The Books of Summer

After Lisnek reworked it, it read like this:

“The Lord is good. . . . He knows those who commit themselves to him.” The words are from the Old Testament [but] this was on a company document sent by the defendant to all employees in the company. You will see and hear many company documents, all of which will show that this is a company whose owner made every decision, hiring and firing, solely on the basis of religion.

Lisnek teaches readers how to avoid the first draft and embrace the second; demolishes the myth that 80 percent of jurors make up their minds after opening statement; and offers invaluable advice on how to get witnesses to understand why literal truth is less helpful to a jury than contextual truth.

If GCs need an ethics refresher they can pick up Derrick Bell’s “Ethical Ambition,” now in paperback. It’s a lyrical and luminous story of Bell’s life in the law — from practicing with Thurgood Marshall through his resignation as a professor at Harvard Law School in protest of its hiring policies. But it is also much more — a guide for living a principled life.

For GCs who feel burned out or simply need to feel better about the legal profession, “One Man’s Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream” is Phyllis Vine’s meticulous recounting of one of Darrow’s last cases, the defense of a group of black citizens charged with murder in 1920s Detroit. It’ll make attorneys proud to be members of the bar. Or, check out Dorothy Rabinowitz’s chilling “No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Errors of Our Time,” an account of unwarranted prosecutions during the child abuse witch hunts of the 1980s and 1990s, how the legal system was perverted and how it � through the work of lawyers � tried to right itself.

Beach Reading

Finally, GCs looking for something a little less weighty can try a novel from fellow lawyer William Lasher, whose protagonist, Victor Carl, is an ethically challenged lawyer. Here’s the opening of his first novel, “Hostile Witness “: “What I have learned through my short and disastrous legal career is that as in law as in life, the only rational expectation is calamity. Take my first case as a lawyer.”

In the page-turner category, we’ve read “Fatal Flaw,” “Bitter Truth” and are half way through this summer’s “Past Due.” And, yes, the latest shows Carl’s glancing familiarity with the ethical rules. It also shows he knows how to cut to the meat of the coconut:

Joey Cheaps might have been a sad sack no account who still owed me my fee, but he was a client. That means something, to be a client. It means he gets my loyalty, whether he deserves it or not. It means he gets my absolute best for the price of an hourly fee. It means in a world where every person has turned against him there is one person who will fight by his side for as long as there is a battle to be fought. And the final battle, as far as I could see, was just beginning.