Posted on August 21, 2009 in Uncategorized

Okay, those of you who identify themselves as "attorneys" and "Esquires", and anyone else who likes people to know that he has a law degree and is therefore superior: listen up. This one is for you.

The fifth Simple Rule for Better Jury Selection is blatantly stolen from and therefore named in honor of Chicago federal public defender Terry MacCarthy, who likes to say, "Talk in a courtroom like you would talk in a barroom."

The MacCarthy's Bar Rule:

Talk in jury selection like you would talk in a barroom.

This rule is in part a matter of word choice: don't use lawyerly words. If you might have to define a word for the jury, find some substitute that you won't have to define. For example, this process that we're studying is not "voir dire" but "jury selection". "Credibility" becomes "believability". The "jury charge" becomes "the judge's written instructions to you at the end of the case". And so forth.

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 Posted on August 20, 2009 in Uncategorized

I wrote last November about Lethal Generosity in the Legal Profession, my thesis being "that the most generous members of the criminal defense community are the most credible and influential."

I was talking then about sharing information and motions amongst criminal-defense lawyers.

But it's become apparent to me that the principle applies in the online marketing context as well. (Sorry, Scott, we all market ourselves. The questions are: 1) how ethically; 2) how consciously; and 3) how well). The lawyer who is generous with her honest praise of other lawyers is going to get more positive attention than the lawyerwho runs down what he perceives to be his competition.

(A digression: John Floyd, Jack Carroll, Don Becker, Tyler Flood, Wayne Hill, Todd Leffler, Dan Corrigan, Doug Durham, Dane and Leslie Johnson, Dennis Slate, Larry Douglas, Dan Gerson, Jeff Purvis, Mekisha Murray, David Breston, Paul B. Kennedy, Joe Salhab, and Cynthia Henley-all of whom Andy Nolen badmouthed for the sake of his own Yahoo rating-are not Andy Nolen's competition. All of the lawyers I've listed try cases; Andy doesn't. The only area in which Andy could possibly compete with anyone on that laundry list of fine lawyers is price; you get what you pay for. If he thinks he's competing with them for the same cases, he's delusional.)

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 Posted on August 18, 2009 in Uncategorized

Comedy tonight (Tuesday, August 18, 2009).

For some free entertainment, come to ComedySportz Houston, 901 Town & Country Blvd., at 7:30 to my improv 201 class perform along with a stand-up comedy class.

Cash bar (beer and wine).

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 Posted on August 17, 2009 in Uncategorized

In conclusion from this post, this post, this post, and this post:

Andy Nolen has been disciplined by the State Bar before. He persists in engaging in deceptive advertising. In my opinion, he needs to be removed from what passes in his world for the "practice of law." Whether they know it or not, his clients are getting screwed.

I was willing to leave Andy Nolen be, and leave it to the buyers to beware, until I discovered that good lawyers had received false one-star reviews for his benefit.

In terms of attacks, this was the online equivalent of throwing rocks: annoying, but primitive and ineffectual. My first instinct, I'll admit, was to retaliate by ordering up a virtual cruise-missile strike of a thousand bad reviews for Andy Nolen. It would have been so easy. And, like my dad often says (in the context of dog training), the best correction is the one you only have to do once.

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 Posted on August 17, 2009 in Uncategorized

Following on from this post, this post, and this post:

I can't swear to it, but I've heard that Andy Nolen has never tried a case to a jury. The Harris County Justice Information System, JIMS, doesn't show a jury trial for Andy Nolen in records of 342 cases going back to 2006.

Despite his not trying cases, Andy Nolen has clients that are happy with him. How?

Even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then.

In Harris County, the Blind Pig Dismissal Rate (the percentage of cases that are screwed up by the cops from the word "go", so that an average lawyer who doesn't do any work beyond showing up in court can get them dismissed) is about 15-20%.

I ran a JIMS report on one of the lawyers who received negative reviews at the hand of Andy Nolen or his proxy, and found that 15 out of the most recent 50 of his cases resolved-30%-were dismissals. (I picked him as a random representative, and won't use his name because he'd be embarrassed, but his average is not unusually high.)

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 Posted on August 17, 2009 in Uncategorized

Following on from this post and this post:

When I googled Mekisha Murray to find her address and let her know that she'd been the victim of an Andy Nolen false negative review, up popped her Yahoo Local page, with (in addition to the one-star review of the last post) this two-star review from"niecy" on July 30, 2009:

seemed ok, but was really interested in her money, what about me!

