3-Hour Lawyers of Reddit Compilation

lawyers has there ever been a time the opposing council accidentally proved your case for you and what happened my opposing counsel made some off-the-cuff remarks about how their client had to go to another remote office to get all the records they wanted to use against my client that let me know the witness they were trying to use to introduce the records as evidence wasn't actually familiar with the records or the records keeping process in the jurisdiction we were in records were exception to hearsay rule but you needed someone familiar with the creation and maintenance of the records to get them admitted i attacked the witness qualifications to get the records admitted and ended up getting the records excluded i then made a motion for a directed verdict on the ground they couldn't prove the case without the records and won all because the opposing counsel complained that their witnesses had to go way out of their way to get records for the court ial not my case but i was in the courtroom watching a trial pro said defendant who was accused of flashing a guard and masturbating till well you know as a pro said defendant he defended himself at trial without an attorney prosecutor was doing well proving the case when the female deputy was on the stand the defendant asked her one question if you saw me do what you claim i did then how big is my dong the deputy responded by raising her hands and estimated about 15 inches the guy grinned turned to the jury nodded said yeah that's right and sat down obviously he was convicted he was doing a 10-year prison sentence so this conviction wasn't of much consequence but i'll never forget it i think that guy may have been innocent but went down for an even greater cause i had a hearing where the opposing party offered an updated contract that my client supposedly signed except it was a horrible copy and barely readable then he assured the judge that the new contract was exactly the same as the old contract except for the party name at the top the original contract was in his mom's name the new one in his name and the data of the contract itself he made that assurance multiple times after he exhausted himself saying how everything was the same i then pointed out to the judge that half the provisions were different in that my client had never signed that form the judge asked if we were really accusing him of forging my client's signature since that's a serious accusation i held up the guy's prior conviction for contract fraud and said i absolutely am your honor we won hands down no further argument needed row those guys were either incredibly stupid or stupidly confident in their skills of trickery my dad is a lawyer it's happened several times if the defendant submits or provides video evidence of assault or unlawful detainment but assumes it will go unnoticed in 50 plus hours of footage my dad watches everything he got a multi-million dollar settlement from a major casino after pointing out a moment that proved video doctoring there was the car one two he had a bunch of recordings and found a spot in the recording submitted by the other side where they are discussing what they need to show and how they will prove it if i recall correctly he played the recording and caught as a surprise they had nothing to say and he won after like four days of back and forth i believe you have to get to a point where that evidence would come up that's why he couldn't stop there my dad is a total badass ional was in court for a friend the guy in front of us was contesting a ticket his defense was that he was passing a car at a time and they got the radar reading from the car he was passing not from him he didn't win that appeal plaintiff was claiming insurance money because he accidentally chopped off his fingers while cutting bamboo with the machete and the insurance company our client refused to pay the insured amount during the hearing the plaintiff attorney began to demonstrate with a rolled-up sheet of paper how his client was cutting the bamboo when the accident happened no matter how he tried he could not reproduce the position of the fingers with the alleged cut of the machete the only possible match would be if the plaintiff had deliberately extended his fingers over a plain surface and hacked his own fingers based on this disastress performance the judge determined an expert opinion and later dismissed the case due to deliberate self-mutilation while he was a jerk one has to wonder what sort of trouble he was in to chop of his own fingers for insurance money i do only civil litigation you would think it would generally be a battle against equals professionals v professionals it's not i face a fair amount of parties representing themselves pro often otherwise smart people who wouldn't think to do their own plumbing or operate on their own appendix but have no qualms about appearing in court on their own behalf surprisingly they don't know what they are doing s one of my favorites from a deposition we didn't pay company x's invoices because we heard they were going through bankruptcy they weren't and b it wouldn't be a valid defense to non-payment if they had been it happens more often than you would think one attorney that people continue to hire brian is sort of a legend as opposing counsel four times and six years he has lost cases against my firm where he could have won this is civil litigation but the guy has a knack for spoiling his momentum one in particular the evidence pointed to our client was at fault and we were asked to settle brian introduced a witness and voicemail to the record we had no knowledge of these and asked to review upon review we were confused as the voicemail had nothing to do with proving their case and made the plaintiff look like a lunatic it was full of incoherent rambling and swearing we allow the exhibits to be entered and they went over as we expected and we won the counter claim not an attorney but i did an internship at the city's attorney's office one summer leading to not wanting to be an attorney man was suing the city for evicting him from a public housing development claims he doesn't speak english and forced the city to hire an interpreter for the hearing city says he was evicted because he was raising chickens in the apartment his attorney insists that's absurd no one would do that pushes for proof the chickens were his clients judge wasn't convinced about the proof everything looks like it is going well for the guy until it comes up that the chickens were given to a farm for slaughter guy jumps up and starts yelling give me my chickens back in english judge starts laughing attorneys start laughing case is dismissed it's quite a sadistic picture poor guy is devastated after learning that his chicken children have been sent to slaughter judge laughs attorneys laugh man now evicted scene not a lawyer went to court yada traffic light out cops everywhere handing out tickets i get one for rolling through a red light though i had stopped i stated it was possible the officer just didn't see me stop and asked if any other officers were witness officer replied every cop in our department was there handing out tickets judge said none of you thought to direct traffic seems like you handed out