Building the Criminal-Defense Skunkworks

I’m looking for a few good criminal-defense lawyers to advance the state of the art in criminal-defense trial lawyering. Together we will seek disciplines that have not hitherto been widely applied to the trial of criminal cases for the defense; investigate and experiment with these disciplines; share among ourselves when and how they are useful and not useful; and document our studies for posterity.

This gig is not for everyone. It will require:

1. Unpaid and publicly unlauded work: participants will be expected to research, experiment with, and document potentially helpful disciplines on their own time; if we get something that works out of the project, we may publish, but otherwise we’ll be doing it for love of the game.

2. Patience and lethal generosity: this is a longterm project; you will get more out of the project than you put in, but it will take time.

3. Broad general competence: you have to be good at more than trying cases the way you’ve always tried cases; you also must be able to understand and assimilate knowledge from broadly diverse fields of study.

4. Trial experience: if you haven’t first-chaired at least a handful of criminal-defense cases, you probably don’t have a proper foundation on which to build; if you don’t regularly try cases it’s going to be difficult for you to experiment.

5. A childlike fascination with the way things work: obviously.

Email me at mb@ivi3.com if you are interested.