Winter Park, FL., business and civil litigation attorney Eric Lanigan spends 80% of his practice in court. Hire a litigator for contracts to ensure that what you want protected stands up in court so that language used is clear. Just as you should hire an appellate attorney to file your appeal.
There are different practice areas just as doctors have different practice areas. You should work with the attorney who practices the area of law that you need for your case.
Courtroom vs. Contracts Lawyer
If your attorney can only write a contract and has never been to court, he or she will use contract language vs. actionable (in a court of law) language that can protect you in court in front of a jury.
If they’ve never had to take a contract and put it up in front of a jury and explain what it means, they can’t help you later if it goes to court.
Litigators Know What Works in Court
Whereas a lawyer who has been to court can look at the language in a contract and say: “this will never wash.”
The lawyer who has been to court will not worry about the length of a contract, the size of the document, the hourly rate that can be earned to write a long contract.
Is Contract Justifiable?
He’s thinking about if this document comes to court, how am I going to justify it? How am I going to explain it vs. the guy who has only written contracts and has clients come in and get them ready to sign already marked pages at an hourly rate.
Why Hire a Litigator to Negotiate Your Contract?
Negotiation is Easy for a Litigator
The negotiation is easy because that’s what a litigator does all day. Any litigator, any court lawyer who’s not spending a dramatic amount of time in negotiation is not doing his client any favors at all.
The reality is, you see the ads that say, “I’ll fight for you,” but the bottom line is you want a litigator who’s a good negotiator; so by definition, they know how to negotiate.
And you want them to write that contract because they’ve been to court with these kinds of deals.
I’ve been to court with contracts that two guys sat down and wrote for themselves and it was the most non-sensical gobbledy blah you’ve ever seen in your life.
Or contracts where I’ve heard a judge say, “this is a classic example of why you have a written contract to protect what’s important.”
Contract Should Be Clear
I’ve seen cases where a client spent six figures in litigation because in the end, the contract didn’t say what the agreement was. And the lawyer thought it did and he had all the legalese that he basically cut and pasted out of old forms. And instead of writing the contract consistent with what the client was telling him, he wrote a contract that was easy because it was taken from standardized forms. And without any recognition that “OK, what’s going to happen when this kind of language gets into court?”
Because I’ve seen where you get into some of these forms and the language looks and sounds great to a lawyer. But if you get into a dispute and you’re in front of six people on a jury: a school teacher and a postal worker and a bus driver and an insurance professional and they’re going to look at that language and say, “what the hell does that mean?”
They’re not going to have the foggiest idea. A lawyer who goes to court says, “well I’ve got to write this for people so they can understand it.”
Contracts Are Written For a Jury
So I tell people a lot of times to make me a list of bullet points. Forget about the legal jargon. Think about what your agreement is. Because you’re writing for the jury, you’re writing for your client–because if you do it right, it won’t get to court.
When you have an attorney write a contract and it’s 98 pages long, and it covers everything under the sun. Drought, floods, nuclear war, they’re endless and they go on and on and on.
If you’re going through the contract and you say, “what is this what does this mean?” you need to get a clear explanation so that it’s understandable by a jury.
Well, you may be thinking, “what if this were to happen, or what if that would happen?”
But 40 years later, I know after having been through enough litigation, we need to cut all this crap out of here.
