Leveraging Tech to Level the Playing Field in “David v. Goliath”

Episode Notes

Transcript

Dave Scriven-Young:

Hello and welcome to Litigation Radio. I’m your host, Dave Scriven-Young. I’m a litigator practicing environmental and construction law in the Chicago office of O’Hagan Meyer, and I also coach young lawyers on how to accelerate their careers without burning out on the show. We talk to the country’s top litigators and judges to discover best practices in developing our careers, winning cases, getting more clients, and building a sustainable practice. Please be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite podcasting app to make sure that you’re getting updated with future episodes. This podcast is brought to you by the litigation section of the American Bar Association. It’s where I make my home in the A BA. The litigation section provides litigators of all practice areas, the resources we need to be successful advocates for our clients. Learn more at ambar.org/litigation. Today we’re tackling a critical issue, the imbalance of power in the Courtroom, whether it’s a David versus Goliath battle where a small firm plaintiff takes on a corporate giant or the opposite scenario where an anonymous or judgment proof defendant evades accountability, the scales of justice are sometimes uneven.

Join us as two seasoned litigators, explore how litigators can level that playing field, and how do we bring deep pocketed defendants to justice and how do we make anonymous bad actress pay? Let’s get into it with our first guest, Fred Tecce. He’s an attorney and founder of Altima Advisors and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He’s a former federal prosecutor and registered patent attorney. He’s also a commercial litigation attorney who has over the last 40 years served in roles as varied as a large firm partner, practice group leader and office managing partner to the founder of a nationally recognized litigation boutique firm. Fred dedicates himself almost exclusively to the representation of a broad spectrum of plaintiff and claim holders, including intellectual property owners in a variety of industries and disciplines. Welcome for the show, Fred.

Fred Tecce:

Hey David. Thank you so much for having me.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And our second guest is Marcus Chatterton. He’s a partner in belch and Bingham in its Birmingham, Alabama office. He’s a tech-minded litigator experience and intellectual property, social media, smart grid, electronic media and general technology issues. Marcus represents large and small businesses and ventures and creative clients and patent trademark copyright and trade secret disputes. Marcus is experienced as lead counsel for patent trademark and copyright infringement actions, and he’s also been involved in unfair competition trade secret state trademark laws and internet-based torts. Marcus, thanks for being on the show today.

Marcus Chatterton:

Really happy to be here. Thanks, Dave.

Dave Scriven-Young:

So let’s begin with the expected imbalance of power and litigation. You see it in, for example, criminal law and personal injury. Fred is a former federal prosecutor and now is your role as a contingency fee plaintiff’s attorney in a small firm. Where have you seen an imbalance of power and how have you seen attorneys and parties deal with that?

Fred Tecce:

Well, Dave, thanks. Throughout the course of my career, I’ve had to deal with the imbalance of power. Of course, when I was an assistant US attorney and people would talk to me about the awesome power of the government, I used to kind of jokingly say that I’d be happy if I could just get a pen that works. But the bottom line is that either on criminal defense, particularly federal criminal defense or in my career is doing personal injury or aviation crash cases. You’re always up against well-funded defendants who have insurance to cover the practice. And then even in my IP cases where I’ve been up against some of the biggest companies in America, it’s from the day you file the complaint to the day, you get a judgment and your significant others outspending the defendant’s money. If you’re successful, that imbalance of power is always there.

Dave Scriven-Young:

So I’m curious, and I wanted to ask you about the criminal context because you’re right. I mean, I think oftentimes people think especially on the federal side, that the prosecutor has the most maybe funding or manpower. I guess what I inferred from what you were saying is that’s not always what happens in a federal prosecutor shop.