enough tickets that you recognized the downlight was a problem dismissed judge dismissed every one of the tickets that were contested in the room from that day one cop wasted half the forces night i hope he never lives it down not a lawyer but represented myself against an employer who terminated me i spent hours upon hours day after day preparing for this case i printed out emails recorded telephone calls mountains of evidence i wore my best suit and nervous as all frick showed up ready to plead my case when i get there my former employer opens with we terminated woe milkerson for truancy he was supposed to report to work after his doctor's appointment but did not show up until 3 p.m there's an awkward silence the judge says but in your written statement you claim he didn't report to work until 12 p.m in the time card you presented to me it shows that whoa milkerson reported to work at 10 30 a.m more silence i won opposing council introduced a highly relevant and bloody crucial piece of evidence during the cross-examination itself we were really p and we had every right to argue that this was deliberate suppression of relevant documents during discovery but rather than object to its admissibility we asked for our lunch break to commence earlier so we could take instructions from our client as to how to proceed which turned out to be a darn excellent course of action the document prima facie looked supportive of the defendant's case but it actually in substance was pretty damning for them we basically came back from the lunch break to rub the defendant's witness facing it and the witness was so shaken he broke for lack of a better word to describe how he couldn't carry on his bulls and completely admitted to his negligence on the stand he admitted as well that he copied the expert's opinion instead of giving his own independent evidence it was a beautiful trial my father is a physician and occasionally serves as an expert witness in some cases involving insurance payouts for car wrecks he had just spent some time explaining all of the different forces involved in the accident and how that could translate to years of back problems his specialty he was quite technical in his explanation and the opposing attorney thought that my dad was overreaching his expertise and was talking more as an engineer rather than a doctor so he asked him if he was an engineer my dad responded that yes he was in fact an engineer as he had a bachelor's in engineering from before he went to med school it apparently didn't completely resolve the case but the attorney did have to backtrack quite a bit and it really strengthened the patient's case that the insurance company should continue paying for treatment your dad is basically a rocket surgeon now but work with lots we deal with car accidents and this particular girl was claiming severe whiplash and lower back injuries from a minor rear end accident some of her injuries were legitimate but she was claiming that her life was ruined and she was unable to function in society she worked as a physical therapy age studying to become a pt so she knew just what to say but she didn't know what not to post on facebook she claimed she was in constant pain after the accident and couldn't go to the gym the day after the accident there's a pic of her lifting weights hashtag accident can't hold me back she claimed a month of lost wages but there she is in a patient graduation from treatment photo on her works website the week after tge accident she missed zero days of work she claimed that she couldn't travel anymore and guess who had photos of vegas strippers all over her instagram for her sister's 21st birthday she asked for 200 k and she got 9 k for the legitimate injuries in mediation as the mediator laughed at her facebook feed not a lawyer but a relative of a retired prosecutor relative was working misdemeanor criminal court cases get called in alphabetical order and two women named catherine smith and catherine smith were scheduled to have their hearings before the judge not their actual names did you get the point both had similar crimes but slightly different so the bailiff announces the next case to the courtroom katherine smith for one count of possession of c with the intention to sell and one count of prostitution so catherine smith stands up and indignantly cries whoa whoa just wait a second where the heck did the prostitution charge come from i may deal crack but i am not a w easiest drug dealing case my relative ever prosecuted jesus christ that sounds like it'd be a scene out of a comedy movie a while back i was prosecuting an illegal discharge of hazardous substances at a recycling facility specifically the charge was for illegal storage and disposal of crt glass which contains lead cadmium and a few other has substances to demonstrate that the owner had no idea that he was receiving crt glass the defense attorney introduced shipping manifests that lacked the term crt monitors or any other word that indicated that material a close inspection of the manifests however indicated that the defense attorney had just control plus f the documents for certain keywords because what the manifests also demonstrated was that this facility as well as two additional facilities owned by the defendant had been accepting asbestos hexavalent chromium and various other hazardous substances that the facility was not authorized to take that attorney literally handed us the case on a silver platter we found emails linking the defendant to knowledge of the crt disposal as well so we even convicted him on our original charge i represented a client who was defrauded into purchasing a bad business the defendant was not willing to settle and all settlement talks eventually halted also the defendant's attorney was pretty slimy and told me they didn't have a lot of the records i was requesting because her computer crashed and had to be formatted the defendant got a new attorney a year into the case and her new attorney told me about all of these records his client had several of which proved my case and were supposedly destroyed in the computer crash his client was clearly not happy a settlement was reached shortly after lawyer here had a trial where the basic elements of the claim against my client amounted to one that he abused opposing party and two that she was in threat of future abuse all nonsense but that's what they needed to show we get to trial an opposing party who was supposed to be unrepresented shows up with five lawyers two advocates and two interpreters but this is a family law issue and these lawyers are from a business law firm i'm curious where this will go they put on a case that never once mentions any abuse or threat of future abuse and end by proving that she had secretly moved to another town prior to filing the motion meaning that he couldn't pose a threat to her because he didn't know where she was i just pointed out to the judge that there was no need for me to put on a case wtf school lawyer here had a student claim she aggravated an injury at school because the teacher hadn't followed the doctor's orders when the doctor got on the stand he testified that a few weeks after filling out the school form which we had he'd spoken to the mom on the phone and ordered some