It takes extra hard work to be a truly 'Great' litigator on one's own in today's world. The way out- Work with the best team!

Much is being said on how the number of lawyers in Nigeria ( and maybe in the world) have grown exponentially. And more is being about some day long ago when everything (especially the law profession ) was supposedly better.

Truth is that things were once better in much of the practice of law, though I’m generally not one to rely much on nostalgia. And maybe clients were served better, again, in some areas of the law, when they had a true professional relationship of confidence with only one lawyer, perhaps a lawyer that handled a range of needs for the client.

But clients in complex litigation today are not better served by one lawyer than they are by the right team. The simple reason why is that in the complicated litigation that you see in many areas of litigation such as civil rights, class actions, criminal cases amongst others, you need to have a team, properly sized and constituted.

Why?
There simply will be occasions where there is way too much going on all at once in such litigation for one lawyer, even a very good one, to have the time to handle all the work, even if such lawyer spent all of his or her time on the matter. And that’s not even touching on how different team members may have skills others on the team do not.

Teams do not need to be big, and should avoid duplication of personnel type. At our firm, we generally assign to a matter on an ongoing basis two professionals with different roles and responsibility levels: a more senior lawyer and a junior lawyer. Very importantly, we also have others at various levels ready to step in to assist at crunch times—when getting out a major filing, when you unexpectedly need to get a letter into the court in two hours and your other team members are out of the office handling an argument, when prepping for weeks on end for depositions, or, in some of our bigger matters. You have a core team, but then your entire team of colleagues available as needed. And ofcourse a bloated team is always good during court appearances.

The point of the team is not only to make sure all the work gets done but because our work, when done best, is collaborative. We do a better job of discussing the challenges and solutions with one another. What this all means for lawyers that want to be great litigators is that you need to find the right team. With the rate of unemplyment in Nigeria today, young lawyers can even form a great team. Supposedly “better” law offices may not always have the best teams that litigators need to do their best work.
But if lawyers want do the best work for their clients and for themselves, they need to find the best teams and fulfill their roles in those teams.


SOURCE: NIGERIAN LAW DAILY BLOG