Video Transcript

Tom Woods
Partner, Litigation

I am Tom Woods. I joined Stoel Rives in 2011. I have always been a member of the firm's Litigation and Trial Practice Group here in Sacramento.

Can you train great litigators—or do you build them from the ground up?

Here in the litigation practice group, I am a co-coordinator of the Stoel Rives Trial Practice Skills seminar that we do annually for associates up in Portland. The other co-coordinator is one of my partners, Ed Duckers, in our San Francisco office. Ed and I annually put on this program for associates who are not quite level one. They have gone through some of their fundamental experience at the firm becoming litigators. They are level two, level three. Eight associates get selected to be a part of this program. They are dropped into a closed universe civil case file. There are two plaintiff’s attorneys, two defense attorneys, two trials going on at the same time. And the firm invests so many resources and so much time and effort and care into this training; it develops the associates really well.

What you end up having is, to give you an idea of the scope, these associates enter this program with a lot of fear, a little bit of anxiety. They have other work to do. They are limited on their experience. They have to perform in front of partners and not everybody wants to do it, but they get involved and they go through this trial binder where they prepare. There are up to eight witnesses. The witnesses are actually played by partners at the law firm. They take time, the partners do. They learn the case file. They learn their role. They actually become characters in this play that is the trial. They get in costume. They employ accents. Some of them break down in tears. Some of them resort to non-cooperation in order to exhibit bias during the trial to actually make things a little bit harder on these new litigators as would frequently happen in real life in a trial. It is a big challenge.

Who is the jury? The jury is actually members of Stoel Rives’ staff who volunteered their time and they sit in a jury box, two juries, one in each conference room, and they listen to these associates, question the witnesses, walk through the evidence, give their opening statements, their closing arguments, hear instructions. I am one of the judges, Ed is the other judge. At the end of this, the juries get up, they go into individual rooms on camera, and they deliberate. The participants in each trial sit in their room and they watch the jurors deliberate. It is the sausage making part of the sausage that not everybody wants to look at. You hear wild things. The associates understand how a jury's thought process goes, and oftentimes, there is not a lot of process there. They come up with strange relationships between the witnesses and love interests and murder conspiracies and all sorts of crazy things, and the associates have to absorb that. They need to learn how to roll with that and how to account for that when they actually come across a real jury in life.

What ends up happening in this is all that trepidation, all that fear that these associates have, it all kind of falls away on the last day. They have come to know these partners and work with these partners. The anxiety that they might have in interacting has gone away a little bit more. They have gained experience. They have gained confidence in their dexterity with the rules of evidence. We all go to dinner afterwards and you would like to do a post-mortem, but you are really not even talking about the trial. You have just suddenly become more colleagues, more friends, more battle tested in your training and in your experience. At the end of the day, a couple things happen. One thing that happens is that all those associates who had some trepidation and might not have wanted to participate, suddenly they are glad that they participated, and they do not know what they were fearful of. That is number one. Number two, they become leaders at the firm. They have gone from that initial step or level one or level two and their next obligation in being a participant in this program is to become trainers and mentors for the next group of associates who get called up to participate in the program next year, and then they become more known. There is a lot more networking and collaboration that goes on with this program, and they do not just become better lawyers, they become better leaders for the firm. I think that is probably the most interesting parallel, but for an associate to realize that is what they are going to encounter when they come here to Stoel Rives, they really get to understand that the firm invests a lot of time and a lot of attention and a lot of care into their development and their long-term well-being at the firm.