Panel of attorneys discusses how to evaluate cases.

Byline: Tony Anderson

Wisconsin Law Journal: Let's go around the room quickly and talk a little bit about your different practice areas and how that impacts the way that you approach case evaluation.

Mark Silverman: I am the staff attorney with Legal Action of Wisconsin. We receive a mix of funding. Our biggest funder is the Legal Services Corporation in D.C. We also have some grants, so our clients are all low-income people. With grants come grant restrictions. So one of the things that we have to look at for evaluation is whether the client is eligible and whether it's a kind of case that we're allowed to take. That's a little bit of an extra level of evaluation that we have to go through compared to the private attorneys.

Jeffrey Hynes: I come from the unique perspective of an employment lawyer who has worked on both sides and also worked in government practice. I was with a large defense firm in the 1980s and left that firm to start a plaintiff's-side practice which we built from the ground up. My general comment based on that experience is that, while screening is important for corporate lawyers, I think it's absolutely imperative to the survival of a plaintiff's-side practice. Plaintiff's-side law practices that fail to effectively screen and evaluate cases eventually wither on the vine.

Merrick Domnitz: I'm a plaintiff's personal injury attorney emphasizing, I guess, mostly insurance, bad faith, and general liability cases. I dabble in medical malpractice from time to time when life requires me to do so. I would echo what Jeff said. I think that, for a plaintiff's personal injury practice, there may not be a more important aspect or component of the practice than to be able to evaluate which cases you ought to be spending your time and money on.

The minute you evaluate a case as something you're going to be involved in, you start spending money. It doesn't take long to dissipate as much money as you can make on the good cases. You can bring it in the front door as fast as you want. If you're not evaluating your cases right, it will go out the back door just as fast.

Charles Barr: We have a small firm. It's two attorneys. We do civil litigation, usually commercial disputes and consumer matters, but a lot of other things kind of along the fringes of that that make our practice harder to categorize than the practices of many of the other attorneys sitting around the table here.

But case evaluation is important for us too, particularly if we're on the plaintiff's side. Just as often we're on the defense side, and then it's somebody already being sued and it's less of an issue. Because our practice is kind of unstructured, we probably take a somewhat unstructured approach to case evaluation, sometimes to our detriment. We've learned some hard lessons.

Kelly Centofanti: I am a plaintiff's personal injury lawyer, with Stadler & Centofanti. I come from a little bit different perspective, and that is that all my cases are referred. So I spend a lot of time talking to lawyers, who've already taken the case and sometimes spent considerable money on the case, explaining why not only do I not want to spend my money on the case but they shouldn't have either. So I talk about this topic a lot with them to try to explain some of the knock-out factors that instantly tell you it's not a case to take.

Case evaluation to me means analyzing it to determine whether or not money should be spent on it. When the plaintiff's personal injury client comes to us or to one of my referring lawyers, they're asking us to spend our money on their case and to gamble that there will be a fee at the end. Although plaintiffs in this state are lucky that there are lawyers who do contingent-fee work, they do have to find someone who will be willing to gamble on the case. That means that the clients have to agree to do certain things, be cooperative, meet with you to prepare, and be interested in the case. They also have to have the facts to support it.

Jay Urban: I think all the folks that are doing plaintiff law do it a little bit differently even though there are some overriding concerns that we all have, especially on a contingency fee.

Our practice is about 80 percent plaintiff's personal injury and about 20 percent employment law, which Jeff does. We have a karma approach to case selection, which means if we do good to others, good will come back to us. As a result, I have a fair amount of referring lawyers...

Sometimes we'll take a case that isn't a very good case. In fact, lots of times we'll take cases that aren't very good cases. But we'll be honest with the clients up front that this isn't a very good case; we're not going to invest very much time or very much money. Maybe you do a little good will. We'll take cases pro bono.

My mom said when we were growing up, you can pick your friends but you can't pick your enemies. So I just try to pick good friends and then hopefully get better cases that way. But I do...