Fred Tecce:

It’s not always what happens. I think when people talk about that, they talk about the ability of the Justice Department in the US attorney’s office to bring assets to bear. I mean, I was in the middle of a trial one time and I needed a document that was in an airport in London, England, and I was able to dispatch an FBI agent an FA agent, FA inspector to literally drive two hours to the airport, get the document and fax it back to me. Faxes were what we had in those days, but when you do criminal defense, particularly federal criminal defense work, the joke I always tell people is it’s like playing for the Washington Generals. Remember that team that used to play the Harlem Globetrotters, your job was to show up, look good and know you’re going to lose. And unfortunately, the conviction rate with the US attorney’s offices around the country is really high for a lot of different reasons, not the least of which is they have the luxury of only taking the cases they want. They don’t have to deal with every case that just comes in the door. So it’s always been, when we talk about the imbalance of power from a federal criminal defense and prosecution perspective, it takes on a lot of different aspects and facets.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Sure. And now as I understand it, you have your own firm contingency fee, plaintiff’s attorney shop. I don’t know how many attorneys you have, but there’s probably a different balance of power than maybe you were used to as a federal prosecutor,

Fred Tecce:

Correct? Correct. And I’ve been counsel of record in IP cases on behalf of the plaintiff’s patent owner against Johnson and Johnson, Siemens Dematic, Northrop Grumman. I have a case in Texas right now against Tesla Polestar Industries in Delaware. So you’re up huge well-funded defendants and it’s almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? In order to every case, particularly when you’re the plaintiff has to have three legs, right? It’s got to have damages, it’s got to have liability, and it has to have deep pocket. And on a patent case, because they’re so risky and so dangerous, the damages have to be significant because you’re going to spend a lot of time on the case and then you need to have a defendant who can write the check for the damages. Otherwise, I mean, they teach you in law school about getting a judgment they don’t really ever teach you about having, but you have to actually go collect and get the money.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Absolutely. So when you are facing maybe a larger international law firm who’s on the other side represent Johnson Johnson for example, what are some of the ways that you balance that playing field when you see that kind of imbalance of maybe manpower, for example?

Fred Tecce:

Well, there’s a couple of tools now at our disposal that wasn’t really there when I first started this a long time ago. One of ’em is litigation funding. The other is the ability to be able to keyword search irrespective gone in the days when they would drive a truck up to your office and unload box after box after box that you’d have to dig through the ability to OCR these documents and then do keyword searches and find what you’re really, really looking for is very, very helpful. I also over the years, have joined ventured with other firms in different ways that have all worked to level the field a little bit, maybe tilt the scales back towards the middle. The last one thing too to remember, and I think there’s kind like this David versus Goliath aura, but the bottom line is that every federal case has to go through one federal judge who sits on the bench because there were a sorority sister of a sitting US senator and they have one LawClerk, so the pipe gets pretty narrow. So I’ve been in cases where there are 36 lawyers on the other side of an oral argument in me, but ultimately it has to get through the judge and his LawClerk.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Right. You have to present the case. And Marcus bringing you into the conversation, I’m sure that you’ve seen kind of imbalances of power in your case as well. I understand you do some IP work as well. Just curious as to whether you’ve seen litigation funding, and I’m sure you’ve seen and probably use either AI or some online discovery tools to kind of assist in what you do on a daily basis.

Marcus Chatterton:

Absolutely. We do. AI in the discovery space is still sort of a shiny, a new toy that those of us that practice here are, I think still dialing in its best use. To go back to Fred’s example of how great it is to be able to keyword search instead of sifting through a truckload full of documents. I think as this technology gets a little more mature, folks who are in that position rather than keyword searching to look for the needle in the haystack, they can let a good AI tool do a lot of that work for them. Being more on the defense side of this, and I say defense side because of course as Fred would tell you in the patent, really the entire IP space, we tend to be plaintiffs as often as we are defendants, but when I’m on the big side of the imbalance of power here, one thing that I realized after a while is even though the big side might have more resources, they often have a much heavier discovery burden. So in these asymmetric cases, a lot of times the smaller side doesn’t have nearly as heavy of a discovery burden that they’ve got to produce. The more capitalized side has a tremendous discovery burden. Now they’ve got more resources, but the discovery burden may be much larger. And so that’s where some of these advances, technology assisted review or straight up generative AI are starting to really make a difference and help to bring that balance back a little bit more.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Are you seeing Marcus more outside review teams being used? And certainly with ai you probably don’t need as many reviewers to go through your gigabytes or terabytes or what have you, of emails relating to a specific litigation, but I’m just curious as to how you’ve seen that electronic review change over time. Because I remember back in the day when I started practicing, you basically were just going through each email and clicking a tag and moving on. I’m sure it’s much different and much more advanced now with AI and different tools

Marcus Chatterton:

