A Conversation With ... Jim Meadows

Tell us about your firm.

Polsinelli Shughart's a full-service national law firm. We have approximately 500 attorneys nationwide. We have nine here in Springfield. The firm literally does every kind of personal and business litigation transactions. We have people who specialize in just about all types of law.

In Springfield, we specialize in litigation ... mostly business, construction, financial institutions, banking cases, and lots of lawsuits with businesses involving other ... typically small businesses, where employees are in disagreement with each other or businesses in disagreements with each other.

We've done everything from employment law to even some probate litigation.

How do you spend your time in practice?

I spend approximately 30 percent to 40 percent of my time on construction-related matters, whether it be construction litigation or helping with litigation prevention, writing some contracts.

I spend the rest of it in just a general business litigation practice, probably (using) 30 percent to 40 percent of the rest of my time in appellate work.

I'm involved in most of the appeals in our office, and we also take some cases on appeal, where other attorneys have handled them at trial, and they hire us to handle the appellate side. The appellate part of a case is what happens after a trial court has made a judgment - what we're used to on the TV shows, where the jury comes back with a verdict and the judge gives a sentence. After that, the parties, with certain time limits, have the right to appeal the judge's or the jury's decision and claim that mistakes were made.

How do you decide which cases to take on appeal?

Just to call them mistakes - we're not saying necessarily that one of the lawyers who did the trial did something wrong, just that something was not legally correct.

When someone comes in with an appeal, and it's not an in-house appeal ... typically, we meet with the attorney who handled it at trial (and) has a very good idea of what issues there are on appeal. Say there was a novel issue of law (for which) there's not much Missouri case law. The trial judge has to make a snap decision on that, and he or she could be right or wrong in that given situation. And the trial attorney will say, "Here's what the trial ... decided, and we want to see if there's a possibility to review that on appeal and convince the Missouri appellate courts to go a different direction."

Why is appellate work important to you?

An appeal gives you the chance to do something different that you don't have time to do in the heat of regular litigation. It gives you the chance to delve very deeply into an issue, to look at it from all angles, and to construct an argument based on all the case law that exists ... and even look at the philosophy, the case law and the reasons surrounding that issue.

What makes cases memorable?

In general, what I like about cases is they range from helping individuals with a dispute over property - who inherits Grandma's farm - to really getting into some very detailed work on employment discrimination and business cases, where you'll be dealing with millions of dollars in question and really unique issues that have only come up a few times before in Missouri (or) the rest of the country. That's kind of a nice variety to have.

And in appellate work, they say the greatest key to success is being the respondent, meaning, in other words, that you won at the trial court. Ninety percent of cases are affirmed - the appellate court agrees with what the trial court did.

But we've been able to get a few cases reversed through the years and made some improvements.

How have economic pressures changed construction-related work for you?

It's gone from being more disputes over quality of work or disputes that involve whether someone is entitled to cost overruns on various projects to now, it's turned into more mechanics' liens, and pursuing payment for work that was done ... or what happens when a big project goes belly-up - who gets paid?