I have watched my close friend and partner for 45 years, Bob Gnaizda, as a legal public advocate.
Aside from the four cases I cited in the last blog. All the effective legal public advocacy work that I have seen has been done on the basis of the following principles:
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The only time to go to court is to have a press conference on the steps of the court to announce a case that is being brought. This is a tactic used to frighten vulnerable opponents. To actually use a court is nearly always a mistake. It is costly in time and resources to prepare a case, and it takes many, many years for the case to be heard and adjudicated. Never worth the time.
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The ideal legal public advocate should come with prosecutorial experience not defense experience. Cases and projects must be put together with the kind of tactics and strategy that people learn in prosecutorial environments.
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Always use the discovery component of a court case to obtain information and use pressure based on the discovery information to obtain your goals.
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The ideal situation is always to use instances where some government regulatory body can be applied as a threat. Many businesses are wholly regulated such as banking, utilities, transportation, communications and a few others. A good tactic is to develop skills and allies at the regulatory level. The regulations may not directly impact on the opponent but public hearings by regulatory bodies and public pressure on regulatory bodies can frighten your opponent into conciliation.
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For a tactic to become successful, pressure must be continuous and unrelenting. The opposition may be forced to sign some public agreement but that agreement should be subject to constant review and public examination. Almost always, an opponent will back out and reneged on promises.
The best person to be a public advocate is a lawyer whose interest are intense in the subject area and whose life is committed to the subject. My interests are in pro-commerce cases.
An example, for me, of such a public legal advocate would be a young woman with ferocious intensity and belief in the values of pro-commerce.
She would find plaintiffs with nothing more than her friendship networks and a telephone call to five people who had been laid off from their jobs because of an increase in the minimum wage. These people would be videoed with their statements and their explanations, for use in media contacts. My imaginary advocate would find the best jurisdiction in the United States, where the case has a chance of being heard and where the local jurisdiction has a chance of dropping its minimum wage policy. That might be a city that had already gone through bankruptcy and was gun shy about risking an adverse court decision.
My public advocate would then seek a class action representing vast numbers of people and broad geography.
With letters to all appropriate legal jurisdictions where minimum wage laws have been passed, attention would be brought to this class-action worth billions of dollars. The tactic would be to get a vulnerable jurisdictions to rescind their minimum wage raises. That action could spread.
It would also be useful to have one or two public spokespersons hold press conferences on the issue.
Where is this young person that I am seeking? Finding adequate funding for her office and a modest salary is trivial….when the right person is available.