In our eDiscovery process there. Of course, at some point there always still is a lawyer clicking review, but the idea is to eliminate as many irrelevant documents so that the only thing or most of what the lawyers are looking at is the good stuff. And so whether we do that with outside review teams that are coming in at a much more manageable rate than attorneys or even paralegals that’s been going on for a long time. We’ve been using what I would call analytical AI or non generative AI for the better part of a decade. You hear terms like technology assisted review or computer assisted review. I think the strongest analogy there is when we build a music playlist on Spotify or on say, the first version of Pandora, you train the software to recognize the sort of music that you want to hear, and as you go forward and you give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on particular songs, the software gets better and better and it presents you with the music that you want to hear and doesn’t present you with the music that you don’t want to hear.

Technology assisted review basically does that on a document review system so that your reviewers are getting the good documents upfront, and at some point if you do it right, they never see the worthless documents. If you’ve got a million documents and it reorders them in response to your training, it’s defensible to cut that review off at some point. So you may only have to review 200,000 out of a million documents and you can leave the others sitting there essentially unreviewed and never produced. The generative AI space is starting to change that game a little bit where all of your time is spent crafting a very meticulous prompt for the system. And once the prompt is right, the platform will review and code every document almost instantaneously, and then you spend a lot of time on the backend doing quality control. But either of those systems, the technology assisted review or the actual AI assisted review, generative AI assisted review, the goal there is to cut out the fluff, cut out all of the irrelevant non-responsive documents where you never even have to have a lawyer at an hourly rate spend their time coding that document.

Dave Scriven-Young:

A great analogy that I haven’t heard you just before, and I wanted to focus on one thing that I think Fred talked about earlier, which is ultimately you have to present this to a judge and a clerk, maybe jury trials, although a jury, although I don’t know how much you see a jury trial in an IP case, but just curious as to Fred will start with you in terms of how are you using technology or how you are presenting what I’m sure is a technologically complex case with lots of emails and that sort of thing, and making sure that that’s presented in a way that’s understandable by judge and a LawClerk.

Fred Tecce:

So interestingly, we used the technology kind of as a substitute, for lack of a better term, for the way we used to do in the old days. When I said about the old days, we used to try cases and you used to blow up exhibits and you’d put ’em up in front of the jury if you had a really hot email. So the technology has been helpful with respect to presentations for stuff as simple as being able to pull up. I work with a guy named Johnny Walker, Johnny pull up exhibit 1 0 1 and he would know which one to pull it up, and then he would you circle down in on the paragraph you want, you blow that up and you highlight that. So in a lot of these courtrooms are obviously designed to handle the technology with jurors having their own screens and stuff. And in fact, I just got finished teaching at the National Institute of Trial Advocacy and we spent time dealing with the students about how to deal with the technology in the Courtroom.

As far as the technology about which Marcus was talking about, I think that has to really plays a role in trial preparation, figuring out what you need and where to find it and what to find, which documents. The technology that I see vis-a-vis trying cases is really more being able to pull up a deposition and this stuff’s old I, it’s not new. Having it synced with the transcripts so that the Scran strip scrolls by as the witnesses actually speaking, kind of stuff like that, that I think have been very effective. And I also think, and I’m curious to hear your take on this, but jurors watch TV and they see stuff that happens on tv, and one of the jokes that we have, for lack of a better term, is that they watch NCIS and they think that every case should have that type of analysis. Every patent case should have somebody who’s dug down to the DNA of any type of a mechanical device. I mean, so our job becomes more difficult because I think the expectations of the jurors are unrealistically raised

Marcus Chatterton:

On the subject of Courtroom technology. Now, I agree with Fred that we’re ultimately, even though it looks nicer and it’s more polished and it’s more understandable, we’re ultimately trying cases the same way that we learned to in law school or the same way cases were tried without technology. One thing that I do think is great is it changes the way you prepare for trial. We can essentially take our entire case file on a thumb drive or on a laptop into court with us. And so the anxiety that we might have about, gosh, what if I need this as an exhibit? What if I need that as an exhibit that I ask my paralegal to make six copies of each of these things that I may or may not use? We just haven’t at our fingertips now and the litigation support specialist or the associate on the file or whoever you’re trying the case with a few clicks, they can pull up that document that you didn’t know you were going to need, but because opposing counsel got into it, now it’s right there.

