Techniques to save clients megabucks

Thank you, Myron Moskovitz, for your "Biting the Hand - Redux." I couldn't agree with you more. A couple extra bucks up front can save millions in the long run!

Many years ago, I was employed as in-house litigation counsel at Bank of America in San Francisco. We tried our own cases all over Northern California, and generally speaking, when we entered courtrooms did not usually receive standing ovations or even a smile from the local audience. The Bank was a tough client to represent, especially by us non-local counsel in the less populated counties.

There came a day when Providence provided us litigation "troops on the ground" with an "awesome" leader in the person of retired Court of Appeal Justice Winslow Christian, who after retirement from the Court became the Bank's inaugural Director of Litigation.

One of the things Winslow drummed into us was that our job in the trial court was to make the best appellate record we could. He also tutored us in techniques that might help our inherently unpopular client appear more reasonable in the Court of Appeal, or even the Supreme Court, should it come to that.

At times those techniques seemed counterintuitive to litigators like me, but I can tell you from personal experience, what Mr. Moskovitz is suggesting can save clients, especially large institutional ones, megabucks!

In one extremely contentious case in a Central Valley county where I represented the Bank and its local branch manager, I sometimes reluctantly did what I was told, with of course some inevitable rhetorical flourishes, which coming for the "big city lawyer" often landed with a thud before the local jury.

But after more or less doing what I had been told, and whopping plaintiff's verdict, the retired judge who had been brought in to preside over the locally infamous case granted us a JNOV, which was affirmed by the Court of Appeal; review denied by the California Supreme Court, one Justice dissenting!

While preparing the JNOV motion, Winslow "suggested" that we retain appellate counsel to "help" me with the papers, and, lo and behold, they became appellate counsel when the plaintiffs appealed. One of them later herself became a Court of Appeal Justice.

I will forever appreciate The Honorable Winslow Christian as a lawyer, judge, boss, man and friend. We should all be so lucky to have a mentor like him.

And Bank of America's shareholders, board of directors, chairman, general counsel and countless others who don't even know it, appreciated the experience he brought to us.