I spent five years at Dow Jones as a reporter before I ever worked for a plaintiff’s lawyer. I remember what a filing day looked like from that side of the desk. A complaint would land, the company’s statement would arrive within the hour, and I’d spend the rest of the afternoon trying to get anyone from the plaintiff’s firm on the phone. Often I couldn’t. The story ran anyway, with the company’s version in it and a line saying counsel didn’t return calls. That line is still being written today, and it is avoidable.
So this is what I ask for in the week before a complaint goes in. None of it is hard. All of it has to happen before the filing, because once the docket updates, nobody at the firm has a spare hour.
I need to know who speaks for the case and I need that person reachable from the moment of filing until about 7 that night. Not the firm’s main line. A cell number that someone answers. I answer my own phone, and I expect the same of the lawyer I’m working with on filing day. Reporters will give you twenty minutes. They won’t give you until tomorrow.
What happened, who was hurt, what the complaint asks for. Plain words, no adjectives. I have sat with lawyers who could argue the case for an hour and could not do this in thirty seconds, and I’ve watched the quote that ran be the one from the company instead. We write the three sentences together before the complaint is final, and we say them out loud until they sound like a person talking.
Reporters read complaints the way I did: looking for the paragraph near the top that says what the case is about in language they can quote. If that paragraph is on page 40, the story gets written from the defendant’s statement. I read the draft complaint for that paragraph and if it isn’t there, I ask counsel to put it there.
A defendant will look through everything the named plaintiff has ever posted. Before filing, someone has to sit down with that client and look at every public post, photo and comment with a defense lawyer’s eyes. I’ve written about this before and I’ll keep writing about it, because it keeps getting skipped.
Big defendants don’t write their statement on filing day. It was approved weeks ago. It will say the company takes safety seriously, doesn’t comment on pending litigation and will defend itself vigorously. I pull the statements they gave in the last three matters and we read them. Then we decide, in advance, how the three sentences answer them. The answer is almost always the document: the page, the date, the exhibit.
A complaint filed at 4:30 on a Friday is read on Monday, after the company has had a weekend to get ready. Tuesday morning gives every reporter a full day to read it, call both sides and file by deadline. The court’s calendar decides, but when there is a choice, I ask for the middle of the week and the morning.
Case caption, court, docket number, the core allegation in two sentences, how many people are affected, and the name and number of the lawyer who speaks. That page, with the complaint attached as a PDF, goes to reporters within minutes of the filing. It was the thing I most wanted as a reporter and almost never got.
In the Johns Hopkins case for 8,000 women, one AP wire story, on a day dominated by U.S.–Russia tensions, produced more than a million press hits. The lawyers settled the case. I won the story.