There’s also some cool tools that we can leverage in the trial preparation phase. Again, I’m hesitant to lean too heavily on generative AI at this point in the cycle. It’s still in that phase where it’s cool, it’s shiny and it’s promising, but I wouldn’t want to rely on it entirely. That said, there’s some really nice tools out there targeted at trial preparation, identifying hot documents, identifying themes that the trial team may have overlooked. You’re not going to go straight up with the results of a generative AI program, but it can be a nice tool in that preparation phase. It can also be backwards looking. We can say, boy, we’ve revised our theme, or We’ve revised this point in this trial that we’ve spent hundreds of hours on to this point, and now we need to go back and find all the documents that support this.

Rather than hunting with keywords. Some of these generative AI tools will go back and build a little portfolio of all the documents in your database that have already been reviewed and coded and pull them together to support a specific argument that you want to do at trial. Now, we’re not going to do this in real time. You’re not doing this in the Courtroom, but in the week leading up to trial or in the evenings to respond to arguments that are coming in from the other side, that’s something that you just couldn’t have done before and now we can.

Dave Scriven-Young:

What are some of those tools that might be helpful in that regard, Marcus?

Marcus Chatterton:

Yeah, I don’t want to sound like I’m advocating or pushing for any particular tool. I’ll say that most of the significant eDiscovery vendors will offer a platform like this. My recommendation would be to look at the e-discovery vendors that you’re comfortable with and field test their platforms. Some of the other traditional legal providers like Thomson Reuters and Westlaw are offering tools that do some of these things as well. And candidly, we are still in the feeling out process, or at least I am in my practice, and so I wouldn’t want to point to one directly, but there’s a lot of them that are hitting every day.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Yeah, that makes sense. And Fred, just curious if there are any kind of tools that you would point to in terms of assisting you either at trial or preparing for trial?

Fred Tecce:

Well, for at trial, I’m preparing for trial. The tools that Marcus, and I’m drawing a blank on which one we use. I try to trademark case not too long ago on Chartres garden hoses. And we had somebody from our local council who was really well versed at using these systems and being able to pull them up and getting the exhibits you want and doing what Marcus said. I mean, not having to take every possible exhibit with you and having them right there is really, really, really helpful. Not unlike a lot of things in our lives. The power of these systems is far exceeds certainly my ability to use them and just as important as having the one that provides the services that you need as a trial advocate is having the person who really understands how to make it work and how to make it work seamlessly because nothing works. Whether you’re fumbling around for a paper exhibit in front of a jury or fiddling around with a keyboard and a computer and pulling up the document you need, none of that looks good.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Yeah, no, totally. And having somebody at your disposal, whether it’s somebody from an e-discovery vendor, somebody from your firm who’s either an associate or somebody who deals with technology is probably key because as a lay attorney, you may not have that technical expertise, but you certainly can rely upon somebody who knows that stuff. And I’m sure you rely on those folks all the time, Fred.

Fred Tecce:

Oh, yeah, all the time. And it’s interesting. So how I met Marcus is that I had brought a case down there. He started off as my local counsel and then we worked together and was a great resource. So there wasn’t an imbalance of power, but the team approach, being able to work with other lawyers, especially when you’re a sole practitioner like I am for the most part, was really helpful. And in the instance where I was talking about the case we tried in Iowa, our local counsel had someone who was so versed and so good at pulling up, making sure the exhibits were right there, the documents you needed were right there when you wanted to cross examinee, somebody knew exactly the passage from the document that you were going use to cross-examine the witness. I mean, when it works, it’s a highly effective tool.

Marcus Chatterton:

And to circle back to those, what I would call Courtroom technology or litigation support software, Dave, you had asked what are some of the ones out there? And in that space, I can say that we’ve had really good success with a company called On Q, all one word on QCUE. There were some earlier technologies out there that were great for the time. A lot of firms are moving past them. I won’t say what those platforms are. I don’t want them to feel like I’m trash talking them, but in the litigation support space, that is the software that we use to organize and pull everything up for trial. There’s a lot of good ones. On Cube seems to be the most exciting one from my perspective right now. But in the prep space, in the AI backed prep space, that’s one where it’s just moving so fast I wouldn’t want to advocate one over another.

