Verisimilitude or Cat-Vacuuming: You Be the Judge

[dr_pretentious]

While my sister and I were driving to Rochester, I picked her brain about the kind of law I thought my current protagonist might practice. It's not her specialty, but she had a general idea of what it entails. I had the right match between temperament and task. I had the wrong courthouse geography. Google brings me unwelcome results. If Bob litigates patent disputes, he has to work in Newark. It's actually easier to change what kind of law he practices than to change where he works or where he lives.

Alas, if he's going to handle anything more exciting than traffic violations, his law firm's office has to be in Freehold. If I were lazy, I would just declare Holmdel the county seat, or, better yet, decide to park a federal courthouse there. All we need to keep our hero litigating patent disputes is a federal courthouse in Monmouth County--is that so much to ask?

So I've spent the past half hour with my Monmouth County map, one Firefox window full of Weichert Realty searches for houses in Holmdel, and another Firefox window full of Yahoo Maps and Driving Directions, trying to shave five minutes off Bob's commute to 71 Monument Park, Freehold. Meanwhile, I've been wracking my brain trying to decide what kind of trial lawyer he is, if he's not a patent specialist.

Maybe I should mention that there is no moment in this story when Bob actually tries a case. His job is one of the things he misses while his whole life gets derailed by the death and subsequent haunting habits of his parents. The only storytelling function served by his having a job at all is that he needs to pine for it. Is Newark too far away? The federal courthouse might as well be on the moon, for all the good it does Bob.

On the one hand, if a detail is worth including, it's worth getting right. On the other hand, I think I recognize this behavior I'm engaged in. Back when I had a dissertation to write, I used to do a lot of it. I believe it was called procrastination.

Comments

[citabria]

1) There's also a federal courthouse in Trenton.

2) There are plenty of patent attys who practice in Manhattan and live elsewhere.

3) Patent law rarely involves going to court -- they tend to leave patent-related litigation to the litigators.

Hope that helps!

[wayzgoose.livejournal.com]

if a detail is worth including, it's worth getting right.

That's really the quesion,isn't it? Is the detail worth including? Is it important to know where he tries cases? If so, is this world reality necessarily the same as his world reality?

In my upcoming story, it was important that Dag be able to walk to work from a duplex where he can have a dog. I put him on Queen Anne Hill and placed his office conveniently on Pier 71, a non-existent part of the Seattle Waterfront. People understand that there is a part of town called Queen Anne, and it is reasonable to walk to the north end of the waterfront from there. I doubt even native Seattlites will count down where Pier 71 is unless they work on the waterfront (not considered a major market-segment for my story).

[sppeterson.livejournal.com]

Fix it in post!

Just throw in a placeholder for now with a revision note to check up on it later, then cover it in the second draft. By then you'll have a better idea of how important that detail is to your story.

being the judge

[twoeleven.livejournal.com]

i'd say both: it bears an excellent resemblance to actual cat-vacuuming. ;)

[reynaud.livejournal.com]

You know, I spent a couple of months at one point temping for a divorse lawyer. She spent perhaps only 1/3 or her time in a court house, the rest of her time in her office, looking over paperwork, meeting with clients, writing stuff up, filling out paperwork, looking up law, looking at and filling out paperwork, etc.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I need his profession to help establish a few things about his character. He likes to be the underdog, likes a good fight, and thinks of himself as a protective figure.

I also need him to have a moment when he looks around his office and laments that it's his fate to drown in paper, so he needs to be up against opposing counsel that's trying to paper him to death with discovery stuff--large corporations are good at papering people to death.

Would personal injury be the right specialty for a lawyer who sues pharmaceutical companies on behalf of patients? My first thought was that that would be a product liability kind of thing, but I'm not really sure.

Re: being the judge

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Oh, good answer!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I've been going over the things I know (or think I know) about daily life in the family law practice my father and sister have. They don't spend that much of their time at the courthouse, in terms of hours out of the day, but they often need to rush things to the courthouse to file them, and a lot of documents have to be hand delivered, can't be faxed for whatever reason. They often need to confer with various administrators, judges, etc., in ways that are best done in person Dad and Pru chose their current office suite in part for its view of the front door of the courthouse, so that they could time their runs across the street to file things or visit people at moments when the line to go through security is short. I don't know how they'd get done all the things they need to do if, on top of the work itself, they had long commutes between home and office, or a long commute between the office and the courthouse.

Ultimately, the reason this character is a lawyer rather than something else is that he needs to have a terrier-like, good-natured combative streak, and the litigators I know all have that going for them.