Meet Dan Warman
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Copyright John Crouch 1994 / / Amicus Curiae, College of William
and Mary
Other Crouch Articles
Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of vending machines? Dan Warman knows.
The adjunct professor of Case Preparation and Pre-Trial Discovery has tried
cases that put him on intimate terms with the fauna that teem within all
of Marshall-Wythe students' favorite snack foods and even in their coffee.
In defending warehouses against charges of bug infestation, he has tracked
the vermin that infest coffee beans and cocoa beans back to their native
continents. He knows how many of them can survive the grinding process,
which survive the brewing process, and which ones are just plain indestructible.
Warman's work is not all bugs and beans, however. As a partner with Norfolk's
Williams, Kelly and Greer, he handles treasure ship cases, train injury
cases, spontaneous combustion cases, and every kind of admiralty case from
railroad admiralty to representing injured sailors. One famous case that
was thrust upon him was that of the USS Central America, a gold-laden ship
that sank in 1862. When it was found in 1992, its original insurers claimed
it. Warman was dragged in five days before trial.
Nonetheless, most of Warman's work, and most of his class lectures, arise
out of the case of United States of America v. 155 137-pound burlap bags,
more or less, of an article of food, [labeled] COCOA BEANS ... [etc.] He
is doing battle with several bean shippers over which bugs came with whose
beans, and which were in the warehouse. The case gives the class plentiful
examples of how to conduct discovery, and how not to.
Warman's class is team-taught with three other partners from his firm, which
is mostly a defense firm. Next semester it will be taught by Thomas Shuttleworth,
a product liability, malpractice and personal injury plaintiff's lawyer
from Virginia Beach.
Warman's students draft discovery requests and responses and depose injured
plaintiffs, doctors and chiropractors. 3Ls in the class get to learn the
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure over again, as they have changed completely
since first year. In many districts, mandatory spontaneous disclosure has
replaced or supplemented discovery. On the other hand, litigants and judges
are free to make up their own rules and discard others to fit the needs
of each case.
The partners offer many tips, of course, but one of the simplest and most
important is to "push back the date where you know you are ready."
All lawyers have a panic date when they will finally get a case in gear
and see what still needs to be done. How early this day comes can make the
difference between success and failure.
In discovery and throughout litigation, Warman urges future lawyers to "use
wisdom" as well as cleverness, to do things for well thought-out reasons
and not "just because you can," and especially to "avoid
getting a reputation as a sharp operator." He says most successful
lawyers keep a grip on "common human decency" and treat each other
"with dignity," even in litigation. Lawyers' "long-term integrity"
is "really hard" to uphold, but is also their biggest asset, he
says.
Though he mostly does defense work, Warman is not enthusiastic either way
about most kinds of "tort reform." He thinks the main problem
with the tort system is the availability of damages for creative new torts
and such intangibles as non-physical pain and suffering, which leads to
incomprehensibly huge random-number verdicts. In his experience, though,
he says juries have been wrong only two or three times, one of which was
a case the defendant should have lost.
He dislikes many lawyers' advertisements, but says advertising in general
has been a good thing, and has lowered clients' costs.
Warman came to the law by way of service in the merchant marine. He graduated
from SUNY's Maritime College and sailed all over the world as a Third Mate
on tankers. Unloading grain in Chittagong, Bangladesh, provided many fond
memories, but eventually he decided to be a lawyer for the people he worked
with, and went to law school at George Washington University.
- John Crouch
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