changes to the student's routine then mom testified that she'd emailed this new info to the teacher except we had all the emails and none of them said anything about the doctor mom backtracked and said she must have forgotten because she'd been busy at work and then at closing arguments the family's attorney explained to the jury that schools are subject to a heightened standard willful and wanton not negligence and so it was their job to determine whether the school had disregarded a known danger naturally we argued that the school couldn't well disregard a known danger if no one had ever told them about the new routine in the first place the jury agreed not a lawyer my wife got hit by a drunk driving teenager years ago parents have dollar sign dollar sign dollar signed dollar sign and friends with the cops so they get it hidden that their daughter was super drunk she couldn't even stand up according to some nurses who lived across the street and responded right away their insurance refuses to pay without evidence wife tells lawyer to take it to court in their position the teenager freely admits she was drinking says it totally changed her life she couldn't believe she almost killed someone she's never touched a drop since and really sorry for all of this that her parents have done insurance company lawyer looks at wife's lawyer and says we will give you a call tomorrow row can't believe that apple rolled that far away from the tree that said one could argue parents protecting their child is a good thing but at this point is was only about money so yeah frick them my wife is a court clerk she told me a story a court clerk friend of hers told her de has a shaky case at best against a defendant police were trying to pin a drug charge on a guy with literally zero evidence the report read that a certain amount of weed and m were found and recovered in the defendant's car but the evidence was lost guy maintains his innocence and has no priors the defense attorney is destroying the officers on the stand for inconsistencies between their accounts and poor documentation on the official police report the prosecution's ace in the hole was a part of the police report that read something to the effect that the police canine said there was marijuana and em and in the car rather than saying something like the police k9 alerted the officers to the presence of drugs it left the defense attorney no choice but to call the police canine to the stand to confirm its testimony da drops the case yes i used to videotape depositions many years ago client was suing insurance company for two years back wages after an injury conversation went like this insurance lawyer it says you're asking for and twenty thousand dollars for two years back pay client yup 60k per year ill well we have your previous tax returns those are only 30k per year client's lawyer i'd advise you to client i know i only put that on my tax form i actually make much more the insurance lawyer very calmly asked to go off the record he said well your client just admitted to tax fraud on video this case is pretty much done now and i don't want to put you out but i need to figure out whether or not i'm legally compelled to tell the judge or irs about this we'll be in touch tldr guy suing for back wages admitted to tax fraud on video deposition did work experience at a trial where the victim flat out stated that the defendant was innocent turns out she's pretty bad at english so when she gave her account it appeared that the defendant had committed a crime they then gave her a witness statement to sign she can't read no good so just signed it anyway this all came out of testimony whilst the prosecution lawyer desperately tried to get her to rephrase what she said funnily enough the trial wasn't immediately thrown out so they brought more witnesses in to testify all backing up the wrong account of what happened comma this all came out of testimony whilst the prosecution lawyer desperately tried to get her to rephrase what she said funnily enough horrifyingly enough the trial wasn't immediately thrown out so they brought more witnesses in to testify all backing up the wrong account of what happened ftfy a barrister friend told me about a case observation she witnessed during her training a guy was up for freaking a minor and he adamantly insisted to his lawyer that his defense was that he had never even seen the girl yet alone met her this despite witnesses in the bar and incriminating cctv footage showing someone who looked like him leaving the bar and going to his car in the car park when he was questioned he steadfastly stuck to his story when the questioning ended there was a pause and he yelled at the judge there was no way i could have know she wasn't 16 when she sucked me off literally blowing his whole case accidentally proved not often made tactical errors often arguing a case on a voter recount in front of a judge judge says i'm going with x that's in my favor so i shut up opposing counsel in arguing a different point later suddenly goes back to the earlier point and belabors it client also a lawyer says to me don't say anything i whisper back don't worry wasn't planning to judge begins rubbing his nose and looking irritated after a few minutes cuts off opposing counsel saying i already ruled on this point mr smith me anything to add i replied in the negative and won my motion would it have come out differently i don't know did opposing counsel make it easier for me absolutely iaaal this was a restraining order case my dude had allegedly been within 500 feet of his ex at trial it came out that she had told my guy that she had told him the restraining order was dropped hence he couldn't have violated the restraining order willfully judge got furious and dismissed the case it's amazing how many people miss that part of a restraining order usually reinforced by the judge it goes both ways and if you intentionally violate the order you can be in trouble too not a lawyer i know but my parents were in a lawsuit where this happened they owned a business and on the other side of it were businesses as well their neighbor to the left sued us claiming that we had been using their property without paying them or without permission that we were essentially trying to adverse possess it we got a surveyor to come in and the surveyor said that not only were we using all of our property but we had been paying rent to them on about 20 feet that was also our property obviously they weren't happy so they got their own surveyor who gave us 50 feet we won the lawsuit now their little patch of property has a rusty fence all around it with keep out signs everywhere it's about 20 x 10 feet i am a lawyer who defends a state from injury claims there was a claim where there was a dispute as to the value of a state employee's injury we went to trial to argue the extent of the injury when the employee takes the stand and is under direct examination by her attorney she is unable to answer basic questions about her name and address everyone just thought it was nerves but eventually the employee confesses that she is a convicted felon and she stole her sister's identity to obtain the state job judge's jaw hits the floor and the employee's attorney just keeps going through his examination