Sound familiar? Yep. (Something you should know: Andy Nolen walks around with a netbook-typecomputer. Typing without caps is a result of typing with one hand while holding the computer in the other.) So I jumped over to "niecy's" review page. Seven negative reviews for local lawyers. No positive review of Andy Nolen, but they've got his fingerprints all over them. (This review on August 3, 2009, sounds a lot like Nolen's work too.)

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 Posted on August 17, 2009 in Uncategorized

Following on from this post...

"Jerry k." left 31 reviews for Houston lawyers on July 23, 2009: 30 one-star reviews and one five-star review.

Guess who got five stars.

Yep, James A. "Andy" Nolen.

Among the lawyers panned by "jerry k.": Don Becker (again, twice on this day), Todd Leffler, Dan Corrigan, Doug Durham, Dane and Leslie Johnson, Dennis Slate, Larry Douglas, Dan Gerson, Jeff Purvis, Mekisha Murray, David Breston, Paul B. Kennedy, Joe Salhab, Cynthia Henley, and John Floyd (again). Every one of them is at least ten times the lawyer Andy Nolen is.

We knew already that Andy Nolen was a lousy unethical lawyer; the true tale is told by the most recent real review on Andy Nolen's Yahoo Local page:

Did not show to court on first day. this is not good.

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 Posted on August 17, 2009 in Uncategorized

Okay, let's play "one of these things is not like the other things," Houston criminal-defense lawyer edition.

Ready?

1. John Floyd.

2. Jack Carroll.

3. James A. "Andy" Nolen.

4. Don Becker.

5. Tyler Flood.

6. Wayne Hill.

Which of these things just doesn't belong?

If you guessed "Andy Nolen", you're right.

Because John Floyd, Jack Carroll, Don Becker, Tyler Flood, and Wayne Hill are extremely competent, talented lawyers who have tried criminal cases? It's a good answer, but not the one I'm looking for.

Because John Floyd, Jack Carroll, Don Becker, Tyler Flood, and Wayne Hill are the kind of criminal-defense lawyers you want on your side when you're forced into bet-your-freedom litigation? Also a good answer, but again, that's not it.

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 Posted on August 14, 2009 in Uncategorized

We lawyers love to hear ourselves talk. That can be the death of a jury selection. In a good voir dire, the jurors do most of the talking. Even if I can't hear what the lawyer and jurors are saying, I can tell a good voir dire from a bad one by listening, as long as I can tell who is talking. Lawyer talking most of the time? Bad. Jurors talking most of the time? Good.

So the fourth Simple Rule for Better Jury Selection is the 90/10 Rule: let the jurors talk 90 percent of the time (or more) in voir dire.

Try to find a way to elicit more information with fewer words (more about that later, especially in Rules 8 and 11). If you have a brilliant defense, try to find a way to get one of your jurors to come up with it. If a juror or your adversary says something that must be refuted, let your jurors refute it (if it's worth refuting, one of them will, given the chance, refute it). Among the many benefits of talking less, you'll learn more, the jurors will like you more (or at worst dislike you less), and the judge will be more reluctant to limit your time.

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 Posted on August 14, 2009 in Uncategorized

They are once again on their way. They are walking through the forest. Shrek belches. DONKEY Shrek! SHREK What? It's a compliment. Better out than in, I always say. (laughs) DONKEY Well, it's no way to behave in front of a princess. Fiona belches

Thence, Rule 3 of the Simple Rules for Better Jury Selection: the Shrek Rule of Jury Selection: Better out than in. It's related to the "hair in the food" rule. If there's a hair in your food (and there always is), better that you should find it; if your jurors have unpleasant or frightening ideas (and they always do), better that they should reveal them in jury selection than conceal them till deliberation.

In jury selection, all untruthful answers are bad. If there are bad truthful answers, though, they are not what most trial lawyers are used to thinking of as bad. A truthful "I think the government is always right", for example, might be a terrible answer... for the government, for the same reason that it's a great answer for the defense: it allows the defense to identify, isolate, and strike a raging pro-government juror who, if he'd kept his mouth shut through jury selection, might have carried his views into the jury room. (It also gives the defense a convenient foil for uniting the reasonable remainder of the panel against such loony notions-perhaps a topic for another day.)

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