It dawned on me recently that I did not begin my writing career seventeen years ago when I started the manuscript for Directed Verdict, my first book. It actually began nearly ten years before that when, as a young attorney, I had fully developed plot lines kicking around in my head.
And it happened while I was running.
At the time, I was a young associate in the litigation section of a relatively large firm. I loved my job but it was a lot of hard work, grinding away on big cases, reviewing reams and reams of documents. It was a far cry from the exciting life of the television lawyers who get to try a major case every sixty minutes. To relieve stress, I would do a lot of running. And while I ran, I would think about my cases, or about other lawyer’s cases, or about hypothetical cases and how I would try them.
