A Good Lawyer Knows the Law...

...a great lawyer gets the judge removed as soon as he or she rules against their client. From Legal Times, a legal critique of the DC Circuit's decision to remove Judge Royce Lamberth from the Cobell Trust Case.
I have been on the receiving end of something like this, more than ten years ago when I was working on a complex personal injury/product liability case in Travis County. Travis County had (and may still have) a truly annoying rotating docket system, whereby every single pre-trial motion you file gets heard by a random judge. In a case with significant discovery issues, like that one, it meant that with every motion, we had to explain the entire case from Adam and Eve to the present, plus the controversy at hand, to a new judge. Finally, I discovered a section of the local rules that allowed you to request that a single judge be assigned to hear the entire case. So, we requested the first and only judge to rule in our favor. Then, the Defendants moved to recuse that judge on the grounds that he was biased because he ruled for us! Evidently, the previous five judges that had ruled for the Defendant were perfectly alright. The judge we requested recused himself, I think primarily because he was up for re-election, and we were assigned a judge who promptly denied everything we asked for. Just to be obnoxious, we tried to recuse her and I pretty much copied the Defendant's motion word-for-word, but of course, it didn't work.