Doug Richards practices criminal defense and complex litigation at Richards Carrington. The firm represents clients across Colorado and, in matters that reach beyond it, nationwide. Those two categories of work — defending a person accused of a crime and litigating a complex civil dispute — are usually treated as separate specialties. They share more than the separation suggests. Both are built on the same underlying discipline: taking a contested set of events, identifying which facts are actually provable, and constructing a record that a factfinder can follow.
Two practices, one method
Criminal defense and complex litigation diverge in stakes and procedure. They converge in method. In each, the decisive work happens well before argument: locating documents, physical traces, and witnesses that the opposing account has not accounted for, then determining which of those items can be authenticated, admitted, and explained to a jury without requiring the jury to take anything on faith.
That is why a defense practice that also handles complex litigation tends to be evidence-forward rather than narrative-forward. Complex cases are won on exhibits and the testimony that anchors them. Criminal cases are won the same way more often than the popular account of trial work allows.
Self-defense as a contested factual question
Self-defense is frequently described as a legal defense, which understates what it is. In practice it is a factual dispute about a sequence of physical events, litigated through the same evidentiary machinery as any other disputed sequence. When the prosecution and the defense agree that a defendant fired a gun and disagree only about where it was aimed and why, the case does not turn on the doctrine. It turns on whether the physical record is consistent with one account or the other.
Firearms cases produce that kind of record. A discharged round travels a path, and that path can leave marks on surfaces it strikes — including a ricochet mark, which indicates an angle of impact rather than a direct hit on an intended target. Where such a mark exists, it is a fixed, non-testimonial data point about trajectory. It does not depend on anyone's memory or credibility. Locating it is investigative work; making it matter at trial requires tying it to testimony a jury already has reason to believe, so that the physical evidence and the human account reinforce each other rather than sitting in separate compartments.
Why the client relationship precedes the case
Richards has described the effect of publishing case stories on the people who eventually walk into his office: a client who has read or watched an account of prior work arrives with a sense of who the lawyer is before any conversation has occurred.
That has practical consequences for a defense practice. The early stage of a criminal case depends on a client's willingness to disclose facts that are unflattering, incriminating in appearance, or simply embarrassing — the details that determine whether an investigative theory is available at all. A client who withholds them during the first interview delays or forecloses the work. Trust established in advance compresses that timeline.