The Havener Law Firm, LLC

by Kathleen B. Havener

There is plenty of advice available or the benefits and pitfalls of focusing one's practice on a definitive specialty or remaining a general litigator. Most of this advice is likely to be irreconcilably contradictory. For example, Deveboise & Plimpton, in describing its litigation practice on its website (as of the date of this writing), states, "Our teams combine the skills of generalist litigators, able to take on any case, with the firm's substantive experience in issues of antitrust, securities and finance, products liability, international dispute resolution, intellectual property and media, insurance, bankruptcy, environmental litigation, mergers and acquisitions, employment, tax disputes, professional liability and white-collar criminal defense." Similarly, Paul Weiss's website states, "Specialization is inevitable, much as the firm prefers to promote its generalist litigators." Apparently, even members of the Am Law 100 are conflicted on the issue.

For me, there is no conflict. I am a committed generalist. But, when I examine the list quoted from Debevoise & Plimpton's website, I can say without hesitation that in my 16 years of practice, I have personally been involved in matters that provided me with "substantive experience in issues of antitrust, securities and finance, international dispute resolution, intellectual property . . . , insurance . . . , environmental litigation . . . , employment, tax disputes [and], professional liability ...." Beyond Debevoise & Plimpton's list, I have also had a piece of the action in matters dealing with government contract bid protests, discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, partnership and joint venture law, eminent domain, school law, fraudulent conveyance, commercial foreclosure, oil and gas, utilities law, and even an arbitration under the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement (the precursor to the North American Free Trade Agreement) for which I had to develop an understanding of how the United States and Canada each deals with promoting the interests of its own growers of durum wheat. (How many readers of this article have ever even heard of durum wheat? I'd wager there are a precious few at best.) I even second-chaired the defense of one (but only one) murder trial. I could probably shake the cobwebs loose in my memory and come up with a few more curious bits of information, but I think I have listed enough to make my point.

I don't deny that when I listen to my spouse, a tax lawyer who practices in the field of tax-exempt bonds and tax-exempt organizations, quote and argue about discrete words in particular sections of the tax code or the regulations, I experience both a sense of amazement and a twinge of envy at his expertise. But, that he can quote chapter and verse of the tax code never makes me wish I had chosen a different path for myself. Sure, it would be nice to have enough confidence in my own knowledge of a particular subject never to have to look anything up. But first, I'm the kind of person who would likely look it up anyway because being certain matters to me. Second, the law in most areas is always changing, and what I thought I knew about it six months ago may not be the correct way of looking at the same facts today. Finally, my reward in taking on so many different kinds of matters is gaining an understanding of how a variety of businesses work, of what makes people tick, and of the intricate details of an ever-expanding number of different worlds. My reward is simply the knowledge itself.

Peter Mere Latham was a great nineteenth-century physician and medical educator. Latham said, "There is nothing so captivating as new knowledge." I passionately agree. I guess it goes back to my school days when I never had a favorite subject. When you tend, as I do, to complex commercial litigation, you have successive opportunities to gain new knowledge about an almost limitless variety of subjects about which you would never otherwise learn. For me, there is a genuine thrill in becoming immersed in the language of a particular business or technology, in getting to know the people involved in the controversy, and in uncovering the history of what really happened. I confess: I am a facts junkie. One extraordinary and unexpected benefit of having such intense curiosity about the facts of a dispute is learning both how to listen and how to inquire when you suspect your understanding may be faulty. You also learn how to record fairly the history of how the controversy developed.

For example, I have literally spent years learning how a landfill is built, how it is regulated and by whom, the geology that underlies a particular landfill, what happens when the landfill is full, what the trends in the waste industry are, and what a particular waste company does to limit its emissions of greenhouse gases. I gained that knowledge in a securities fraud case in which the matter in dispute was whether the disclosures made in a particular prospectus contained statements that were misleading to potential investors. To defend our client against the allegation that the issuer-a company involved in collecting, hauling, and disposing of waste-misrepresented the facts about the company in its prospectus, it was essential to learn everything there is to know about land-fills. How else could I assure myself and the tribunal that the statements in the prospectus were indeed true?

In a government contract bid protest, I learned in a single meeting the intricacies of why the computer our client was to supply was able to pass the benchmark set in the government's request for proposals, and why the client's competitor believed such a successful performance to be impossible. I learned what made the successful bidder's computer better, faster, and smaller. In an intellectual property case, I learned the difference between the methods our client and a competitor used to wrap individual slices of cheese.

Does your understanding of the esoteric and extremely case-specific facts "matter"? Of course, there is no doubt that it matters enormously to your client when those facts affect the case you are engaged to handle. It should matter to you at the very least because your knowledge of those facts contributes to your ability to represent your client competently. But does that knowledge improve your mind? Does it make you smarter? Does it make you a better lawyer?

I doubt that the knowledge of case-specific facts makes you any smarter than you were before you knew them. But I think that such knowledge and a continued thirst to gather and understand more and more information, indeed, make you a better lawyer. An ever-increasing store of knowledge gives you the means to develop an understanding of an ever-widening variety of industries, businesses, rules, regulations, laws, bodies of law, and persons. That kind of understanding is a platform for improving the analysis and assessment of every matter you ever handle. Further-more, this wealth of background information puts you on a higher plane when you set out to understand the facts of the next matter you take on.

The securities fraud action that required me to learn the ins and outs of landfills has so prepared me that I would have not a moment's hesitation taking on the representation of a waste-handling enterprise in almost any aspect of its business. I would have an advantage in accepting such representation, because I would not have to learn everything from scratch.

And what this continuing curiosity certainly does is keep me always interested in my work. I can honestly say that I have never spent a single day in the law that bored me. There is always something new to be learned that will help me figure out a better way to represent my clients' interests. And, I confess, I don't have any sense that my curiosity will diminish as I go forward. If "an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less,' then I will never be one. I will always be chasing more and more information about more and more areas, and every small esoteric factoid that I learn will make me smile, simply because I learned it. Like Dr. Latham, I will continue to be captivated by new knowledge.

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Kathleen Havener is a partner with Hahn Loeser & Parks LLP in Cleveland, Ohio. Her practice consists of complex commercial litigation, including multidistrict litigation, securities fraud, insurance fraud, tax fraud, corporate tax controversies, insurance coverage disputes, real estate disputes, administrative law, and appeals. She is a codirector of the Section of Litigation's Division VI (The Profession).

End note
1. Nicholas Murray Butler, winner of the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize, Columbia University Commencement Address, 1947.