Local counsel
If you're trying a case here and you aren't admitted here, you need an Indiana lawyer on the caption. I can handle the Indiana side of the case for you.
Why me
I've defended cases outside Indiana, admitted for the case, with local counsel of my own. So I know exactly what the arrangement is supposed to feel like from your side of it, and I know the two ways it goes wrong.
The first is local counsel who signs and disappears, leaving every local rule question and filing issue to you. The second is local counsel who starts running the case.
The arrangement
You keep the strategy, the client relationship, and the podium. My job is to see that nothing procedural is ever the reason a good case goes badly, and to tell you when a local rule or practice may affect your case.
I'll take on as much or as little of the substantive work as you want, and I'll say so plainly when I think a hearing is one you should cover yourself.
For the company
Large companies keep national counsel for good reasons. Those lawyers know the business, the witnesses, the history of the litigation, and how the company wants its cases handled. When one of those cases is filed in Indiana, the company needs an Indiana lawyer on the appearance, and it needs that lawyer to fit around the relationship it already has rather than compete with it.
I serve as Indiana local counsel for large corporations whose lead counsel have no office here. The legal department keeps its lead firm, the lead firm keeps the case, and the company has somebody in the courthouse who answers to both.
For the legal department, that means the Indiana piece of a national docket is run the way the rest of it is, by a lawyer who can be reached, and who says early, before a deadline makes it urgent, when something about an Indiana court changes the plan.
What that includes
Admission
The temporary admission petition, the supporting materials, and the certificate of good standing, prepared and filed so the motion is granted rather than returned. Indiana wants a lawyer admitted here in the case and on the papers, and I stay in it.
Filing
Indiana e-files through a state system with its own conventions, and every county and federal division layers its own local rules and standing orders on top. Deadlines, service, confidentiality designations, and proposed orders in the form the court expects.
The judge
Not the written rule, the practice. Which judges want a call before a discovery motion, which ones rule from the bench, how continuances are really treated, and what a case management order in that courtroom means in practice.
Appearances
Case management conferences, status hearings, routine discovery motions, and local depositions. I prepare from the file itself, so the only thing you have to send me is the hearing notice.
On the ground
Site inspections, witnesses who won't travel, court reporters, videographers, and record custodians. Someone two hours from the courthouse instead of a flight and a hotel away.
Trial
Indiana jury practice, the venire in that county, and the instructions this bench gives. Some firms want a local lawyer at the table for all of it. Some want me there for voir dire and nowhere else. Both are fine.
Where
Indiana's trial courts and both of its federal districts, the Southern District from Indianapolis to Evansville and the Northern District from Hammond to South Bend. I've practiced in these courts for twenty-three years.
A firm this size can clear a conflicts check the same day you call. There's no committee and no queue.
If you have several Indiana matters rather than one, the role can be the coordinating one: consistent positions, one point of contact, and no two of your files taking opposite views of the same issue.
Your client is your client. I don't solicit clients from local counsel engagements.
Narrative entries that say what was actually done, sent on the schedule your client requires, in the format their guidelines specify.
