Blog — Around the water cooler

Each week we will pose these three questions to different lawyers in the legal community.

This week we talk with Donald R. Cassling, who has been practicing for over 30 years. He practices commercial litigation, including UCC litigation, bankruptcy litigation and patent-infringement and trade secret litigation at Quarles & Brady.

– What do you find the most interesting about your practice?

My practice (primarily breach-of-contract litigation, IP litigation, and bankruptcy litigation) gives me the chance to do three things I enjoy:  Being a student, a teacher, and an advocate.

In tackling complicated financial or technical disputes, I like to make sure that I get a thorough understanding of the client’s business, products, inventions, markets, goals, and challenges. Once I know that I understand the technical or financial basis of the client’s problem, I do my best to simplify it from the jargon in which it was originally packaged into common, everyday English. This simplification sometimes reveals gaps and assumptions in the client’s own thinking, and can also help to give the client a new perspective on its problems and how to solve them.

After I’m convinced I understand the client’s business and technology well enough to describe it in plain English, I know that I can turn around and teach it to others in ways that are easy to understand and that tell a persuasive story.

– What makes a good lawyer?

A good lawyer is one who can strike the right balance between competing virtues:  A good lawyer should have a burning desire to compete and to win, but it should be balanced by having the character to do so honestly and fairly.

He should have the discipline to be prepared and well-organized, but balance that discipline with the courage and creativity to improvise and take chances when they present themselves. He should have the confidence and ego to be convinced in his heart of hearts that he is absolutely the best person to make this argument or try that case (even when his head is telling him that there are lots of good lawyers around who could do an equally good job). Finally, he should have the strength and perseverance to take a punch and keep fighting, but that determination has to be balanced by the wisdom to know when settlement is probably a better option than trial.

What “makes” a good lawyer can also mean “how do you become” a good lawyer.  The answer to that question seems obvious. You don’t come out of law school as a good lawyer or a bad lawyer. You become a good lawyer by following good examples – by observing, working with, and competing against as many excellent lawyers in as many different arenas as possible. At some point in your career, however, you inevitably change from learning by example to becoming the example.

Whether you intend for that to happen or not and whether you’re aware of it or not, your associates will be paying attention to how you make decisions, how you handle pressure, and how you treat your colleagues and your adversaries when you think no one else is looking. For older lawyers, therefore, the challenge is to remember that you’re always a role model for younger lawyers, and the character you display every day in the relative privacy of your office will help to mold – for good or ill — the young lawyers around you.

– What is the biggest legal news and what is its impact?

The “biggest” legal news I’m currently aware of are two issues that are as much political in nature as they are legal:  (1) those laws, regulations, executive actions, and lawsuits that are trying to shift the balance between protecting our security and protecting our individual freedoms and (2) those administrative actions and lawsuits generally arising out of the subprime mortgage crisis that seek to “soften the blow” of bad economic decisions, by selectively bailing out some institutions and individuals, but not others.  I don’t know what the impact of these political/legal fights will be, but I assume that we’ll have a better idea after the next election.