Will Newman (wnewman_at_beckerglynn

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Will Newman is a commercial litigation attorney at Fleischman Bonner & Rocco LLP. He represents clients in disputes involving contracts, employment issues, and products liability matters. He also regularly provides strategic advice to companies in advance of disputes, both to avoid the burdens of litigation and to protect their legal claims and defenses if litigation is inevitable. He is also a contributing editor of the American Bar Association publication, Litigation News, and the author of the commercial litigation blog, Unpredictable.

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted last month

At times, litigators need to persuade their clients, their adversaries, mediators, and juries. But one major audience they need to persuade is judges. These are the people who decide whether their arguments have legal merit, whether their claims can proceed, often whether their claims will succeed or the claims against their clients will be dismissed, and the ground rules for how the litigation will go.

Since judges are such an important part of commercial litigation, I thought I’d share some thoughts on working with judges.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/judges

Working With Judges — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

Part of the reason lawyers are so deferential is because judges have the power to hold lawyers in contempt. And another part of this is because judges ultimately decide major issues in a case, so l...

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted last month

I frequently tell people that litigation is expensive. As a result, many people only litigate disputes concerning large amounts of money, since smaller amounts are not worth the trouble or cost. But some disputes are important to people, even if the amount at stake is low. People care about being disrespected or scammed. And what may be a small amount of money to one person may be significant go another. Luckily, there is a forum for people to dispute small amounts because, in the alternative, people would take matters into their own hands. That forum is small claims court.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/small-claims

Small Claims Court — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

Only certain types of cases qualify for small claims court. Generally, they are disputes over an amount of money below a certain threshold. For example, in New York City, small claims courts hear d...

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GreeceUnited StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 2 months ago

Following my interview with Prof. Ernest Metzger about litigation in Classical Rome, I wanted to go further back in time to learn about litigation in Ancient Athens. Unfortunately, there are no direct flights from New York to any year in the past, let alone ancient times. Plus, even if I arrived there, I wouldn’t understand any Ancient Greek and would panic without cell phone reception. So instead I spoke with Prof. Adriaan Lanni, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies the Ancient Greek legal system to learn about litigation in Ancient Athens.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/Athens

Litigation in Ancient Athens — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

There were no rules of evidence. Instead, each litigant at trial gave a speech and it was somewhat freeform, a little like Judge Judy . These speeches included matters that may not be technically ...

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 2 months ago

Once a litigant wins a litigation, a court grants her a judgment that she may need to enforce. But that judgment may only be used to collect assets within the jurisdiction of the court. This presents an issue for a litigant who wants to use the judgment to collect assets that the judgment debtor keeps somewhere else. What good is a New York judgment if the defendant owns very little in New York, but owns a house in California and keeps a bank account in Florida? Courts address this issue by letting litigants obtain local judgments based on judgments in other courts without needing to re-litigate the entire case.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/domestication

Domesticating Foreign Judgments — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

Litigants often try to use the “procured by fraud” exception to try to re-litigate the merits of a case. They claim that the initial court was deceived by false evidence or testimony and the new co...

Liked by Meghan Warren

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 2 months ago

Computers and robots are replacing people at more and more jobs. Robots can build cars, sew clothes, and tend bar. But what about lawyers? Are computers coming to do litigation, too? I don’t know for sure what the future holds, but there are several ways in which computers are doing their work already and some ways in which they may do more.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/robots

Computers Doing the Job of Lawyers — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

In my experience, technology assisted review does not process the actual document requests that lawyers carefully draft and even litigate. It only processes how a lawyer coded a subset of documents...

Liked by Meghan Warren

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 2 months ago

A theme that appears in some legal advertisements is that the lawyer is tough or belligerent. For example, the blog Above the Law wrote about three different lawyers who each called themselves “The Hammer.” And I assume this theme is meant to address potential clients who may believe that the best kind of lawyer is forceful, combative, and obstinate. Potential clients, for example, like Roger Ailes, who had once said he wanted a “street fighter” as a lawyer instead of “white-shoe marshmallows.”

Lawyers that meet that description exist. But in my experience, however, lawyers who adopt a belligerent persona do not do the best job for their clients. Instead, I believe that this kind of aggressive behavior makes litigation unpleasant, more expensive, and less likely to sway a judge or settle on favorable terms.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/tough

Belligerent Lawyers — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

Bluster often fails to work with opposing counsel. Most cases end in settlement. And so a lawyer has to get the other side to agree to a deal. But bullying opposing counsel will rarely make opposin...

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South AfricaUnited StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 3 months ago

I have already posted about litigation in Africa’s most populous country and its second most populous country. But what about its fifth most populous? Well, now I have. In search of knowledge on the subject, I spoke with Graham Girdwood, an attorney at Group 621 in Johannesburg, to learn about what litigation is like in South Africa.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/south-africa

Litigation in South Africa — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

South African courts cite UK contract law and UK’s rules for evidence. They do this because UK law offers a large body of precedent that courts can follow. They also do this because a lot of the la...

Liked by Meghan Warren

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 3 months ago

Every month, I post on my blog about recent court decisions in commercial cases to illustrate how litigation works. I did it again this month and the link is below.

But I can’t discuss courts and the law in the United States right now without begging my fellow Americans to support senators who will take concrete steps to address the recent abhorrent decision Supreme Court decision and protect women’s rights.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/june-2022

Comments on Recent Cases: June 2022 — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

In litigation, plaintiffs often seek compensation from any party that has the money to pay them. But they do not always articulate a sufficient reason why the defendant with money is the one respon...

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United StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 3 months ago

News outlets frequently report on documents filed in court. But it is common for people to misunderstand what the court filings mean. This is especially true when the filing is not a decision by the judge on the merits of the case. So I thought it would be helpful to talk about some of these filings and what they do and do not mean in litigation.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/misc-filings

Court Filings That Are Not Decisions on the Merits — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

Strategically, parties deny most things in an answer and assert as many affirmative defenses as they can, because if they do not, they may lose the chance to do so later. So people may discuss a de...

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ItalyUnited StatesDisputes / litigation

Posted 3 months ago

I write a blog to let people know what it is really like to represent clients in commercial litigation today, and to update people on recent legal decisions. And nothing screams “today” and “recent” more to me than Ancient Rome.

So I recently spoke with Ernest Metzger, a professor at the University of Glasgow, about how Romans in its Classical period litigated their commercial disputes and the influence that system had on dispute resolution today.

https://www.unpredictableblog.com/blog/rome

Litigation in Classical Rome — Unpredictable

unpredictableblog.com

The true “expenses” of Roman litigation were in time and reputation. There were no filing fees and such. Advocates in Rome did not typically charge fees: advocacy was provided as part of a system o...

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Will Newman
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