How To Prepare For A Hearing

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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, it’s Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where our aim is to make that transition from law school to your professional career as an attorney, as easy as possible. And to point out that the practice of law is actually fun when it’s done correctly. And when you’re busy using the success cycle, which we talk about in a lot of our podcasts are referred to anyway today we are going to answer a question that you may get into eventually, maybe sooner than later.

And that is how do you prepare for a hearing or a trial? How do you prepare for a hearing or a trial?

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Scott Benton: Now, as a new attorney, chances are that you’re not going to be thrown into any kind of trial situation where you’re the lead attorney, that may take some time to [00:01:00] actually have a case that goes that far and goes all the way to trial, a lot of times cases are settled.

Most of the time I’d say cases are settled before they reach the trial phase. Most cases have a lot of other sort of conversations before that sometimes both sides are going to disagree enough that it just ends up in a courtroom. But for the most part, as a new attorney, you are going to most likely encounter hearings.

And hearings are discussing a much smaller portion of a case than would a trial. A trial may go for several days, maybe even weeks, maybe longer. A hearing often is just maybe an hour, a couple hours. It’s much shorter. Not sometimes it’s not even an hour long. It’s a much shorter period of time.

So you want to make sure that you are prepared for both hearings and trials down the line. But you want to make sure that you’ve kind of done everything that you don’t always know [00:02:00] what to do to prepare we’re going to cover this is a very broad scope by the way there are so many components to trial prep.

We’re not going to be able to cover that during the span of this podcast. And so this is material that we’re just going to have to return to over and over and over again, because it is such a broad subject, but we are going to talk about a couple of important components that you’re going to have to consider.

So that you can at least do hearings comfortably and show up for hearings and make sure that you’re properly prepared for those. And remember, any kind of prep that you do on a case, whether it’s for a hearing or a trial, is billable to your client. That is proper work time because you need to move the case forward and this is part of moving that case forward, the work that you’re going to do for a particular hearing.

Now also keep in mind that there are courses that you can take. So there’s sort of like a trial school that you can go to. If you do any kind of Google search in your area, wherever you are, you’re going to see that there are many options [00:03:00] for courses that you can take, whether it’s in person or online, you should really investigate these because you want to make sure you have that kind of procedural vocabulary of what you need to do in order to prepare for hearing or a trial.

And there are plenty of courses that you can do that with. There are also CLEs if you go to your bar organizations and you’re looking up the CLE courses that you can take a lot of times. There’s not just one trial prep course, but there are several.

I’ve, seen them where they break them up into components and you can during your CLE completions, you can probably take all of them. I’m sure you’d get a lot out of that as well, but there are also dedicated trial schools and of course, books and other resources that you can consume, but you want to make sure that this is an active direction that you’re going because learning how to prepare for a trial or a hearing, which is really what we’re talking about. But, learning how to prepare for trial and then being in one, what [00:04:00] you need to do while you’re in a trial is very, very important information for you to have. So you want to use all available resources, even if that’s mentoring attorneys or supervisors at work who have been through many trials themselves.

You want to make sure to utilize those resources because you don’t want to be caught blindsided in terms of going into a trial and really having no idea what you’re doing.

Now, there are two components that I want to talk to you about in this podcast that is going to be helpful information for you when it comes to hearing and trial prep.

And the first thing that I want to talk about is what’s called scope. In a hearing, the scope of a hearing is going to be much, much smaller than the scope of a trial. So hearing might be addressing maybe one or two issues about, let’s pick a topic about discovery for instance. And that is the entire scope of that hearing.

You’re not there to solve the entire case. You’re not there to come to an [00:05:00] agreement about who gets what. That’s not the point of hearing. The scope of a hearing is going to be much, much, much smaller. Now, the reason that you want to know that is because your client isn’t always going to understand the idea of scope.

So it becomes really important that you explain that to your client and describe what the scope is for that particular hearing, because a lot of times your clients, not always, of course, but a lot of times your clients really don’t have any reference points to the legal world. They don’t understand the difference between a hearing and a trial.

They just think that if a judge is involved, or a courtroom, let’s say you’re doing this in person in a courtroom and it’s not even, you know, virtual on a Zoom call or something like that. Their understanding of the way a courtroom works is very much predicated on what they’ve seen on TV. So in their mind from watching shows like maybe, I don’t know, there’s all these courtroom shows.

So [00:06:00] maybe it’s Judge Judy or if you go back far enough, The People’s Court with judge Wapner there’s a ton of these shows, but they’re usually about a half an hour long and there are three cases on the docket. And so they’re spending really less than 10 minutes per case in order to present the case, argue about it, make a decision, and then the final sort of gavel comes down and that closes the case.

And you do all of that in about 10 minutes. And so people that really don’t spend on cases or in courthouses or on legal procedure or really understand how the law works in their mind. There’s no difference between a hearing and a trial. So you want to make sure to explain all of that to them and again get down to What the scope of the trial is and make sure that they understand we’re not there to address several other issues.

These other 20 issues, for instance, we’re just focusing in on this one issue on this hearing and the hearing is going to last maybe 15 or 20 [00:07:00]minutes or whatever time you think it’s going to last. So it’s really important that scope becomes part of your conversation with your client.

Now, the second important component to preparing for a hearing or a trial is the notice of service. You want to make sure that everybody who requires a notice has been served with that notice and that you have a proof of service that’s on file and you have a copy of that proof of service with you during the hearing at all time. And the reason that you want to have that is because, well, first of all, you need to send out these notices.

Otherwise the court really can’t do anything. And so the judge and the court, they’re going to make sure that proper service has been done. And your proof of service is that demonstration to the judge and to the court that the notices have been properly sent out, that service was done.

So that means the court can proceed, they can make decisions, they [00:08:00] can operate like a court can. And you want to have that copy because sometimes mistakes are made. They’re just simply made. Maybe on the notes that the judge has. The judge looks and notices that on the notes it says that proper service hasn’t been made.

Things like that will happen. So, in that case, if proper service hasn’t been made, then that’s really the end of your time with that judge. They’ll probably be pretty annoyed with you because you’ve now wasted their time, the docket’s kind of now messed up, the judge doesn’t, you’ve made the judge look bad, you’ve made the court look bad.

The judge’s supervisor likely is going to come back around and be kind of concerned that the cases aren’t moving as quickly as they need to. So, you want to make sure that you have that proof of service on file and a copy of it with you in order to demonstrate that all service has been made so that the hearing can move forward.

So there are two primary components here. There’s the [00:09:00] scope that you want to make sure you understand and that your client understands that the scope of a case is really much smaller than the scope of a trial, which could go for days or weeks or whatever it is. And that you have that proof of service notice that’s on file, that you’ve served everybody that needs to be served on a case.

And that you are ready to go for this hearing or for this trial. So, remember, you need to educate yourself. You gotta go to trial school. You gotta learn how to be in a trial and how to prep for a trial. You can take CLE courses that will give you a lot of this very valuable information. You can ask your supervising attorney.

You can ask your mentors that you’re working with. What do I need to know in order to prepare for a hearing or a trial and what do I need to know when I’m there, whether it’s virtual on a Zoom call or it’s in person.

So I hope this has been helpful and I hope that this has sort of explained and answered the question of what do you need to know in order to prepare for a hearing or a trial.[00:10:00]

I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. If you like this podcast and you’d like to receive an alert every time we put out a new episode, you can go to our website. Our website is Classroom2Courtroom.com. That’s classroom, the number two, courtroom. com and there you can put in your name and your email address.

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Until then, we hope you will join us in making the world a better place, to be. one client at a time. Thank you so much. Take care now.

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