How to Play Tennis With Your Spouse and Not Get Divorced

It is difficult to hit with a spouse (or significant other). After watching friends (with the help of lawyers and judges) divide their community property in half several times, I discovered that there is a way to practice tennis with your spouse and keep your net worth. Agree on two rules, then set up a specific practice routine.

Rule 1 is NEVER give your spouse tennis advice. To make sure this rule is clear, the key word is Never. It will be very difficult not to say “get your racket back sooner” or “brush up on the ball,” etc. However, if you violate this rule, make sure you are not within striking distance (or guys, at least wear a cup). A polite spouse may respond to your helpful tip by saying, "Here's a tip: Don't give me anymore tips."

There is one exception-- if the spouse asks for a tip, e.g., "Why am I hitting so many forehands into the net." Even then think long and hard about your answer. If you are forced to give a tip (or just can’t help yourself), there are two sub-rules:

a—Try to think of something your spouse did right (but needs to do it more often) and compliment it by saying, “It seems like you really hit some good forehands when you got your racket back very early,”

b—Only give out one tip (and only one and I mean one, not two), then follow sub-rule “a” above.

Rule 2 applies to the other spouse. Ask them not to say, “hit the ball closer to me” or “don’t hit with so much spin,” etc. Usually, the better player is trying to hit it nice and such not criticism is not easily swallowed.

There is a practice routine that works well because it prevents the less-skilled spouse from running across the court to hit the ball—which admittedly is usually quite fun to watch, but it restricts conversation on the way home from the courts.

Get a basket of balls. After a 5-15 minute warm up, place your spouse at the baseline on the forehand side of the court. You stand on the at the net on your forehand side so you are hitting cross court to each other—you at the net and your spouse at the baseline. The person on the baseline should practice footwork, watching the ball, and following through as well as trying to hit a low (just a few inches over the net, medium-speed ball, with a controlled stroke. If you can, make the net person take a step or two to the right or left and once in a while hit a lob. The net person should practice stepping forward, contacting the ball in front and watching the ball. Then switch until each person has hit from each of the four positions. The better player usually feeds the balls. Then, one of you should hit controlled serves about (20-30 balls) and the other person practices their return. This should take about an hour.

Sticking to these rules will assure a great workout, a few laughs and the biggest bonus—you will be able to talk to each other after the workout.

© 2016 Phil Aurbach, Las Vegas, NV

Some Thoughts About Organizing Discovery Documents & Trial Exhibits

After preparing for trial a few times, here are my thoughts about organizing discovery documents (usually in pdf format) and deciding which should be used at trial.

Use an excel spreadsheet to organize discovery documents as they come in.  

This spreadsheet can be very useful in several ways:

1.  To sort documents by bates number or by date or by element of the cause of action.  All you need to do is click the top box down arrow and the documents are automatically sorted in ascending or descending order based on bates number or date, etc.  This can be very useful to look at the documents:

-- in chronological order (instead of the order in which they are produced)

-- in order of element of the cause of action (because you can see when you don't have documents relating to a certain element eg causation)

-- you can sort the trial exhibits column so just the exhibits you want to use at trial will be listed at the top of the spreadsheet.

2.  If all the discovery documents are placed in the same folder as this spreadsheet, you can right click in a cell with a bates number and link that cell to the exact document.  After you link each bates cell to the specific document, you can click on the bates number while in the spreadsheet and the document will open so you can look at it.  

3.  Finally, when it comes to trial, you can delete columns E through H and you have your list of exhibits for use at trial.

Summarizing PDF Depos

Summarizing PDF depos

Instead of creating a separate document for a deposition summary, try this: summarize a pdf depo with bookmarks.  When you click on the bookmark, you go directly to the place in the deposition that you thought was important testimony.  You can highlight the testimony in the deposition to make it easier to see.

 

To get to the bookmark “pane” i.e., column, go to View in the pdf depo, then Show/Hide, Navigation Panes, Bookmarks.

The bookmark can summarize the key points of the deposition on that page.  Highlight the text (go to View, Comment, Drawings & Markups and click on the highlight icon to drag over the text of the depo.  Add a key word into the bookmark summary to make it even easier to review.  You can put all similar key words together by dragging the bookmarks into position.  This is how it looks:

The Key words are

BACKGROUND

CREDIBILITY

BONUS

$86K

P3

If there is a ~ tilde in the bookmark, the fact is especially important.

Ctrl F searches the pdf depo.

Shft Ctrl F searches the depo AND the bookmarks.