Eggs Win Trials

 Posted on September 09, 2012 in Uncategorized

Jordan Rushie asks (rhetorically), Should I run my law firm on Apple? (a stupid post Greenfield and Tannebaum will laugh at), and compares this question to another:

It's like asking if you prefer to eat eggs for breakfast or cereal. It's a preference. It won't win the trial or make you lots of money anymore than your Fruit Loops will.

Rushie overstates the importance of the question of Apple-vs-PC question and understates the importance of that of eggs-vs-cereal. Much more than your choice of operating system, the right breakfast food will improve your chances of winning every trial.

The right choice? Eggs.

If your body is running on carbohydrates-if you get your energy from Froot Loops®-you have to keep replenishing your carbs or suffer physical and cognitive deficits ("low blood sugar"). In trial, are you going to be able to depend on having a cracker break in the morning?

If everyone else in the courtroom had Froot Loops® for breakfast, they're going to start dragging around 11am. Do you want to be dragging with them, or do you want to be the one person who stays sharp?

Eggs help our bodies produce testosterone. Sugar doesn't. In trial, do you want more testosterone or less?

(Interesting study on trial lawyers and testosterone: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1559-1816.1998.tb01655.x/abstract.)

Definitely eggs for breakfast.

Toss some bacon in with them.

In fact, and even aside from the health benefits (which mainstream medicine doesn't want to admit), trial lawyers should be low-carb and high-fat all day long. Everyone else in the courtroom is going to eat carbs for lunch; these are going to make them doze in the mid-afternoon too. We want to be sharp then to take advantage of their sleepiness.

Mainly, though, we don't want our performance to depend on our being able to stop for food-sometimes we need to work through lunch. If we're in lipolyis (fat-burning mode) we can, unless we're already emaciated (few of us are that), go all day on water alone. ("But if it comes to slaughter / You will do your work on water / An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of ‘im that's got it.")

I eat my carbs on Saturday, so that by Monday I'm back in lipolysis. My trial lunch, when I pack one, is a hardboiled egg. A hardboiled egg is well packaged, tasty, simple, and nutritious, and I can eat it at counsel table when the prosecutors are out carbing up. I stay sharp through the afternoon, and don't lose a minute of prep time. It's not sporting.

(As to the Mac-or-PC question, I use a Mac because I've used Macs since 1991, but nothing in my experience leads me to believe that "it looks cool" (the only one of Rushie's "seven advantages of running Mac" that bears directly on trial) is not in fact a disadvantage.)