Peter Lubin, firm co-founder, brings a wealth of courtroom experience to Lubin Austermuehle DiTommaso’s business and class-action litigation. He has been lead plaintiff’s or defense counsel on numerous multi-million dollar class-action lawsuits with national impact. Lubin Austermuehle DiTommaso received the first DuPage County Law Firm of the Year award in 2008 for their commitment to the ideals of the legal profession. For over two decades, Peter has also handled a wide range of complex commercial litigation matters. Peter received an AB from Dartmouth College in 1980, and his law degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1983. He teaches trial and litigation skills to law students at the University of Chicago Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. Peter was selected by the then Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit to be one of the founding members of the Markey-Wigmore Inns of Court, and received commendations from various legal aid organizations for providing them with substantial awards from certain consumer class actions. In 2007 Peter was named to the Visiting Committee at the University of Chicago Law School. To review Peter’s full resume for a description of the cases he has worked on click here.
Transcript:
| We really like to get to know our clients, really get to know their case in depth to the point where we’re willing to spend extra time to do that. If you had filmed this in my office, there would have been a taxi meter that I inherited from my dad as a lawyer, which one of his clients gave him as a joke. We like to tell our clients we’re not taxi meters–we’re going to sit down, and you’re not going to feel like you’re being billed for every second. Even though we do bill by the hour, other than in contingency cases, we’re going to take the time to learn about their case, and they’re not going to pay every nickel for that. We realize, particularly with our small business clients, that they have a budget and litigation is expensive. We want to find a way to win and have a satisfied client at the end of the day. You have to know about human nature. You’re really producing almost like a movie by the end, so throughout the course of the case, you’re envisioning how you’re going to organize the case, what witnesses you’re going to put on, and even which lawyer on our team is most effective to question a particular witness. For example, yesterday we were doing a deposition, and I knew that my hard-nosed personality wouldn’t work with that witness and wouldn’t play in the courtroom. So the person who was taking the deposition was my colleague Terry Bueller, and he has a different style. It’s a mix of styles and a plan to get an aggressive approach to tell the truth, but it’s also about really understanding human nature, understanding what happened, and making a very effective presentation. Being a good storyteller is key–if you tell a good story and create it with enough dramatic flair, you can win the case. Sometimes, like this summer, Terry and I had a small case where we got $120,000 off of someone who had cheated on a $10,000 car. We won $60,000 in punitive damages against one of the largest car dealers in the country. |
From Peter’s interview for the Masters of the Courtroom series on ReelLawyers.com.
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