Litigation lawyer: Difference between revisions

{{A|people|}}One of the sainted [[risk controller]] functions of a financial services firm, the [[litigation]] department deals with ongoing customer complaints, where the firm has disappointed expectations, and prosecutes the firm’s own claims, where its clients have.  

In a well-run firm, therefore, you might expect a [[litigation department]] to be an unglamorous backwater, and this is how it used to be. But, after the dislocations of recent times, many a [[litigation department]] has, like [[human resources]], come to resemble some kind of [[military-industrial complex]]. Teams have gone from half a junior lawyer, on flexi-time, between spells of maternity leave, to fully weaponised Death Stars of fusty, naturally censorious [[Mediocre lawyer|solicitors]] lacking the appetite for any call, however safe, or any risk, however remote.  

But as the world shakes off the malignities of the last decade; as the business environs drift back to the benign, the pendulum might at last be falling back. So, to keep themselves in silk in times of fair fortune, {{t|litigation}} teams have invented an advisory function. They encourage their colleagues to consult them, ahead of time, to avoid future angst.

This is a theoretical but not actual function, because no-one in their right mind would ask a litigation lawyer to bless any course of action more contentious than sitting cross-legged in an air-conditioned padded cubicle having first signed a lengthy [[disclaimer]]. Signing off hypothetical risk scenarios in the abstract is just not how [[litigator]]s roll. They are are short the same option as is any [[risk controller]]: there is no upside from signing off any [[risk]] that has not been fully diffused in a [[circle of escalation]], underwritten in blood by someone else (such as a [[Sullivan and Cromwell]] partner)<ref>Who, thanks to a crafty assumption on page 73 of its [[legal opinion]] ''won’t have underwritten it at all.</ref> and [[socialise|socialised]] to the [[General Counsel]].  

For if you ''do'' wind up in court, hasn’t your contractual architecture ''already'' failed you utterly? To be sure, it might be a nice surprise to find the deckchair to which you are clinging floats, but how much nicer would it be were it still sitting on the sun-deck of a vessel still steaming towards the New World? Contract design should avoid icebergs. A litigator can only help with sorting out whose fault it is once one has been hit.