like nothing happened the judge stopped him and had the court reporter read back the testimony the employee's attorney was still oblivious to what happened the judge recommended the employee drop a case and quit her job immediately the employee's attorney wanted to keep going the judge then told him that his client will drop a case and quit case was dropped and she quit that afternoon the vast majority of the time it's not an opponent who directly proves up my case but the expert s he she hires instead it's only happened twice in my relatively short career but these types of cases usually settle real quick after the shortest depositions of my life l do you have an opinion on what may have caused plaintiff's spinal condition d yes l in your opinion within a reasonable degree of medical and surgical certainty could it have been what happened to him at work d no a lot of doctors charge for a pre-interview before a deposition and a lot of attorneys hate paying so i understand how this can happen but i've got to feel for the guy at the end of one of those debts former prosecutor in the uk here defendant had not attended community service and went to trial stating he had a valid reason not to attend usually we would accept doctor's notes proof of hospital admission evidence of travel disruption but he had none of this he told his solicitor he was unwell and his note was lost in the post i began cross-examination by asking if he attended on the date no i didn't did he have a transport issue no was he unwell no i'm fit as a fiddle i looked at his solicitor a friend of mine outside court and he buried his head in his hands so why didn't you attend oh bugger i was meant to say i was sick wasn't i quickest trial i ever won not a lawyer but i had a legal dispute settled this way had a car crash in which both myself and the other party were driving towards each other both too quickly around a corner and crashed a few minutes after the crash another driver who knew the other driver in the crash arrived on the scene and offered to act as a witness despite not having seen the crash in this witness description of the event they started off by describing the roads as totally blocked by hedges with no visibility of the traffic ahead they then went on to describe how they could see my driving as way too fast for the conditions having seen me from miles ahead obviously called them on the contradiction and got the blame split 50 stroke 50. now but i got my younger brother out of a traffic ticket related to a minor fender bender i went to traffic court with him and asked the judge for permission to assist him since he was under 18 at the time the judge was cool with it anyways the first thing i said was my brother asked for it was never shown a copy of the police report from the responding officer can we see it before we go any further the counter's attorney said there isn't one the officer failed to complete his report because he was called to another incident immediately after this one the case dismissed court fees returned lawyers over it what was your oh crap moment in court sat in on a personal injury case where the plaintiff broke their leg in an accident and had a doctor on the stand as an expert the woman's lawyer begins questioning the doctor about their experience with leg injuries he was a well-known orthopedic surgeon in the area she asks if he's ever treated a tibular fracture the leg bones are tibia and fibula to which he only answers no then she starts grilling him with questions about the tibula after about six seven questions she asks how did you get to medical listens and have been able to practice medicine this long if you've never treated a tibula fracture and begins a small rant about going after his credentials and those that gave it to him to which he simply responds there is no bone named the tibula the lawyer became beat red and everyone in the room tried their best to keep from laughing including the judge oh god i can feel the second hand embarrassment i was representing a plaintiff in a hit-and-run case plaintiff is testifying and is despite me preparing them for several hours the previous day an absolutely terrible witness for her own case like she couldn't even identify the street she was crossing when she was hit by the car it was a major highway and we had gone through the sequence of events countless times the day before the hearing the oh crap moment came during cross-examination defense counsel pulls out a picture of my client dressed up and ready to hit the club which was posted to facebook the day after the alleged accident i thinking quickly object because the time stamp refers to when it was posted not when it was taken defense counsel show the picture to my client and asked her when the picture was taken sure enough they say it was taken the day after the accident when she was supposedly in unbearable pain oh crap not your fault good thing it happened too it means justice is served when i was in college i was a bailiff guy is on trial for murder first witness testified that she saw the defendant shoot the victim second witness states the same police officer testimony is that he arrived at the scene and defendant was there holding the gun coroner testimony is that the first bullet hit the victim in the arm the second bullet hit the victim in the torso and the third bullet hit the victim in the heart which was the fatal shot defendant yells out see that proves that i didn't kill him i only shot the mother sucker twice uk bear with me on this one i was in court listening to the most boring old defense lawyer you've ever seen he was questioning the arresting officer in the case it was drugs or something like that anyway he's droning on about every little detail and the magistrate was constantly telling him to hurry along the arresting officer was getting noticeably annoyed and the room became empty pretty quick everyone was very bored and annoyed he was droning about details that i'm not sure anyone was really listening to or cared about anyway he went over arrest times and the likes with the officer time he admitted the suspect and released him he had bored the officer to the point where he was barely paying attention so he was admitted in at 21 45 on the night in question yes comma and release the night after yes cameron that was what just after 10 p.m yes what time after 10 i don't know quarter past 10 maybe so my client was detained for more than 24 hours perm wait the penny dropped the officer let his guard down and had revealed he kept the defendant for more than 24 hours which is the max time for detention in the uk the defense rested and the magistrate threw the case out immediately well played sir well played i think this qualifies though it wasn't me that was the lawyer god called for jury duty was at the jury selection phase and they asked if anyone here thinks they should not blah blah defendant was in the room i raised my hand the defending lawyer looked at me like oh this ought to be good and asked me to explain i suggested i tell them in private he insisted i tell the courtroom i said okay i probably shouldn't be on this jury because i was on a previous jury for this man which returned a guilty verdict lawyer's face went oh crap commotion and a wait while they