Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts: Fifth Edition.

• Author: Haig, Robert

Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts: Fifth Edition

Edited by Robert Haig

Reviewed by Ed Comey

Remember the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? To win a million dollars, contestants had to answer a series of progressively harder multiple-choice questions. If they were stumped, contestants could reach for a "lifeline," they could "phone a friend," or (in some versions of the show) "ask an expert." With his latest edition of Business and Commercial Litigation in Federal Courts, Robert Haig has offered federal court litigators a lifeline.

Armed with the fifth edition of Business & Commercial Litigation, federal court practitioners can now "ask an expert" when stumped by substantive, procedural, or tactical litigation questions. Actually, make that 373 experts. Coming in at 16 volumes, and just under 20,000 total pages, Business & Commercial Litigation is a repository for the wisdom of nearly three dozen judges, as well as hundreds of practitioners from some of the country's leading law firms.

In his forward, Editor-in-Chief Robert L. Haig boasts the "publication is unique in the legal literature." Indeed it is.

Start with the breadth of topics: the treatise comprises 180 chapters (up 26 chapters from the previous edition). The topics combine a unique blend of substantive, procedural, and practical advice. On the substantive side, the roughly 100 topics range from Antitrust to Collections to Fashion and Retail to Immigration to Labor Law to Money Laundering to Space Law to Tax--and everything in between. There are also 17 chapters or so dealing with litigation procedure (e.g., The Complaint; Responses to Complaints; Removal to Federal Court; Parties; Summary Judgment; etc.). When it comes to a substantive or procedural topic, if you name it, it's almost certainly in there.

What's more, in addition to the usual fare you might expect in a treatise of this sort, there are, by my rough count, two chapters on trial advocacy (Trial Strategy and Advocacy; and Effective Trial Performance); two more dealing with ethics (e.g., Ethical Issues in Commercial Cases; and Civility); and another four dealing with the "business" of law and client management (e.g., Marketing to Potential Business Clients; Fee Arrangements; Coordinating Counsel...