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Comments on Recent Cases: August 2025

Courts typically defer to the decisions of arbitrators, even when they believe that the arbitrators made a mistake. This is because federal law implements a policy where people can rely on arbitration being quick and final and not just the first step towards a lengthy litigation process. Still, people still attempt to appeal in court and, sometimes, they win.
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Comments on Recent Cases: July 2025

While a plaintiff in litigation can recover money owed without a written contract on the principles of basic fairness, the existence of a written contract often prohibits recovery on fairness or “equitable” grounds. But litigants often debate when a written contract exists.
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Comments on Recent Cases: June 2025

Many people seek mediation to resolve disputes rather than initiate or proceed with litigation. As part of the mediation process, parties often submit a written statement to the mediator to explain their positions. These statements are often confidential, especially since they may make concessions in an effort to strike a settlement. Courts respect that confidentiality.
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Comments on Recent Cases: May 2025

Parties in American litigation not only often have the power to conduct deposition interviews of the other parties; normally they can compel non-parties, too. But this power, however, is not unlimited.
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Comments on Recent Cases: April 2025

Parties in litigation have very broad powers to ask questions and gain information about the other parties. This often includes information that is irrelevant to the case. But in some instances, courts will put limits on the subjects of inquiry in discovery.
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Earning Clients' Trust

I try to let clients know that I understand what they are going through. It may make a lawyer easer to trust if they recognize the emotional challenges that client may be going through because that may mean they have more emotional intelligence, or at least experience with similar issues.
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More Thoughts on Appearing Pro Hac Vice

Clients often hire lawyers in their own community. And those lawyers typically are allowed to appear in the local court. But sometimes clients hire lawyers from another community than the one in which the relevant court is located. This has happened a lot in my work, and so I wrote a post about lawyers being temporarily admitted to a different court. A few years later, I write to update the post.
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Factual Research

The bulk of the relevant material may be there since it includes the materials the parties thought to ask for and that counsel identified as being relevant. But there may be relevant information elsewhere! And so a creative litigator thinks outside of the box and searches for more facts that may be useful.
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More Thoughts on Deposition Designations

Witnesses swear to tell the truth at the start of their depositions, just as they do when they testify in court. And violating that oath is technically a crime, just as it would be for lying in court. And a court reporter makes a verbatim transcript of the deposition, which allows lawyers to submit the exact same testimony at trial.
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More Thoughts on Answers

Answers are usually relatively inexpensive documents to draft because they do not need to be well-crafted narratives that persuade people of the defendant’s innocence. Defendants have other opportunities in a lawsuit to explain their story, such as in motions to dismiss the case and at trial.
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Gathering and Preserving Evidence in Litigation in Argentina

Our national procedure system (or Procedure Code) establishes two big ways of producing evidence before trial, even though both of them requires the involvement of the judge and, in one of them, of the counterparty also.
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Litigation in Estonia

Lawyers do not wear a robe and should instead wear formal business dress, though sometimes they dress casually.
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Litigation in Louisiana

I find the bar down here to be pretty genteel, but that may just be true of most smaller jurisdictions that are not trying to be high-powered legal centers. When I started down here it was perhaps better dressed than NYC (most people still wore suits to the office), but that’s largely faded away and we’re business casual like everywhere else.
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Litigation in Morocco

Since each side bears their own legal fees, there is a tendency for defendants to delay proceedings. They may hire a cheap lawyer to litigate and appeal as a means to delay their obligation to pay or dissuade a claimant from pursuing litigation.
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Litigation in Haiti

From the complaint to the judgment, the deadline can last up to three months if there aren’t any strikes. Often times it is the clerks who are on strike, other times it is the judges or bailiffs to claim salary adjustments (raises) or better working conditions.
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