Understanding the Importance of Court Preparation
How important is it to be prepared? I’m Tulsa criminal attorney Carl Birkhead with Wirth Law Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I’ve been practicing family and criminal law for a little over seven years now, and I want to help you make law easy by talking to you about how important it is to be prepared for court.
This sounds like a no-brainer, obviously. You want to be prepared for court. You don’t want to show up looking like a mess. It’s not always as easy as it looks. There have been plenty of times when I’ve had clients when I’m trying to get their case ready for court, I’ll tell them that I need information or documentation or screenshots or videos, and for whatever reason, they either can’t or won’t get them.
The Team Effort in Legal Preparation
Guys, when you hire a lawyer and when you’re litigating a case, especially a relatively complicated one, this is a team effort. It’s not just you paying money down to an attorney and then they take it and go off to the races. This is a team effort. It’s a symbiotic process. I like to compare it like this. It’s a sniper and a spotter. The client’s the spotter. They’re the ones that are giving you the information. They’re picking the target, and then your lawyer’s going to be the one taking the shot and hitting the mark.
This happened this month when we had clients who were very much on the ball. Because of their prep work and their willingness to do exactly what we told them that we needed to do, we were able to be ready for court on very short notice. When I say short notice, they hired us on Monday and we were supposed to be going to trial on Wednesday.
Success Through Client Cooperation
Not many clients, at least in my experience, can be ready that fast, but thankfully, these clients were. They had everything that we needed. They had all of their documentation. They even had it organized. It helped us so much because it helped us be ready to get ready for trial. We dropped all of our other cases. I got my team on this. We went through everything that they had.
We made sure that it was all in chronological order. We pulled out what we needed. We pulled out what we thought was going to be the best, the most productive, the most helpful. When I say we pulled it out, I mean our clients brought us over 1,000 pages worth of documents. Within two days, thanks to the legwork that they did, we had it all ready, sorted, printed, and printed multiple copies.
Achieving Favorable Outcomes
That way we had stuff for my table, stuff for opposing counsel’s table, stuff for the witness stand, and stuff for the judge. We were ready to go. We made such a strong showing that we didn’t even have to litigate the case. By the time we ended up getting to court like I said, two days after our clients hired us, we showed up, suits on, ready to go, evidence ready, clients ready, clients prepped for testimony. The other side wasn’t.
I’m not trying to bag on the other attorney, the fine attorney, upstanding legal counselor, but in this particular instance, because we were able to just show up ready to go and be ready for trial, they didn’t want to do it. We ended up settling. We ended up settling for a really good deal. Our clients are getting a fantastic outcome of this.
Work With Us for the Best Outcome
Yes, it’s thanks to my legal work and my team’s legal work. I’m not even trying to toot my own horn here. I’m trying to say my clients, really, really stepped up and they helped make that possible. You want to work with your attorney. You want this to be a team effort. I want to work with you as much as I possibly can to help make this happen.
Schedule Your Initial Strategy Session Today
If you’ve got a case coming up or if you think that litigation is coming down the line, call us at 918-879-1681. Let’s sit down. Let’s go over what you’ve got and let’s see what we can bring to the table so that way we can make sure that we’re ready to go. I’m Tulsa criminal lawyer Carl Birkhead. I’m with Wirth Law Office and I want to help you make law easy.
