The case you should have turned down

Every plaintiff firm is carrying one. It was signed on a good day, it has eaten eighteen months, and everybody knew by week three. Here is what the file looked like at intake, and why nobody said so.

Ask any plaintiff lawyer with ten years behind them about the worst case they ever took and you get the same shape of answer. Not a disaster — a slow one. A file that was never going anywhere, that nobody could quite bring themselves to close, and that quietly consumed more hours than the three cases that paid for the year.

Everybody has one. Almost nobody runs the numbers on it afterwards, which is why everybody takes another.

It does not announce itself

The bad case is rarely the one with obvious problems. Those get declined in the consultation, cheerfully, by someone who has seen it before. The expensive mistake is the file that looks fine and has one thing wrong with it that nobody weighs properly, usually because it arrives wrapped in a sympathetic client.

Four shapes come up again and again:

• The liability is clean and the damages are thin. Everyone focuses on the clean part, because clean liability feels like winning. A case you will certainly win for very little is still a case you are financing for two years.
• The client is wonderful and the record is silent. Sympathy is not evidence. If the only source for the central fact is the client telling you about it, you have a credibility contest, and those are expensive.
• There is one document nobody has seen yet. The employment file, the prior claim, the surveillance. Everyone agrees it probably says what the client says it says. Sometimes it does.
• It is just outside your practice. A good case in an area you touch twice a year costs three times what it would cost the firm down the road, and you will still be learning the standard of care on their dime.

Why nobody says so in the room

This is the part that actually matters, because the diagnostic problem is usually solved and the organisational one is not. Someone in the room nearly always knows. They do not say it, for reasons that are entirely human:

• The intake person is measured on signed cases, not on declined ones. Nobody has ever been praised for the file they talked the firm out of.
• The partner who heard it first has already told the client it sounds strong. Reversing that is a phone call nobody wants to make.
• It is a slow month and the room wants to sign something.
• The objection is a feeling about the file rather than a sentence, and feelings lose arguments to enthusiasm.

That last one is the fixable one. A reservation that cannot be stated as a specific missing fact gets dismissed as pessimism. The same reservation stated as "we have not seen the 2021 review and the whole retaliation timeline depends on it" survives the meeting, because now it is a task rather than a mood.

The question that does the work

One question, asked before anyone signs anything, catches most of it:

What would have to be true for this case to be worth what we think it is worth — and which of those things have we actually seen?

It is deliberately not "is this a good case". It forces the theory into a list of specific propositions, and then forces each one into a column: seen it, or taking their word for it.

A case where everything important sits in the second column is not necessarily a bad case. It is an unknown case, and unknown cases should be signed with a plan to find out quickly rather than signed with optimism. Those are different decisions and they feel identical in the room.

The thing that makes this hard is time

The honest reason firms sign thin cases is that doing this properly takes hours you do not have at intake. Reading a full employment file before deciding whether to take the matter is a real afternoon, and the client wants an answer today, and there are four other calls waiting.

So the evaluation gets done on the intake summary and the client’s account, which are both versions of the same source. The documents get read properly in month four, which is when the problem surfaces, which is after you have spent the money.

That gap — between when the file could be read and when it actually gets read — is where most of these cases are born. It is not a judgement failure. It is a sequencing failure, and it is the one part of this that software genuinely changes: if the records can be read in the first week rather than the fourth month, the conversation about whether to keep the case happens while it is still cheap to have.

Closing one is a decision, not a failure

Firms are far better at opening files than closing them. A case that has already absorbed a year carries its own argument for continuing, and the sunk hours are exactly the reason people keep going rather than the reason to stop.

Worth putting on the calendar twice a year: pull the ten oldest open matters and ask, for each one, whether you would sign it today knowing what you now know. Not whether you can win it — whether you would take it. The ones where the answer is no are not going to improve by being ignored for another six months.

Nobody enjoys that meeting. The firms that hold it anyway are noticeably less tired.