looked up records yep verified whole jury was now tainted everyone goes home and they start over i was interning for a judge we were in the middle of voir dire for what was frankly not that exciting of a criminal case half-day trial expected not salacious details or violence or anything 75 potential jurors in the room and when my judge didn't let a guy out of jury duty because he'd have to pick up his kids that guy proceeded to say in front of everyone that if he was made to show up next week he'd make it the shortest trial ever and find him guilty right out of the gate my judge was an incredibly even keel guy nothing shook him or got to rise out of him and he was an expert at figuring out what he wanted to say in the most neutral fashion possible before he said it conversations with him took forever because there was a pause before every sentence but then but then this guy poisons an entire jury pool of 75 people we had to individually question each person to see if that little outburst was going to affect their impartiality etc 75 in camera interviews later judge pulls the guy back in in front of everybody and begins to scream at him about disrespecting him the courts and every other jurors time me the attorneys and the court reporter go whiteface because we didn't know this was coming the guy didn't have to sit for jury duty but i still don't know if he got to pick his kids up since he spent a couple days in jail for contempt this is probably why the couple jury selections i've been and they dismissed everyone at the first hint that person seemed like they didn't want to be there including the guy who sighed loudly then walked shaking his head to the jury box when his name was called judge instantly moved for his dismissal i was involved in a pretty messy custody case the other party was a mess and had kept the child from my client for a few weeks op was playing lots of stupid games and kept requesting continuances i requested a drug test which the judge ordered however the op didn't show up for it to clarify he did show up he just stood in front of the toilet for literally two hours and claimed he couldn't pee i was representing the plaintiff so the burden was on me i called multiple witnesses that testified to the defendant's drug use so opposing counsel decides to call their client for direct examination and asks you don't use h and crack right that is for the non-lawyers a very stupid question for many reasons especially considering his client didn't show up for his drug test however i fully expected the defendants to just lie and say he was clean after the question was asked there was a really long pause and the defendant said yes i do both of those drugs my head almost exploded i didn't ask any questions on cross-examination because i didn't want to muddy the waters i won and the child is doing great i genuinely don't understand how people are this stupid not mine but my boss is one she had to defend a small time delinquent as duty solicitor before going to court he asked her what he should do she explained to him if he was cooperative and truthful his sentence would be milder after hearing the case the judge asked him if he wanted to add something he got up and explained to the judge my counsel told me to be truthful so i wanted to tell you that i not only did the robbery i'm being heard for but also several others in the region he continued to admit to several robberies that had been unsolved yet and everyone even the state attorney were fascinating i suspect the truth did not set him free mine actually happened while i was sitting in the jury pool during via dire the case was a double homicide and the jury pool filled the entire courtroom if you are not familiar with via dire it is when the lawyers ask the potential jurors questions to determine who they want to sit on the jury and who they want to exclude it is a long and boring process for almost everyone involved but 9 stroke 10 it's the most important stage in a case so the lawyers are asking us questions and if that question applied to you you raised your hand and they handed you a microphone to answer the question the question asked was do you or anyone you know have prior knowledge of this case so this elder gentleman raised his hand is handed the mic and proceeds to say yeah i work at a police station as a janitor and i heard two detectives talking about him points to defendant and they were saying he was about as guilty as sin we all kind of stared open mouth like this guy and i started chuckling because i couldn't believe what i was seeing naturally the defense attorney asked to approach the bench followed quickly the by the state prosecutor after some quick and energetic whispering the judge addressed the man do you realize what you just did you potentially poisoned this entire jury pool i will be calling your boss and you will be hearing about this you can count on that you are dismissed sir but this isn't over the man was escorted out and then the judge addressed the remaining jury pool which was still in a mostly packed room now i want you all to disregard what that man just said i'm sure if any of you were ever accused of a crime like this you would want a fair trial and not be condemned based on the words of one old man i have been in court many times since but never have i seen that level of downright jaw-dropping absurdity again literally the first thing i ever did was just a law student in turn guy has a legit defense on a drug possession case drugs found in a jacket guy wasn't wearing jacket they were going to have a very difficult time proving the jacket belonged to my guy had a long meeting with client explained everything client was excited day of the preliminary hearing guy shows up and sits down directly in front of the officer who arrested him while wearing the jacket in question the exact same jacket we were going to say they couldn't prove belonged to him not in court bits at a tribunal and also i was plaintiff suing for wrongful termination my rep so you terminated him because he was ill employer yes mr and he was ill because he is disabled employer yes mr so you fired someone for being disabled employer yes was in court for a directions hearing the judge was already in a bad mood and asked why we were here for such a seemingly pointless litigation without giving details he was right the barrister starts to make our case and i am taking note about areas we need to further explore when i hear excuse emmy why were you so rewarded to emmy the client who had been told to not come had come to court that day and was evidently incensed by the judge questioning the merit of their case they berated the judge for about three minutes with me and my counsel first stunned and then trying to shut them up before he adjourned the hearing but the case did not go very well to my client surprise and fury big sigh those are always the ones who are totally shocked when it doesn't go their way not me but my former law partner she was in court representing a client i think in a hearing for a restraining order against her soon-to-be ex-husband our client was telling the judge that when they met to exchange the children for visitation the ex had kicked her he immediately angrily shouted she can't prove it i didn't leave a mark