So you know all about that cab rank rule where you take on whatever comes your way. It means not irregularly you get dumped with a steaming pile of turd that there's no hope in hell of winning and the best you can hope for is minimising the damage and not making yourself (and preferably your client) look like an idiot. Sometimes your client looking like an idiot is pretty unavoidable, so you'll settle for doing your best and hoping for the understanding of the judge, who can see the patent level of cow poop you are being forced to peddle, but will not give you too hard a time knowing that you're just doing your job.
But there are other cases where you get a warm feeling as you prepare. A growing realisation that while it's far from being a slam dunk, you have a real shot at making it fly. And as you prepare your skeleton that realisation builds into a wave of euphoria as bit by bit the pieces fall into place and you see exactly where you can nail the other side's naughty bits to the wall. And you see that if you can just make this one point stick, everything else will flow and follow on from that and you might, with a following wind behind you, get over all those other hurdles.
That is the feeling I had as I prepared for my trial last week. There were weaknesses in my case. There were loopholes to exploit. There were things in my evidence I'd have to gently pad around and protect. But there was a glorious shining target on the other side's case that I could aim at, and I could poke, and I could punch a hole the size of a ten ton truck through. And once they fell down on that, the little niggles on my side would be nothing compared with the blatant falsehoods on theirs.
In theory.
In reality there were any number of things that could go wrong, and even if I rode roughshod over that part of their case, the real crux could be conceptually separated and a carefully guided judge, performing a rigorous analysis might just come to the painful conclusion that while they were lying, still my clients weren't telling (or remembering) the whole truth, or even if they were, it wasn't enough to get them what they wanted.
And then one of my witnesses blew a hole that looked about the size of the titanic in my chronology. It's a horrible thing to come out of a trial, and know you've scored every point you hoped to, but that the other side landed some good blows too and you just have no idea which way the judge will jump.
That's why, as a judgement is delivered, and bit by bit it comes down in your favour, it still feels fantastic...
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