In the year 2001, David Ball on Damages took our community of approximately 100,000 plaintiffs’ lawyers by storm. It is fair to say that with one little noticed exception, Damages was the first book to provide us with comprehensive strategic advice on how to deal with the complex issues we face when we try injury cases. The advice was not only comprehensive, but spot-on.
After working for years with many of the best trial lawyers in the country, it would have been understandable if David had kept what he learned to himself. Instead, he took the best techniques and solutions he had developed and wrote an accessible, practical guide for plaintiffs’ lawyers of all levels of experience, in all practice areas, in all regions of the country. Almost overnight, he raised the level of practice of the plaintiffs’ bar. And almost overnight, lawyers began referring to Damages as the “Bible” of the plaintiffs’ bar.
David went on to develop the Reptile system of advocacy with his friend Don Keenan, become a mentor to Rules of the Road, and write two more highly successful editions of Damages.
He could have stopped there. Or, he could have coasted along, writing additional editions of Damages on his own, while continuing his highly successful consulting business. But David is too intellectually curious and too intellectually generous to do that. Instead, he wanted to take his ground-breaking body of work to a new level.
Who better to help than his long-time protégé, Artemis Malekpour, and two of the most creative trial lawyers of our time, Courtney and Nick Rowley? These three had already taken David’s ideas and pushed them into new incarnations, while coming up with innovations of their own. This was a recipe for an extraordinary book; but for added spice, three more legal pioneers were asked to contribute: Dorothy Clay Sims, Aaron Broussard, and Pate Skene.
This book lives up to the reputations of its authors. If you are reading this, you want to be a better trial lawyer. Maybe you have tried a hundred cases, maybe none, but the fact that you are reading this book sets you apart from the majority of plaintiffs’ lawyers—perhaps only 10 percent actually read books on trial practice. You want to learn litigation and trial tactics that will cause you to settle more favorably or win more often. You think reading this book can help you do that, and you are right.
What you hold in your hand is an extraordinary toolbox of trial tactics and techniques. Importantly, you are given not just the techniques—solutions to the problems we face—but also the reasoning of the authors as to why these techniques work. This gives you an opportunity many “how-to” legal books don’t give: an opportunity to cultivate and advance your own emotional intelligence.
What is on display here is the emotional intelligence of some of the best legal strategists of our time. As they exchange views about some of the vexing issues we face, you will see not just how they solve a particular problem, but why that particular solution makes sense to them.
Great advocates have always known, even if they couldn’t put it into words, that cases are not usually won by clever arguments but by a jury’s emotional connection to the people and issues in the case. As you read this book, pay attention not just to the techniques being discussed but to the explanations given by these super-stars. You will get a good, long look at what has made them so successful.
Can emotional intelligence be taught or learned? I believe so. We learn what we pay attention to. So, as you read this smorgasbord of trial techniques, pay attention to the humanity that drives the techniques. You will be looking at the psyches of these authors—the fountainhead of their brilliance and success. Do not overlook it, it is a great gift they have given us.
Rick Friedman
Bremerton, Washington
September, 2021
