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[00:00:07] Scott Benton: Hey everyone, Scott Benton here.
[00:00:09] Scott Benton: How are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney and Where we make the practice of law fun. Now today, we’re going to take a look at the value of winning as well as losing a trial. winning and losing.
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[00:01:14] Scott Benton: So let’s say that you’ve started your career as a litigation attorney and eventually you get to a point where you’re going to take a case all the way to trial and this is going to be your first trial. So you work diligently to prepare for it. You deal with all the trial fear that it creates.
[00:01:29] Scott Benton: leads up to that big moment where you find yourself in a courtroom in front of a judge for the first time and you’re in that position of lead attorney for your client. And when your first trial is over, it turns out that all of your hard work actually paid off and you won, which means that you’re happy. Your client is happy. The firm that you work for is happy. Your parents are happy. Your law school professors are happy. It seems like the whole world’s happy that you won this case in the court of law.
[00:01:54] Scott Benton: And from it, maybe a week later, you sit down and you go through every step that you took [00:02:00] that ultimately achieved this victory. You go back over all the steps carefully because by virtue of winning that case, you recognize the value in revisiting your work to duplicate it for any future cases that you work on. Since the case was won, naturally you’re going to see value in the work you and your firm did to ultimately realize that win. Then, let’s say a month later, another one of your cases goes to trial. And this time, just like you did with your previous trial, you spend a lot of time on the trial prep.
[00:02:31] Scott Benton: And you use some of the ideas from the case that you won to get ready for trial. However, once you go into the courtroom, a few things go unexpectedly sideways and you end up losing the trial. This time around, while your client’s happy with your work, they’re unhappy about the results, of course.
[00:02:48] Scott Benton: Your firm doesn’t roll out the fanfare like they did last time and your parents don’t even call to find out how you’re doing. Everyone just wants to forget all about it.
[00:02:57] Scott Benton: So you’re actually at a crossroads now [00:03:00] because you might be tempted to forget All about it as well and not sit down like you did with the previous trial in order to reflect on the case and determine what went well and what could have probably been improved upon. It might be more difficult to do a deep dive on a case that you’ve lost than on a case that you’ve won because it might seem there’s just no value in looking closer at the cases that you’ve lost.
[00:03:24] Scott Benton: But as far as your ability to accelerate your career as a litigation attorney goes and to become competent, confident and highly skilled on your future trials, there’s really no better way to get there than by looking at and analyzing the trials that you both won and lost.
[00:03:41] Scott Benton: Whatever happens to your case, use the attorney in order to grow and in order to grow rapidly, you need to spend some time inside the space of both outcomes and breaking them down to get a better grasp on how ultimately to sharpen your legal skills. So it’s a little like that [00:04:00] old quote that’s usually attributed to history and it says, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
[00:04:06] Scott Benton: Now, going back over your trials and taking a closer look at what went well and what could be improved upon means accelerating the development of your skills and your abilities to navigate the legal services that you provide your clients to such a high level that your effectiveness as an attorney, it’s simply going to skyrocket dramatically.
[00:04:28] Scott Benton: For attorneys who do not go back after their trials are over and do not learn from their work are either going to take a very long time to get good at their job or they’re just simply going to stagnate or maybe even just make the same mistakes over and over again. In fact, when it comes to learning what to do and maybe more importantly what not to do, the trials that you lose have much more value where growth is concerned than the cases that you win. Because a lot of the time with cases that you lose, there’s pain or discomfort or some kind [00:05:00] of negative outcome, maybe even embarrassment that’s associated with that case that you really never want to repeat again, which becomes an absolutely excellent motivator to really learn a particular legal area or maybe a courtroom dynamic that you might have missed the first time around.
[00:05:18] Scott Benton: So with that in mind, and maybe as a little bit more of a thought experiment, the more painful a trial is, especially if you lost the case, the better it is, because that’s when you really learn those valuable lessons. So there’s a tremendous amount of value in lost cases that you really don’t want to miss.
[00:05:38] Scott Benton: As painful as it might be to go back and look at them. Make sure you squeeze out all of the value that you can from those experiences and get those teachings implanted in your head where they won’t be easily forgotten.
[00:05:51] Scott Benton: In fact, when you talk to litigators, even top litigators, who seem like they probably never made a single mistake in any case during their entire [00:06:00] career, and you ask them about how they got so good at practicing law, they’re usually going to tell you all about the boneheaded mistakes that they made that really taught them how to become an excellent attorney.
[00:06:12] Scott Benton: And most of these stories are going to have some extremely painful moments or episodes with lessons in them that they just never forgot. And they might be so painful that they’re going to be lessons that even you’ll never forget as well. And it’s why celebrating wins and celebrating losses can be so extremely valuable.
[00:06:32] Scott Benton: So try to remember that on the path of providing excellent legal services to your clients and for them during trials, not only will you find an absolute treasure trove of value in the trials that you win, but arguably you’re going to find even more powerful and more important teachings in the trials that you actually lose.
[00:06:53] Scott Benton: So don’t miss out on the opportunity to look very closely at all of your courtroom experiences, whether or not [00:07:00] you ultimately were victorious.
[00:07:01] Scott Benton: My name is Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for watching this episode. If you’re finding this to be valuable information and you’d like to receive an alert every time we put out a new episode, you can go to our website.
[00:07:15] Scott Benton: Our website is classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the number two. courtroom dot com. You can leave us your contact information there and we will send out an alert. So that you know a new episode is available. Don’t forget to share and subscribe. And we hope you’ll join us on our next episode of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast.
[00:07:32] Scott Benton: And we also hope you’ll join us in the meantime of making the world a better place one client at a time. Thank you so much.
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