Dave Scriven-Young:

No, that makes sense. And just wanted to quickly move on to kind of the second imbalance of power where you might represent a plaintiff with kind of all the money in the world against the defendant who may be anonymous or has no skin in the game. And Marcus, I understand you’ve seen such defendants in your practice, so would love to hear about some of those.

Marcus Chatterton:

Yeah, we actually deal with this more than I would’ve expected. This comes up where you’ve got, say for example, a celebrity or a well-known business figure who’s being defamed anonymously online. So if we’re representing that celebrity, we may have great resources, but we’re going up against an anonymous actor who feels correctly or incorrectly that they can act with impunity and they may be extremely hard to track down. Another example there would be what I would call brigade. And as I’m using that term, imagine a business gets involved or accused of something scandalous, something that’s newsworthy to the point where dozens, hundreds, sometimes even thousands of individuals who’ve never been to this business, go and start giving them negative online reviews in a coordinated way, right? So a business that’s highly reviewed on Google businesses or Yelp or a physician on a WebMD or something like that who’s got a 4.8 review, suddenly tanks to a one star review because all of these people who they’ve never met who have heard something negative about them, have decided to go and attack them in that way.

Another example would be fraudulent, counterfeit online activity. Somebody registering or using an online storefront to either sell counterfeit goods or in some cases we’ve even seen malicious actors that are purchasing genuine goods, reselling them online at a steep discount as part of a scheme to collect, to harvest credit card information so that they can scam consumers. And to do that without getting caught because the consumers think they’re dealing with the genuine brand owner. In each of these cases, a kneejerk reaction might be to report it to the police or to the FBI, which is nothing wrong with doing that, but in my experience, it’s been unlikely to give any sort of a satisfactory result. So we’ve wrestled with a lot of situations like that where a well-capitalized client is trying to figure out, gosh, do we really throw money at this issue? Or if we do throw a lot of money at it, can we even do anything?

Dave Scriven-Young:

Sure. And what are some of the ways that you can bring some of these people to the table? I know some of them may be international actors or people that just don’t want to be found. What are some ways that you’ve seen some success in that area?

Marcus Chatterton:

Well, one example, again, tying it back to the IP world where Fred and I both live, if we’ve got a malicious actor that’s registered, an internet domain that incorporates your client’s trademark, there’s a really great tool under what’s known as the uniform domain name resolution protocol that is, it’s essentially, as I understand it, an international treaty amongst all of the top level domain registrars. It proceeds as an arbitration relative to civil litigation. It’s very cheap and very fast. And at the end of the day, if you prevail, that domain name will get transferred over to the trademark owner. So we’ve seen this where malicious actors have registered a spurious domain name, they’ve never populated it, they didn’t create a website that would render, but they’re just using that domain name to be able to send out scam messages to send phishing emails that purport to be from your client.

And they’re trying to defraud people. And even though we can’t, I shouldn’t say can’t, even though it would be very remote and very expensive to try to bring some malicious actor from a different country to justice over that issue, and of course we report it to the FBI, at the very least, we can knock down the internet domain so that they can never use that one again, and then try to go on the offensive and buy up any valuable internet domain that they could try to use to do the same thing. These would be domains where they’ve changed one letter or they’ve added something like corporation to the end of the business name to get a similar looking domain. Another area where we’ve seen some success here is in that anonymous online defamation. And again, you can hit limits with this where you’ve turned over all the stones that you can think to turn over and you don’t quite get there.

But there’ve been some really cool success stories. One of those, and this has been I think at least 10 years now, but one of those is professional golfer. Phil Mickelson and his legal team was really successful on one of these. In that situation, Phil had been defamed by some anonymous actors who were making statements about him in the comment section of Yahoo Sports, Phil’s legal team filed a John Doe lawsuit identifying the usernames of those two accounts filed a John Doe lawsuit in Phil’s home state of California. They used that lawsuit that John Doe lawsuit to subpoena yahoo.com and subpoena. That subpoena resulted in an IP address. That IP address happened to be in Canada, same IP address for each account. So Phil’s legal team then filed a separate action in Canada so they could domesticate a subpoena and they subpoenaed the internet service provider.

