A few years back, two of us had the privilege of joining a highly trained SWAT team in New Orleans responding to a call for a barricaded subject with an assault rifle. To be clear, by “joining” we mean observing from the relative safety of the command vehicle. From that vantage point, we had the privilege of watching the incident response unfold from start to finish through a wide-angle lens, so to speak. Like a SWAT team, a lawyer’s specialized knowledge and training arm us with a variety of tools to solve problems before resorting to the big guns (i.e., litigation). Read more about our lessons learned from SWAT here , to give us all more access to more tools.