goal in these forums: to give people some accurate, useful information and point them in the right direction to resolve their issues without attacking them or making them feel bad for asking their questions.