What are the Benefits of Starting a Litigation | California
Many clients come to my office, and they have a stack of papers from a letter writing campaign between their prior council and another attorney or the other side where they say, nothing came of this. I spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars and all that happened is they wrote letters back and forth. Maybe there’s an agreement reached, but everything fell through. To me, the saddest thing about that is that there was no lawsuit filed. If there’s a lawsuit filed with a backstop of litigation and with the thundering cloud of a trial moving and advancing steadily forward, settlement is a beautiful thing because settlement, with that backstop of litigation in place and with the case number in hand, any settlement that’s reached has the forces if a judge or a jury decided it. Without that case number, without the lawsuit, without a filed complaint, you have nothing more than a breach of another agreement. Then you’d have to go in to still in to the lawsuit, still in to the discovery, the depositions, the trial, everything that costs so much and gives attorneys a bad name as far as the expenses. What I suggest is shoot first, ask questions later. We already know that by the time you, as a client, are in our office, the problem is not resolvable on a client to opposing party level and then an attorney is necessary. For the $435 of hard costs that it costs to file with a State Court, with the $70 that most process servers take to do up to three attempts at the service of a summons and a complaint, the amount of monies have attorneys spend a couple hours drafting a complaint and getting all the other accouterments of documents that need to be filed, that’s the best way to start your litigation. At that point, you have something if you reach a settlement agreement and you propound discovery along with the demand letter for settlement, even if there’s payment plans involved right at the inception. Instead of a defendant lawyering up, often times you can encourage them to enter in to a settlement or a payment plan or the terms that are sensical and make sense for all parties involved. That’s just another example of what we do to manage litigation costs.