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Dress Rehearsal; With jury trials on the decline, new litigators increasingly cut their teeth in-house
Within a year of earning his J.D. in 1978, Ernest F. Teitell was handed his first jury trial. "I was incredibly nervous." At times, he wished the courtroom floor would put an end to his misery and swallow him up, he recalled. But despite his share of mistakes, Teitell managed to win an acquittal for his client, who was facing assault charges. Now the president of the Connecticut Trial Lawyers Association, Teitell fears those entering the profession today will never get the chance to experience the same high-anxiety lessons as he did so early in his career--there's simply not enough jury trials. "The breadth of experience a new lawyer can get is far diminished from when I started practicing," acknowledged Teitell, a name partner at the Stamford litigation boutique Silver, Golub & Teitell. "It certainly is a problem for training lawyers." The decline in federal court trials is documented in a 2004 article by University of Wisconsin Law School professor Marc Galanter in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. From 1962 to 2002, the number of civil trials dropped from 5,802 to 4,569, even as overall dispositions multiplied five-fold, Galanter found. In Connecticut, the number of cases, particularly civil cases, going to a jury trial also has plummeted in recent years, due to settlements and the rise of alternative dispute resolution. During the 2004-05 court year, there were 721 jury trials, 481 civil and 240 criminal, according to Judicial Branch statistics. The previous fiscal year, there were 917 jury trials, of which 673 were civil.
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