Favorite Quotes

Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be enough business.

Abraham Lincoln

You don't have to attend every argument you're invited to.

Unknown

An ounce of mediation is worth a pound of arbitration and a ton of litigation.

Joseph Grynbaum

Conflict is inevitable. But combat is optional.

Max Lucado

When non lawyers ask me why litigation is stressful, I tell them imagine you're a surgeon and there's another surgeon in the operating room trying to knock the scalpel out of your hand, misadjust the anesthesia and shove the surgical nurse out of the way. That other surgeon - in litigation - we call him opposing counsel.

Frank Ramos, Miami litigator

No lawyer should fashion himself a "superstar." None can make all, or even most of, the calls correctly. Measured judgment is key, luck and bad fortune are always present, results are seldom perfect, and success can never be assured.

Robert E. Shapiro, The Tragedy of James Comey: A Lawyer's Tale

What I admire most in any litigator is a serene spirit, a steady freedom from moral indignation, an all-embracing tolerance - in brief, what is commonly called good sportsmanship.

H.L. Mencken, Mencken Chrestomathy

Lawyers have to have an elephant's hide, the courage of a martyr, and the patience of a saint. We are not trained for this.

James Gray Robinson, As Legal Professionals: We Are Strong

This is a CIVIL division. "Rambo lawyering" will not be tolerated. Counsel will treat jurors, parties, witnesses, me, my staff, and each other with professionalism, courtesy and respect at all times.

Colorado State Court Judge Robert McGahey, Jr., Pretrial Order section IV(5) (2012)

The role of an attorney is to ensure that the best legal interests of his or her clients are being served. Often, a client's best legal interests are inconsistent with the client's driving emotions.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida v. Cypress

For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke

People who have expertise just love to share it. That's human nature.

David Baldacci

On issues of the law, however, the fact finder does not need a party's expert to explain legal intricacies to her; the Court comes equipped with its own expert on these issues - the Judge.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Jonathan Goodman, Romano v. John Hancock Life Ins.

When facts are few, experts are many.

Donald R. Gannon

There is nothing like the death of a moneyed member of the family to show persons as they really are, virtuous or conniving, generous or grasping.

Jesse Dukeminier and Stanley M. Johanson

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

The best friend a person has is one who has just died.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Vulgarity is no substitute for wit.

Julian Fellowes, Downton Abbey

Keep out of probate litigation. It's like being ground to bits in a slow mill; like being roasted at a slow fire; like being stung to death by single bees; like being drowned by drops; like going mad by grains.

Charles Dickens, adapted from Bleak House

Wills are uncanny and electric documents. They lie dormant for years and then spring to life when their author dies, as if death were rain.

Janet Malcolm, Strangers in Paradise

A will contest is a colorful and tragic tapestry of human emotion and desire. The actual intention of the testator often gets lost in the side bar plots and the maneuvering of rival factions vying for a share of the wealth.

Hon. Eunice L. Ross and Prof. Thomas J. Reed, Will Contests

Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Napoleon Bonaparte

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

H.L. Mencken

There is nothing so practical as a good theory.

Kurt Lewin

The earth belongs in usufruct to the living; the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, Sept. 6, 1789

In the rapid descent of life, every support on which man can lean should be left untouched, and it is well that interest serve as monitor to duty.

Jeremy Bentham, The Theory of Legislation

People are the best judges of their own concerns; or if they are not, that it is better for them, on moral grounds, that they should manage their own concerns for themselves.

Arthur Hobhouse, The Dead Hand

Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens. Maybe, said Elrond, but let him not vow to walk in the dark, who has not seen the nightfall.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Money-giving is a very good criterion of a person's mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally ill people.

Dr. Karl A. Menninger, quoted in Newsweek, Nov. 2, 1959

The post mortem squabblings and contests on mental condition have made a will the least secure of all human dealings.

Lloyd v. Wayne Circuit Judge, 23 N.W. 28 (Mich. 1885)

In 2001 decedent took his original copy of the 1997 will, urinated on it and then burned it. We hesitate to speculate how he accomplished the second act after the first.

Estate of Stoker, 193 Cal. App. 4th 236 (Cal. 2011)

To be undue influence in the eye of the law there must be - to sum it up in a word - coercion.

Lord Justice Hannen, Wingrove v. Wingrove

But to say that a man is a fiduciary only begins analysis; it gives direction to further inquiry. To whom is he a fiduciary? What obligations does he owe as a fiduciary?

Justice Felix Frankfurter, SEC v. Chenery Corp.

A trustee is held to something stricter than the morals of the market place. Not honesty alone, but the punctilio of an honor the most sensitive, is then the standard of behavior.

Justice Benjamin Cardozo, Meinhard v. Salmon

Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury.

Judge Learned Hand, Helvering v. Gregory

The less the rewards of wealth are associated with one's own contribution, the better the case for taxing them. Inheritance remains one of the purest forms of getting something for nothing.

John A. Brittain

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Benjamin Franklin

Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.

Yogi Berra

Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

Deirdre Sullivan, Always Go To The Funeral

The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that's only if you're very lucky. And you listen very hard.

Mark Slouka, Nobody's Son

Death is not the end. There remains the litigation over the estate.

Ambrose Bierce

It can't end like this. Tell them I said something.

Pancho Villa

In return for the loan of life, we each owe God a death. Payment in full is a non-negotiable term of the debt, but the timing and circumstances in which remittance is made varies.

Chief Judge Ed Carnes, Bobo v. Tennessee Valley Authority

Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of never-ness.

Mikhail Iossel, Life: How Was It?

When researchers ask people to assess their own well-being, people in their 20s rate themselves highly. Then there's a decline as people get sadder in middle age, bottoming out around age 50. But then happiness levels shoot up.

David Brooks, Why Elders Smile

We are communal histories, communal books.

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas