Boxcars and Rainmakers: A Glossary

Boilerplate: standard legal language used in motions, wills, pleadings, closings, etc. Also may be defined as excessive verbiage used in routine matters to cover every conceivable contingency. Usually baffling to laymen, but "court tested"--accepted by courts for so long that lawyers have little incentive to simplify.

Boxcar discovery: requests for every remotely relevant document. Also known as "fishing expeditions" and "give us the warehouse," discovery involves use (or abuse) of pretrial procedural rules to delay and wear down the other side.

Brokering: also known as "farming out." A lawyer gives a case to another lawyer for a "forwarding fee." An efficient if often unethical way to make money. See "ten-point men."

Bulletproof: a document with no loopholes.

Churning: legal research and motions that have marginal (or no) relevance or usefulness but add to billable hours. Also known as "running up the meter."

Cooling the client out: deliberately lowering a client's expectations, so that he, the client, will be pleased with whatever settlement he eventually gets. Lawyers who do a high-volume business in personal-injury cases are sometimes reluctant to go to trial (too time consuming) and will cool a client out by persuading him to accept a lower settlement than might be attainable in a jury trial.

Forum shopping: looking for a court with favorable precedents, a friendly judge or a home-town jury.

Hacking the pie: what happens at a year-end meeting of partners when they divide up a law firm's profits.

Legislative practice: lobbying.

Paper wars: trying to drown the other side in motions, interrogatories, depositions, pleadings, cross-claims and countersuits. Exploiting every procedural nook, cranny and nuance in order to avoid or delay trial on the merits. Often used to great effect in complex antitrust cases.

Rainmaker: law-firm partner who brings in business, sometimes because he has held high Government office. Among the most famous was Richard Nixon, who managed to attract Pepsi-Cola to the New York firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose partly because as Vice President in 1959 he steered Nikita Khrushchev to the Pepsi kiosk in Moscow as photographers clicked away. Rainmakers can come up dry: ex-Attorney General Ramsey Clark did so much free pro bono work that he lost money for his former New York firm.

Revolving door: what Washington lawyers go through as they pass back and forth between private practice and Government.

Sharpshooter: a lawyer who aims at loopholes.

Ten-point men: lawyers who specialize in settling personal-injury suits steered to them by other lawyers. The ten-point man often manages a settlement simply by bribing an insurance-claim adjuster. He gets his nickname because, for this service, he is usually paid 10% of the total settlement, keeping half and giving the other half to the claim adjuster as a payoff.

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