BarkingDogs.net

The material on this page was contributed by Geordie Duckler, LLC - Attorney at Law,
in an interview conducted by the Barking Dogs Webmaster in May of 2006

Go to the index for the Geordie Duckler interview

As to the Type of Attorney Best Qualified to Represent You In a Barking Dog Case

Barking Dogs Webmaster:
In terms of types of attorneys, I understand that there are civil litigators and, then, there are personal injury lawyers. Which of those two would be a better choice to represent you as you attempt either to sue or to get an injunction against the owner of a barking dog?

Geordie Duckler:
Actually, one is just a category of the other. The term litigation simply refers to a lawsuit. So any attorney that will file a lawsuit and pursue it through to trial is a litigator. When it comes to types of attorneys, the big division is between those who handle civil cases and those who take on criminal cases. So if an attorney says he is a civil litigator, that just means he is someone who knows how to take a lawsuit through the steps, as opposed to being the type of attorney who represents those who are accused of having committed some type of crime.

Barking Dogs Webmaster:
So then, every personal injury lawyer is a civil litigator?

Geordie Duckler:
Yes. By definition, every personal injury lawyer is a civil litigator. They have to be. If they are personal injury lawyers they have to know how to file a lawsuit and take it through the steps necessary to litigate.

Sometime they just call themselves litigators, because that's all they do is file cases and, then, solve them and settle them out of court. Sometimes they do a lot of trial work, so they call themselves trial attorneys, because mostly they are winning their cases at trial, as opposed to settling things out of court. But any personal injury lawyer is likely to be both a litigator and a trial attorney, anyway. I would think.

So in terms of the categories of litigators, personal injury lawyers are attorneys who deal with injuries to the client, usually a car crash, or they've been slugged or knocked in the head with a baseball bat. And the fact is that a barking nuisance also causes injury to the person, so any personal injury lawyer is likely to be willing to consider taking on a barking dog case too.

Another type of attorney who might sometimes deal with barking dog cases are the business, contract and transaction lawyers. They don't deal so much with injury to the person as with financial injures, like breaches of contract or business disputes. But they probably wouldn't know that much about barking disputes and how to handle a nuisance case so, most likely, you wouldn't go to them.

There is no specialty area of law in which a certain type of attorney focuses exclusively on handling nuisance cases, like barking dogs and that kind of thing. But there is a specialty in which people deal with real estate law, or real property law. They are called property lawyers, and they deal a lot with things like how much is property valued at and how much does it buy and sell for, and all those kinds of transactions. Again, they wouldn't have any specific interest in nuisance cases.

But in terms of being able to prove what you need to prove in a nuisance case, which is the loss of the use and the loss of the ability to enjoy your property - which is really the entire basis of any nuisance case - they will have a good handle on that as well as on everything else to do with how you enjoy property, how you use it and lose it, and how you value it. And that's always nice to know.

Barking Dogs Webmaster:
Are you saying then that a person might want to seek out a property lawyer to handle their barking dog case?

Geordie Duckler:
I'm just saying that most nuisance statutes and most nuisance common law rules talk about property. They don't talk about loss of sleep or emotional distress. They say that to meet the test to show a nuisance you have to show that the use or enjoyment of your property has been interfered with. Therefore, at some point in the case, you need to tie together the fact that someone was living at a certain place, but now the place is different than they wish it was, and different than it could be.

So in that sense, a personal injury lawyer would be helpful, but a property lawyer could be first rate for that purpose as well.

Barking Dogs Webmaster:
It sounds like a property lawyer, who has extensive experience doing injunctive work, who also handles personal injury cases, would be just about ideal.

Yes, I think that would be a good combination of skills and knowledge.

Go to the index for the Geordie Duckler interview

This page from the Duckler Interview is part of Section Three:
the Law section of barkingdogs.net