This morning, the cast of lawyers in the Sean Bell case will meet for the first time the judge who may preside over them for years as they present evidence in the most important police brutality case since Amadou Diallo.

When three detectives were indicted in March for their involvement in Bell’s death last November, Judge Arthur Cooperman was chosen in a random drawing to oversee the case. During his career, Mr. Cooperman, 73, has sentenced both those who attacked police officers and police officers who brutalized citizens. The 25-year veteran of the state Supreme Court in Queens is a former assemblyman of Queens.

The meeting is a pretrial conference during which the lawyers will schedule what motions they plan to make. Because the three defense lawyers have not yet received any material from the Queens district attorney’s office, no major strategy announcements are expected, the president of the Detectives’ Endowment Association, Michael Palladino, said.

“We will simply make a request for discovery materials,” he said.

Mr. Palladino said the union and the attorneys haven’t yet decided if they will make a motion to change the venue of the trial, though legal experts have said the prospect is likely. After four police officers shot and killed Diallo in 1999, they were indicted on murder charges. Lawyers were granted a change of venue, to Albany, and a jury there acquitted the officers of the charges.

Mr. Palladino said the union is planning to hire a polling firm to test the bias of prospective jurors in Queens. The lawyers in the Diallo case used the results of a poll to convince a judge that they couldn’t get a fair trial in the Bronx.

“My concern is that we’ll do whatever we can, whatever is legally possible to ensure that these individuals get what they are entitled to, and that’s a fair trial, whether that is in Queens or another jurisdiction,” he said.

A lawyer who represented one of the officers who shot Diallo, John Patten, said Judge Cooperman could set the tone for a possible trial at today’s meeting.

“He could be aggressive on behalf of the defendants or he could be more neutral and wait and see,” Mr. Patten said.

Judge Cooperman declined to comment for this article.

In a 1997 profile of Judge Cooperman in the Queens Bar Bulletin, he talked about presiding over the first case against a police officer who used a stun gun inappropriately against a suspect.

“It was strange,” the judge said. “You would go home and see the case on television and in the newspapers. It was a circus. Artificial light flooded the hallways for the cameras.”

Of his personal jurisprudence, he said: “Although sometimes it may not seem that way, I enjoy what I do. I try to be fair. I try to decide issues on what I believe the law says.”

According to the profile, the judge also wrote one of the first decisions in a case in which DNA evidence was used to convict someone.

Judge Cooperman is a baseball enthusiast, a veteran of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and a graduate of New York University’s College of Arts and Science and School of Law.