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You're ready to be a business tort lawyer: think handling business torts will be dry and boring? Fighting for the rights of small-business owners has its share of excitement - and it lets you flex your hard-won trial skills for a worthy cause.

Article Excerpt
Handling garden-variety personal injury torts and handling business torts are different in a few key ways. For one thing, business tort cases give you much better opportunities to display the full range of your trial advocacy skills because of the much wider range of factual disputes that can be involved. The drama inherent to these cases can captivate a jury's attention, since they commonly involve not just negligence but actual underhanded, intentional misconduct. And your opponents--who specialize in "business litigation"--probably have less jury trial experience than you do.

In business trials, talented and experienced civil trial lawyers can use their skills to help a different type of client--the small-business owner--get justice after being wronged.

You may be thinking, "But I don't want to represent com represent people." You like representing the injured and the forgotten against the rich and powerful. Of course: That's the calling and the rallying cry of every trial lawyer. What you may be ignoring, however, is that business tort cases are often about the same thing.

Consider the statistics. The table below shows data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. It lists the numbers of American businesses, large and small. (1)

Employment size of enterprise Firms Firms with 1-4 employees 2,734,133 Firms with 5-9 employees 1,025,497 Firms with 10-19 employees 620,387 Firms with 500+ employees 16,926

Notice that there are a lot of small businesses. In fact, there are more than 4.3 million U.S. companies that have fewer than 20 employees. That is 250 times the number of big companies that have more than 500 employees.

The 16,926 big companies already have lawyers. These are banks, brokerage firms, utilities, heavy manufacturers, and auditing firms. They're the ones committing the torts against the small businesses--and reneging on promises to them.

The ones that need you are the 4.3 million small-business owners. These are the people routinely harmed by the big companies, which are defrauding them, illegally pricing them out of business, competing unfairly with them,...

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