Unconventional Wisdom: How Two of America’s Top Trial Lawyers Win Cases

This book was written for trial lawyers who handle wrongful injury cases. It’s about how to achieve great results for your clients.

Sure, most cases are settled, not tried. But to achieve the best settlement for your client, you have to be an able trial lawyer because it’s the apprehension of a big verdict that motivates opponents to settle. And trial skills are readily transferable to pre-trial skills, which help make cases better, whether or not they are eventually settled or tried. So excel­lent trial skills are indispensable.

First of all, this book is not about theory. It is about actual things that occur in a courtroom, or before or after trial. It is based on our combined 80-plus years of knowl­edge, most of it since 1995 when we formed the Philadel­phia-based law firm of Kline & Specter, PC, now the largest plaintiff’s firm in Pennsylvania and one of the largest in the country.

Second, this book often stands conventional wisdom on its head. Partly that’s because some conventional wisdom was never right. Partly that’s because as society, the law, and tech­nology have evolved, time has upset many courtroom truisms.

This book teaches what we believe works best in civil lit­igation and why.… But we don’t profess to know everything; every case and every situ­ation is different, requiring different strategies for achieving a successful resolution. As we’re fond of noting: “You learn half of what you need to know in your first year as a lawyer and half of each remaining half in each successive year. You never learn it all.”

Robert Zausner is a former journalist with the United Press International and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is the author of Two Boys: Divided by Fortune—United by Tragedy; Bad Brake: Ford Trucks—Deadly When Parked; Danger Above: A Tragic Death, an Epic Courtroom Battle; and Dying to Have a Baby: A True Story.