thanks buddy there was something like this on judge judy when she was asking the plaintiff about items stolen from her bag the defendant quickly jumped in and said something in particular wasn't in said bag busted probably the funniest one i ever came across happened to a colleague we were prosecutors then 18 year old defendant applying for bail he needed a residential address and got his dad to show up at court to confirm that the family home was available to him defense lawyer gets old dad to confirm that son can stay at family home dad says yes my fellow prosecutor gets up and asks dad do you really want him home dad goes off the deep end jesus the grief he's brought me and his mother out all hours taking drugs hiding stolen property in the garage all night parties i'm on antidepressants and the wife's had a nervous breakdown dad goes off on one for five solid minutes as the defendant gets taken back to the cells he calls out thanks dad i owe you one two moments in a dui trial one passenger is testifying for drivers sobriety when the door asks her you keep saying he was sober but are you even tip certified of course for bartenders so they can recognize drunk patrons she was two the head of the county's blood lab accidentally admitted he cranked the sensitivity of his machine's way up because he was experimenting on two thanks krieger obligatory i know but in a pre-mediation meeting once for an uninsured motorist claim an insured had alleged that she couldn't walk without the aid of a cane and had a pronounced limp after an accident due to a low back injury and a shooting pain in her right leg the doctor notes didn't support anything but a subjective injury after a few weeks but she was still treating two years later and going to new physicians so we had her followed covertly to see if she was really using the cane and had a limp etc we got footage of her carrying like four grocery bags in each arm to her car in a walmart parking lot walking perfectly fine when she got to her car she even opened the trunk of her suv without putting any bags down and lifted the gate with her knee partway her elderly mother was with her using a particularly decorative purple cane with a flower pattern on it they followed her to a doctor appointment an hour later and she's on video using her mother's cane and walking with a limp that would give forrest gump a run for his money i never did follow up on how that played in the mediation but i can only imagine it gave some attorney an oh crap moment my grandfather was a pie it's amazing how freaking dumb people are when it comes to insurance fraud person i was representing was on trial for assault and the third degree in dui in my state a3 means you've assaulted an aid worker or police officer and is a felony the allegations are that he was very verbally abusive to the officers and at one point kicked one in the face we're sitting at the defendant's table and the officer is testifying about the statements my guy made to him including some pretty horrific name calling out of nowhere my client screams your freaking liar frick you you son of a bee but we lost the trial another time the judge asked a client whether anyone had coerced him into pleading guilty and he said yeah my attorney i about crap my pants but he laughed and said i'm joking number not a lawyer but a defendant as a teenager i got busted with a couple of buddies throwing eggs at cars we were only actually in the courtroom for our sentencing there was no trial the judge called each of us up individually to ask us if we had anything to say one of my friends tells the judge that he is a good kid who doesn't normally do things like this lie we used to do it all the time and that i was just in the wrong place at the wrong time i wish there was a video of my other friend and i sitting in the benches watching this happen but we simultaneously dropped our heads into our hands because we couldn't believe that idiot just said that the judge was not pleased and she took the opportunity to remind him that going to a store buying eggs going to another location across town and then throwing those eggs at cars was not just being in the wrong place at the wrong time i am sorry your honor i ah i didn't know i couldn't do that i'm not a lawyer but i was a character witness for my childhood dog in a civil trial between our neighbors and my parents opposing council was questioning me i wasn't even out of elementary school at the time and he asked if our dog was aggressive she was a rottweiler and very loving and incredibly protective of me and my siblings his final question to me is one i will never forget he asked did your father tell you what to say before you came into court today i responded yes then he asked what did he tell you to say i said the truth now i was too young to remember the courtroom reaction but according to my father the judge audibly guffawed in the opposing council lost all the wind out of his sails character witness for my dog has me smiling they're so loyal to us we should return the favor i was at a hearing arguing that my client was wrongfully terminated because the employer failed to abide by the proper procedures during the hearing a witness for the employer tried to offer documents that were fraudulently altered in order to make it look like the proper procedure was followed i noticed the alteration opposing counsel quickly got that witness out of the room and after a quick adjustment my client got a large settlement late to the party here but as a law student we were allowed to make court appearances under the supervision of an assistant district attorney i was doing arraignments and myada said don't talk to the judge unless he asks you a specific question so the judge and the defense attorney were going back and forth about when the next court date would be the judge wanted a specific date let's say 4 stroke 20 the defense attorney was adamant that she couldn't do that date in my file i had a calendar with a big x over four stroke 20 saying do not schedule the judge and defense attorney go back and forth for several minutes the judge wanted four stroke 20 and the defense attorney saying no i was keeping my mouth shut because the judge hadn't asked me directly finally the defense attorney relents and agrees to four stroke 20. the judge turns to me and says do the people agree with four stroke 20 at which point i say sorry your honor but we cannot schedule for 4 stroke 20 the judge looked at me for a second and then just ripped into me mister jones 1 you just heard me and the defense go back and forth for several minutes about a date you knew the people can do do you like wasting the court's time it went on like that for a few minutes him just berating me in front of about 200 people in a court in brooklyn finally after me apologizing profusely and him giving me a withering glare we moved on and went to the next case at the next break the judge said mr jones one please approach the bench i thought i was really in for it then i walked up beside the bench the judge came down to talk to me and said with a big smile don't worry about it i was just giving you a hard time welcome to brooklyn criminal court opposing council was a nightmare everything late his work was extremely subpar and so forth