Word: protracting
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DELAY. Thanks to overcrowded, harried courts, lawyers can often find ways to protract a shaky case indefinitely. Postponements, recesses, objections, motions, depositions, unavailability of client or lawyer?the list of stalling techniques is endless. Sometimes the intent is to squeeze a cash-starved opponent into a disadvantageous settlement. Or it can be even more pernicious. In Chicago, an attorney for a notorious dope dealer won 72 postponements over four years on the ground that he had trials elsewhere. A judge finally tired of that game and ordered the trial to proceed; the jury needed only 30 minutes to return with...
...lawsuit. The wear-'em-down philosophy was articulated by Cravath, Swaine & Moore Senior Partner Bruce Bromley in a speech before an appreciative audience of Stanford law students 20 years ago: "I was born, I think, to be a protractor ... I could take the simplest antitrust case and protract it for the defense almost to infinity ... [One case] lasted 14 years ... Despite 50,000 pages of testimony, there really wasn't any dispute about the facts ... We won that case, and, as you know, my firm's meter was running all the time?every month for 14 years...
...They desperately need Republican votes to impose cloture, and to get those votes they may have to accept Dirksen's amendments. Yet they fear that to do this would be to set off an avalanche of amendment attempts that would, at worst, gut the bill and, at best, protract the battle indefinitely. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield said he thought the debate might even last through the national nominating conventions and into the fall...
...quite telling all. Hoping to weaken both British imperialism and the threat of a people's government in the New World, Spain had sent the colonies secret shipments of clothing, salt and munitions through the private mercantile house of Gardoqui & Sons-but only in quantities calculated to protract the struggle without making a real decision possible. When Washington's army began winning important victories, Spanish interest in the Revolution abruptly vanished...
...anxious courtship makes a long and languid evening. Farmer Stover shows twice the indecision of Hamlet without any of the excitement. The apple of his eye is a decent, agreeable girl but singularly unobservant. And the worried relatives, gabby neighbors and drawling farm help that punctuate-and protract-the evening are all stock-comedy figures...