Note: This article was published in Law.com's Litigation Daily on January 12.

BEST PRACTICES

This Gibson Dunn Team Shows You Can Get Associates Reps While Winning

“You have to be in the cage swinging, getting pitches. You don't get better if you're not,” says partner Collin Cox who led a team of three associates to a $15 million trial victory in Dallas federal court.

January 04, 2023 at 07:30 AM

Last month when a federal jury in Dallas returned a verdict for Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher client Maiden Bioscience, it wasn’t partner Collin Cox sitting at the counsel table. It wasn’t the client either. Cox had told the client there wouldn’t likely be a verdict until after lunch. So when the jury came in after just three hours of deliberations, Cox and the client were both scrambling across town to get to the courthouse as sixth-year associate Matt Scorcio wrote the following notes on his legal pad: “We won. $15 million.”  

The fraudulent transfer verdict the Gibson Dunn team won for the collagen maker landed them a spot as Litigator of the Week Runners-Up back before the holidays. But it accomplished something much more significant for both the firm and the client: It brought home a win while garnering significant stand-up trial experience for Scorcio and his junior associate colleagues Katie Rose Talley and Michael Zarian. 

It seems only appropriate that Scorcio was there to take in the verdict. He handled seven witnesses at trial, including Maiden’s expert witness and cross-examination of all four defense experts. Talley cross-examined the last witness at trial, a former president of one of the co-defendant companies who had moved to another by the time of the trial. Meanwhile, Zarian argued the jury charge and motions that came up during trial.      

The Litigation Daily caught up with Cox, who joined Gibson Dunn’s Houston office from Yetter Coleman in August 2021, and Scorcio and Talley, who are both based in Dallas, via Zoom yesterday. Cox landed the case after Maiden previously won a $4.3 million default judgment against RBC Life Sciences for breaching a supply agreement and had to prove up that its assets were transferred to successor companies, including DSS, Decentralized Sharing Services, with intent to defraud Maiden.

Aimed to help Insurers prevent, prepare and prevail In adjudicating complex claims, negotiating settlements and winning cases.

“These sorts of cases are the ones that should be tried. We just had a fundamental disagreement with the other side about what happened here,” Cox said. “And we needed a jury to resolve it.”

Cox said, with fewer cases going to trial, firms need to be intentional in creating stand-up opportunities for associates. He said he believes in “giving associates as much responsibility as they can handle and sometimes a little more than they want.”

“I firmly believe that’s what we do as trial lawyers,” he said “You have to get reps. You have to be in the cage swinging, getting pitches. You don’t get better if you’re not.” 

He said that getting the client comfortable with the team in this case was relatively easy. All three associates have multiple federal clerkships on their resumes—including clerkships in the Northern District of Texas for both Scorcio and Talley. The client also got to see the associates in action well before trial. Of the 13 depositions in the case, Talley took two and Scorcio took or defended the rest.

Talley said the division of labor wasn’t a new concept when the team got to trial. “It started really at the inception of the case,” said Talley, who clerked for Amy Coney Barrett at the Seventh Circuit prior to the judge’s confirmation to the U.S Supreme Court. She said that there was a “trickle-down effect” where Cox showed trust in Scorcio as the senior associate on the team, and then Scorcio as “a good custodian” of that trust shared it with her and Zarian as junior members of the team. 

Scorcio, for his part, said that embracing the responsibility you’re given is key to getting other opportunities. “As an associate, you don’t always control what’s going to come up,” he said. “All you can do is try to do an excellent job and be open to taking on a lot of responsibility.”

“I feel lucky to have gotten those opportunities and all you can do is try to do an excellent job with each one along the way,” he said. 

But Talley admits that as a young lawyer approaching new tasks can be daunting at first. “I think it can be tempting as a young associate where you don’t have a lot of experience and you’re being asked to do things that you didn’t do when clerking and you certainly didn’t learn in law school, to say ‘I don’t know how to do that’ or ‘I certainly can’t do that as well as other attorneys.’” But she said that she’s tried to take any opportunity she’s been given. She said she recognizes that even if a particular task isn’t done to perfection, she’ll learn from it with help from senior members of the team. “I trust that these guys will be able to pick up things that I missed or help me when I’m doing something new that I haven’t done before and then the end product will be good and I’ll be better for it.”

Cox said that he thinks giving young lawyers an opportunity also enlivens the trial presentation. Jurors, he said, don’t want to hear from the same lawyer over and over again. 

“The product is better … It’s not entirely selfless,” he said. “We put on a better trial because the jury heard from four different people in four different ways.”