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New Litigation Handbook is a Quick Reference Guide for Busy South Carolina Lawyers

Posted On Oct 20, 2015

Lawyers have access to millions of pages of reference materials, thanks to the Internet and law libraries. But sometimes practitioners just need a quick way to find practical information, such as a filing deadline for an appeal or appropriate objections to an overly broad discovery request. 

Based on my experience combing through reams of articles looking for such information, I've written the South Carolina Litigation Handbook for the busy civil lawyer. Each time over the past few years that I had to stop and research a small – but important – point of law, I made notes in order to have a shortcut for the next time it surfaced. The result is the Litigation Handbook, published in September by the South Carolina Bar. 

How many days do you have to appeal? What's the proper remedy for a specific cause of action? Open the book, and it's right there. 

There's little in the book that you can't find online or in other books, but I've reduced recurring civil litigation topics to the essentials in an easy-to-access and streamlined format. Some of the items covered in the book include:

  • More than 40 causes of action and remedies,
  • Types of damages and how to recover them,
  • More than 20 types of defenses,
  • Time allotments under the South Carolina Rules of Civil Procedure, and
  • Discovery objections.

I hope the book is particularly useful for younger lawyers. One of the hard lessons for all lawyers is that the rigorous academic regimen of law school gives a thorough grounding in the law, but focuses little on how to actually file a case or motion. As a buddy of mine used to say, in law school, you sit in an ivory tower and look down on the law. 

Consequently, new lawyers find they have to work hard after they graduate to get up to speed on how to apply everything they learned in school. Like all lawyers, I went through this rite of passage. My goal in writing the Litigation Handbook is to help younger lawyers learn the basics of practicing, and I hope that it will be useful as a quick reference guide to more experienced practitioners, too.

You can find the book on the South Carolina Bar website here.

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