Complaints

When a client tells a lawyer she wants to sue someone, she may not know all of the possible causes of action. She may just know that the defendant has done something wrong. It is up to the lawyer to use her own knowledge and research to determine what causes of action address the defendant’s conduct.

Relief

The most straightforward thing that people can seek in a lawsuit is money. If you allege in a lawsuit that a defendant caused you to lose a certain amount of money, or failed to live up to a promise to pay you a certain amount of money, you can seek a judgment that directs the defendant to pay you that money.

Lawsuits Often Take Awhile

The wheels of justice move more slowly than many people expect. Lawsuits, even ones where you are very much right and the other side are bad people, often take months or even years.

Paying for Litigation

Under the “American Rule,” plaintiffs and defendants usually pay for their own lawyers, even after one of them prevails. This is why parties often settle cases: no one wants to spend more on legal fees than they recover or than the amount of a judgment they avoid. But in some situations, a prevailing litigant may recover their attorneys’ fees from their adversary.

Document Requests

In the body of a document request, an attorney will set forth numbered requests for documents. The number of requests may vary, but it is not uncommon for a document request to have fifty or more numbered requests. In my experience, some requests are broad and others are specific.

Document Review Strategies

Companies often compile spreadsheets or other documents that are helpful to better understand the facts of the case or to evaluate claims made by witnesses. I try to keep an eye out for documents like employee directories, monthly financial statements, and organization charts.

Frequently Used Software

Law firms often use document management software to store documents. Instead of saving documents in a folder or a shared network drive, law firms often allow employees to save documents on a system in which each document gets a unique ID number. The system then allows any other user to access the document.

Temporary Restraining Orders

Temporary Restraining Orders frequently arise in disputes arising from the use of confidential material or intellectual property. This may be because it is difficult to quantify the damage arising from improper use of confidential material and so a money judgment may not properly compensate a plaintiff.

Release

In a settlement negotiation, the defendant's main objective is to get a release from the plaintiff. A defendant usually offers the plaintiff money in exchange for a promise by the plaintiff not to sue and to end any existing litigation. But the defendant usually also wants a release from the plaintiff because it legally ends the threat of any future litigation by the plaintiff on the subject of the dispute.

Confidentiality

If someone finds the filings and publicizes them further, it is usually too late to do anything about it. Newspapers and other media often scour filings to look for scandalous claims to publicize. And sometimes search engines can capture them and the filings can get captured by internet searches. There is virtually nothing that can be done to stop people from talking or writing about something that is already in the press or captured by search engines.

Defaults

If a defendant does not respond before the deadline, then the plaintiff can ask the court to award it a default judgment. A default judgment is (in most ways) the equivalent of a judgment that a plaintiff would have gotten if it had proved its claims at a trial.

Document Discovery Basics

Document requests are often very broad because the lawyers making the request at the start of a case do not know what evidence the opposing party possesses. Accordingly, they often ask the opposing party for all of the documents it possesses on various topics that are relevant to the dispute.