accused me of lying multiple times when he had dropped the ball during another hearing in which he did another dumb move judge says i'm glad you are the last case on the call and all of the other attorneys have left the room so they aren't here to hear me say that you are a terrible attorney not a lawyer but i witnessed my ex-wife try to argue with the judge that she couldn't be accused of kidnapping our daughter because our daughter was legally emancipated not a spoiler she wasn't at the time of the kidnapping my ex had legal statutes written on small sheets of paper she had torn out of books in the jail library and she kept arguing with the judge after being told that none of it mattered after the fifth time my ex interrupted the judge with her nonsense the judge slammed her hands down stood up leaned over her bench and told my ex that she had been a juvenile court judge for 20 years and was well aware of the statutes if she interrupted one more time then she would be held in contempt and spent several months more in jail my lawyer held up his folder in front of his face to hide his grin during this exchange i walked out with full legal and physical custody of my daughter caught supervised visitation for mix and a full restraining order two high-profile men on trial for killing another guy both ex-cops from the 80s a notorious time in our country for police corruption the first trial had been aborted after one barrister had made a casual comment that the other accused had already killed two or three people second attempt was six weeks into an expected 10-week retrial all of the networks and papers were covering this trial the gallery was always packed with law students because of the many uniquely horrific aspects of the trial so we're six weeks into the retrial defense one gets up to cross-examine a witness did you know of accused murderer one yes he was a cop and a drug dealer in the 80s the court basically exploded the judge immediately issued a non-publication order meaning there was an embargo on all information from that day it was early afternoon but the judge excused the jury for the day then spent the next day and a half deliberating over whether to abandon the trial over halfway through and for the second time the best oh crap moments are when your opposing counsel or opposing client says or does something that wins the case for you true in civil cases you usually know what will happen ahead of time but in my state discovery in smaller civil cases is more limited and clients don't always want to spend 30k dollars when we can get the same result for 10k dollars in an adverse possession case the witness only needed to say i use that area as my backyard and i fully expected him to say this it would harm my case but i knew i could get around it when asked about his use of the area he said no i never really went back there didn't use it at all lost the case for the other side and i could barely keep a straight face it was completely opposite of what the witness had told opposing counsel off the record apparently the under penalty of perjury made him change his story i had another case about losing multi-unit dwelling insurance because a guy's place was a fire hazard i asked him if his personal insurer knew about the fire hazard yeah and the jerks canceled my policy i also love it when i have a difficult party on the other side and the judge rips them a new one i had a convoluted case with a lot of parties about nothing at all the plaintiff was heinous the six or seven attorneys were working out calendars with the judge when the plaintiff starts yelling at her attorney from across the courtroom because she didn't like that he had conceded some little non-issue the judge told her to sit down and shut up i was sad that the case settled because she would have been amazing on the stand coma i also love it when i have a difficult party on the other side and the judge rips them a new one we call that getting bench slapped not exactly in court but i was defending a juvenile robbery case where there was very little evidence there was supposed to be two guys but they only picked up this one kid he had no stolen property on him he was picked up like outside his own house wearing different clothes than the victim had initially said this kid was on the honor roll at school his family seemed kind and were involved he wrote poetry and played instruments i actually believed it was a legit mistaken identity case i went to meet with one of the kids mentors for a character reference and he exactly matched the description of the other robber i was the dumbass that almost screwed myself i had two charges in two different chords i accepted the first plea which almost always carries probation but my plea didn't have that condition when it came time to accept the second plea the prosecutor didn't include probation because she assumed my first charge put me on probation she said as much to the judge and me being a big dummy almost corrected her my lawyer grabbed my shoulder and i crap you not told me to shut the frick up she doesn't know you almost became that kid that reminds the teacher about homework or an essay that's due serious lawyers what's a case you regretted winning i'm a work comp attorney now represent injured people but used to work on other side insurance defense there was an applicant with a serious injury fell off a ladder busted back with fusion shoulder fricked years of treatment internal issues psych issues really just fricked up 50 plus permanent disability we were five years in and finally getting to settlement time if we bought out his future medical settlement pretty far into six figures this guy was the sole provider for wife and two kids then we found out he had a regressive brain cancer expected only couple years to live at best thus we wouldn't buy out future medical anymore still got permanent disability for 60 ish but can't give medical buyout based on 25 plus year life expectancy anymore i felt terrible for the guy and his family me and the adjuster tried to get insurance to agree to some sort of amount like five-year buyout but the bean counters said heck no the attorney knew it wasn't me making the decision even though he worked on that guy's file for five plus years he decided to take zero dollars in fees i have so much respect for that attorney turning down ten dollars k plus in fees to help his client in a very crappy situation working in insurance defense feels like selling your soul at times i do family law and i represented a father who had lost most of his custody from h jews and imprisonment as a result he came to me saying he was clean and doing good and had his life together and it checked out he had been clean for almost nine months not counting jail time and seemed sincere and wanting to resume a full relationship with his son the other side fought viciously to keep him at extremely little custody and supervised at that but we prevailed and got an order restoring fairly frequent unsupervised partial custody not long afterwards only about three months after the case he was back doing h sold most of his furniture and for me the most soul-crushing is that he set up a fake gofundme stuff for his child's cancer his child didn't have cancer and has never had cancer so you know