And it turns out it was a single individual who was making these defamatory comments using multiple Yahoo sports accounts. And of course, the public record drops off there. We don’t know how they ultimately handled this, how they ultimately resolved the case, but that’s proven to be a worthwhile thing to attempt. There’s other examples. Football coach PJ Fleck did the same thing on a football message board. I’ve done this a number of times. Of course, if it leads to an IP address that’s in Singapore or the Cayman Islands, we may hit a dead end there or a dead end in the sense that we’re not going to retain council in somewhere like that and continue throwing money at it.

Dave Scriven-Young:

That makes a ton of sense, and it’s really interesting, Fred, bringing you back into the conversation. In your practice, have you seen things of this nature and have you used any of these possible solutions in your practice?

Fred Tecce:

I have and a little bit of a somewhat different bend. I represent one of the largest sellers of gates on Amazon, and we deal with these three party vendors who sell through Amazon marketplace. They’re very difficult to find, they’re very difficult to track down. And there’s a process now that’s kind of evolved. Northern District of Illinois, Chicago looked to be kind of ground zero for it. Where were IP owners such as Baustian LA 3M and others bring lawsuits against groups of these kind of third party sellers or entities that sell oftentimes on Amazon. And the remedy that’s been kind of hashed out by the courts that’s helped this is that they’ll oftentimes issue a temporary restraining order, which then the IP owner takes to Amazon and Amazon will blacken or darken a page. And the theory being that you then using the Schedule A process, you try to get information and data about the identities of these individuals, these entities, because oftentimes they’re offshore, oftentimes from Far East.

And you then get that information to try and enforce your intellectual property through those means because it’s very, very difficult. You can literally spend years under the historic or the classic legacy IP litigation process trying to deal with these. And what ends up happening invariably is that the entity change names, the entities change, they become a different entity. They continue to sell the same product under a different brand name. And so it’s very, very frustrating for an IP owner dealing with these things, particularly on Amazon. And Amazon has a system that they’ve developed for dealing with intellectual property areas like that. I hesitate to use it for my clients. Other people may use it with a lot of success. The name escape You for a minute, but those are the kind of cases that I see that are kind of analogous to what Marcus was talking about.

Dave Scriven-Young:

We are unfortunately at the end of our time together, this has been a really interesting conversation, but wanted to find some moment for your last thoughts for our audience today. Marcus, I dunno if you had anything else to add or any final thoughts regarding the imbalance of power and possible solutions either from either perspective?

Marcus Chatterton:

Sure. I mean, technology is obviously a great leveler for a lot of these things, but I would caution other lawyers from being too reliant on technology but instead to look at emerging opportunities. The example that Fred gave about the Schedule A, the Schedule A defendants is a great example of an emerging novel legal approach that’s not technology heavy for dealing with these things. The emergence of things like the uniform domain, name resolution protocol, again, a newer legal forum that gives us opportunities. So a combination of technology but also novel legal approaches, I think is the way to get it done.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And Fred, any last thoughts?

Fred Tecce:

The only last thought that I would have, particularly with respect to technology in the Courtroom and AI through Discovery is these are all great tools. I see a lot of young lawyers, it’s dangerous to speak in generalities, but I see a lot of young lawyers use some of this technology as a crutch. And I think at the end of the day, if you’re going to be really an effective advocate for your client, you need to pay attention to the fundamentals of being a good lawyer, the fundamentals of being a good trial lawyer, and recognize and use these tools as arrows in your quiver to get where you want to be or need to be on behalf of your clients and not use them as the tools, but don’t rely upon them. Don’t use ’em as a Christ, don’t use ’em as a substitute for good old fashioned good legal work.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Well, that’s great advice and it’s a great way to end the show. Fred tei and Marcus Chatterton, thank you both for being on the show today.

Fred Tecce:

Hey, thank you for having me. Thank you, Dave.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thanks to litigation section, premier sponsor Roundtable Group for sponsoring This podcast. Roundtable Group is an expert witness search and referral service with decades of experience and a comprehensive array of academic and industry relationships, as well as access to proprietary tools that further enhance the expert search capabilities of attorneys with no upfront fees. You only pay if you retain an expert referred by Roundtable Group. Learn [email protected]. And now it’s time for our quick tip from the ABA Litigation Section, mental Health and Wellness task force. And I’d like to welcome back Charla Stevens to the podcast. Charla is a lawyer and business consultant who provides workplace training, independent investigations, strategic human resources consulting and mediation and conflict resolution services. She previously practiced law in New Hampshire and Massachusetts for more than 37 years and spent the majority of her career at McLean Middleton where she chaired the employment Law practice group and also represented schools and healthcare practices. Welcome back to the show, Charla What’s your quick tip?

