The Ugly Side of Divorce: Trial Prep

There is a law of the universe - or my life at least - that says "if something can go wrong, it will go wrong"  There is never a time when this is more true than when doing trial prep.

This comes as a surprise to most clients, but most all of the work that goes into trial happens long before showing up to the courtroom and getting sworn in as a witness.  The attorneys put in hours - HOURS! - meticulously preparing documents to use at trial.  Gathering statements, making charts and other demonstrative documents, organizing things, basically planning out the entire trial - piece by piece - until the case is proven.  Once you've carefully selected or prepared you exhibits, you have to organize them by topic, anticipate the order you'll want to use things, figure out which witness will be able to present the exhibit to the court, digitize the exhibits the exact way you plan to use them, and then put them in neat little binders organized by tabs and make 4 copies.

This all has to be planned, prepared, and sent to the other attorney a full month before trial happens.  That means there are no surprises at trial.  You know a month before trial happens exactly what is coming.  It also means that you don't get to surprise the other side.  Nevertheless, no amount of planning and scheduling to meet your deadlines will prevent the worst from happening.  When the deadline is on and the pressure is building, everything falls apart.  Every. Single. Time.

In order to prepare trial exhibits for a trial I have in October, I responsibly declined Labor Day travel plans so that I could do just such trial preparations as outlined above.  But because everything that can go wrong will go wrong, things didn't go quite as expected.

After spending an embarrassing amount of time trying to get myself into the new building/office suite (think: lost keys, holiday locks, digital keycards that don't work), the scanner wouldn't scan, the printer ran entirely out of paper (we ruin a lot of trees trying to prepare for trial), email inboxes are full and therefore won't send or receive any emails (which doesn't end up mattering because the scanner doesn't work anyway), and stacks of papers end up piled in nearly every corner of the office to the point where we couldn't remember which stuff was trash and which stuff was important.  Somewhere around midnight, I nearly quit my job.  Somewhere around 2 am, I thought to myself "This might actually work out".  And somewhere around 4 am when I was packing up to go home and go to bed, I was elated that 1) everything was done and 2) the documents could prove exactly what I wanted to prove at trial.

Moral of the story: the process is hell but worth it in the end.  I have trial in 4 weeks and I've done 90% of the preparations for my case.  When we show up to court, the clients will never understand that what happens in that courtroom is already planned, known, and reviewed by the judge and attorneys involved.  Instead, they will be overwhelmed by the same emotions that already overwhelmed their attorneys a full month earlier.