Author’s Preface
Winning Legal Wars first appeared in 2003. It was a coming-of-age story, but it wasn’t about a young lawyer coming of age! Instead, it contained a bunch of ideas, a lawyer’s first understanding of how the Justice Machine worked. At the time I wrote it, I had only recently understood the ‘system’ I worked in. I felt delighted, liberated, indeed triumphant. I wanted to share my joy. The problem was I also wanted to impress everyone around me. Winning Legal Wars was pompous, self-aggrandizing, sermonizing, patronising, grandiose, and the vocabulary was truly intimidating. I hated the book within days of it hitting the shelf.
My publisher had no trouble selling the book. Pretentious books easily find intimidated readers to buy them. In the years that followed, I transformed the book into a workshop series and took it across the country. I did weekend workshops for senior executives, playing war games with intelligent people who engaged with the Justice Machine as part of their job. It was fun, and it was enriching. But as the years rolled by, I found myself simplifying my stories, focussing better on the basic thread of my case studies, divorcing myself from the self-absorbed tedium of the written work. The book didn’t talk to its audience like the workshops did.
Eventually, I took the book out of print about 2010. The publisher waited patiently for a rewrite, but life got in the way. My law practice kept me engaged. Yet, at every turn, I found myself using the same principles to advice my clients. Tragic as it has been, the pandemic of 2020 provided me with the space to rewrite the book. It is difficult to be creative when both nature and humans are inflicting violence on one another: when a great and ancient civilization is being reduced to a wasteland. Still, one grits one’s teeth and here we are.
In the end, I didn’t have to change much from the 2003 edition. The structure remains the same. I have a new opening section, and I trust you will find that insightful. This section contains a perspective I did not have in 2003 and I thought it dovetailed beautifully into the ‘attitude’ of the book.
I struggled between using old case studies and new case studies. People resonate better with newer case studies but then you have to obliterate identities and events all the more in order only to protect people. I found there wasn’t that much difference between the old and new cases, I was comfortable in the knowledge that the more things change, the more they remain the same. I have also deleted about a third of my case studies. You can emphasise a point too much!
That takes me to the decision to not charge for this book. After three books published, finding a competent publisher was not going to be a challenge. But is it moral to sell one’s life experience and knowledge? There is no simple answer here but I do hope I asked the right questions in this 2016 piece https://www.nsouthlaw.com/2016/08/08/is-ipr-moral/. Curiously, it raised this issue in the context of a pandemic so this Opinion piece remains as relevant today as always.
In the end, the decision was simple. It came down to objectives. Why was I writing a book? Did I want to share my knowledge or did I want to take a buck off someone’s back pocket? I am told people do not respect things they don’t pay for. Perhaps that is true of those who have a great deal of money. For much of my life, I was not that person. I didn’t want a financial criterion to determine who would have access to my knowledge. In giving the book away free, everyone can have it to use or to throw away, to profit or to reject. I share it because I know that life itself is elusive. It is only experience and knowledge that can outlive us, and I want to share mine before death do us part. We humans don’t have an option to find immortality. Is there too much hubris in wishing that our ideas do?
Thank you then for taking a peek at this book and I do wish you a happy read.
Ranjeev C Dubey