Charla Stevens:

Thanks so much, Dave. Today’s tip is focused on some pretty basic advice. We’ve probably talked about this before, but it’s that timely year again spring, and it’s time to plan your vacation if you haven’t already. Surveys have shown that the majority of American workers do not use all of their PTO or vacation time, and something like 40% of workers at one point in the recent past indicated that they took no vacation time at all with more employers. Jumping on the unlimited or flexible PTO bandwagon statistics now are showing that people take even less time off when they’re told they can have as much as they want. So this tip is both for leaders and for junior attorneys. Take time off this summer and plan it now. Planning in advance and getting it on your calendar will pay dividends. Your team will know about it and respect it.

It will be less stressful planning in advance and you’ll have something to look forward to. So some thoughts about planning your summer vacation. What’s your vacation goal? Is it spending time with family relaxation, adventure, seeing a new place? Is your ideal vacation destination a spa or a yurt in Costa Rica? Is it an amusement park or a quiet house on the lake? Focus on those options. What are your obstacles to taking vacation? Is it time? Is it money? Do you not have a traveling companion? Is it your trial schedule, your kids’ schedules, figure out whether you need babysitters, pet sitters, passports, coverage for hearings, and get all of that in place early. Finally, it’s really important, and this is where the fun begins. To explore different destinations and options. Use a travel app or a travel agent to help you plan a vacation to Europe or an island may be more affordable than you think.

Check out credit cards with introductory perks like bonus airline miles or free rooms at a hotel. Set expectations early with your work colleagues and your family. Will you be available or working part of your vacation? Everyone needs to know that. Your kids may need to know that you’ll be on email early in the morning or in the evening after they go to bed. Your team may need to know that you won’t be calling in at all, that you’ll be in a different time zone or at a destination without wifi. Just make sure everybody knows and those expectations are set. Make sure not to make your vacation too rushed. Schedule in some downtime and a day or two to settle back in. When you return from your trip, give yourself time to unpack, do laundry and catch up on things before you need to go back to the office. Supervisors and leaders encourage your team to take time off and be a good role model by taking time off yourself. If you don’t take time off, your staff may not think it is appropriate or expected that they will do so. Even though you may have a very generous vacation policy, try not to call in yourself or bother your team when they’re away, absent a true emergency. Rest, relax, have some fun and share the pictures when you return.

Dave Scriven-Young:

Thanks so much for your tip today, Sharla.

Charla Stevens:

Glad to be here. Dave, hope I’ve given some helpful advice to someone.

Dave Scriven-Young:

And that’s all we have for our show today, and I’d love to hear your thoughts about today’s episode. If you have comments or a question you’d like for me to answer on an upcoming show, you can contact me at dscr Young at O’Hagan meyer.com and you can connect with me on social. I’m at attorney DSY on LinkedIn, Instagram X, and Facebook. You can also connect with the ABA Litigation Section on those platforms as well. But as much as I’d like to connect with you online, nothing beats meeting you in person at one of our litigation section events. So please make plans to join us at the 2025 Section annual Conference, April 30th through May 2nd in Chicago. This annual conference provides unique opportunities to learn and interact with in-house counsel, outside counsel, academics, government, employees, and judges from across the country. The conference will include over 20 dynamic programs highlighting all aspects of litigation, and of course still will be opportunities to network during our special events and programming breaks.

To find out more and to register, go to ambar.org/sac 2025. You won’t want to miss it. If you like the show, please help spread the word by sharing a link to this episode with a friend or through a post on social and invite others to join the show and community. If you want to leave a review over at Apple Podcasts, it’s incredibly helpful. Even a quick rating at Spotify podcast is super helpful as well. And finally, I want to quickly thank some folks who make this show possible. Thanks to Michelle Oberts, who’s on staff with the litigation section. Thanks. Also goes out to the co-chairs of the litigation sections audio contact committee, Haley Maple and Charlotte Stevens. Thank you to the audio professionals from Legal Talk Network. And last but not least, thank you so much for listening. I’ll see you next time.

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