where that money was going i withdrew my appearance at this point so i don't know what happened afterwards but i imagine and hope his custody was taken away basically the net result of winning that case was that the poor boy had to witness his father relapse on agent was exploited for money worst case i ever won as a mom with a child's father like this if this were to ever happen i wouldn't blame you eviction law basically every other case even the buttholes it's not rewarding to put people out on the curb ever i work in medical malpractice defense once i had an obstetrician gynecologist who burned a patient during a procedure when i met with the doctor he lied to me throughout the representation over 16 months saying he had no idea how it happened there is a doctrine and law called rezips are meaning absent some sort of negligence this accident could not have occurred woman came in without a burn and after the procedure the woman left with a burn but there's no way this doctor didn't know what had happened the area of the burn was where he was operating on it wasn't until i brought up settlement because this was not a case we could win did he say oh maybe i do know what happened we ultimately settled that case which is considered a favorable outcome considering the potential high monetary verdict sometimes i think this doctor really ought to have lost that case and their license settled a personal injury case for a guy and he was set to get about five thousand dollars he was in jail i held the money for a couple months and when he got out he came by to get the money without delay the next day the cops came around and asked if i knew him i explained that i did i was told he died that night of an overdose and the only thing found on him was my card some drugs he had not yet used and a needle [Music] guy lost his wife and children in a car accident he wanted to exercise to get his emotions and mental health back in check doctor wrote him recommendations for exercise equipment ball chin up bar nothing crazy and he submitted the expenses for same to his insurer client insurer adjuster wanted this for tooth and nail because exercise equipment was only covered for physical rehab and he was not physically injured i do not practice in this area anymore i wouldn't say i regret this so much as to this day it amazes me as a first-year associate i was given a terrible pie case where my client received a flu shot and thereafter felt pain in his shoulder he went to another doctor who performed an mri and determined he had a torn rotator cuff which was undoubtedly not related my job was to allege the flu shot caused the rotator cuff tear our ortho actually correlated the two which is the more regrettable position and the case paid out being the bottom of the totem pole i had no choice but to take the case which was handed down by a partner but at the same time just overwhelmingly made me feel like the worst stereotyped attorney and just hated having to walk into court on it and feel my reputation being destroyed i do juvenile work criminal law and family law i represented this client first when he was a juvenile charge with disorderly conduct at school and fighting then when he became an adult at four was for simple things like possession of marijuana as he got older it became easier and easier to figure out what part of his life hasn't gone as well as it could and i tried to counsel him and push him to better himself he got his ged he started going to n a he started classes at a community college and found a part-time job on the night of his 21st birthday he was charged with a dwi of course i'll take care of that too about six months later we are due in court for trial on a monday and he doesn't show up which at this point in his life is highly unusual as i'm trying to figure out where he is the court starts going over arraignment's first appearances and then lo and behold three people are up for murder charges the prosecution starts to tell the judge what the fact circumstances of the case are and mentions a few victims names apparently my client was at a party when these three individuals decided to allegedly do a drive-by shooting my client suffered multiple gunshot wounds and didn't make it to the hospital so by default as you can't prosecute a dead person the state has to take a dismissal i guess technically a win either way it was crushing to me as i thought he had really turned his life around he had i'm so sorry to hear that this is the first comment on this post that really tugged at my heart as a personal injury attorney i've seen a few clients win the blue color lotto or getting more money than they reasonably know how to deal with i do my best to educate them but my job is to try and maximize their recovery not teach them finance i have definitely contributed to a few drug habits in one of my first cases after passing the bar exam a young man retained me on a drunk driving charge no one was hurt but he totaled his car during trial the arresting police officer testified that my client was clearly drunk at the accident scene and that my client was loudly blaming the accident on the freaking butthole who stole his car crashed it and then fled before the cops arrived however according to two other witness statements tended into evidence it was my client's friend the passenger who was screaming about the butthole who stole the car not my client the driver the cop must have confused the two men during his testimony this discrepancy raised a reasonable doubt in the judge's mind so she acquitted my client at the time the acquittal was somewhat unexpected for me in my personal view my client was clearly drunk and responsible for the accident regardless of who was blaming the mystery but told to the cops but i was happy my young client got off no one was hurt and lessons were learned and i was quite euphoric to have won my first criminal case the regret about a month after the equivalent my young client called me at 3 am from the police station saying it's me again the police arrested me for drunk driving again can you help me not only did i answer no i instantly regretted getting the earlier acquittal my client apparently didn't learn any lessons that didn't end nearly as badly as i thought it would i was expecting him to have killed somebody while drunk driving i got a spoiled brat of a teenager cleared of a sharp lifting charge when he absolutely had done it his rich parents hired me to represent him i did that to the best of my ability and we went to trial and won but i can't say i felt good about it this kid needed to be taught some accountability for his actions and his parents just wanted to buy their way out of any trouble he got into had this happened to me twice got my client out on bail only to their off to have him up and killed first time he was in building supposedly selling got chased by the police and a struggle ensued where he was shot point blank in the head mother told me that it was my fault that he was killed in that i was working with vader and the police second time a young man no more than 16 gets released while waiting trial on robbery one of the conditions of release was that he maintain a curfew that very night he breaks curfew goes over to somebody else's house and was killed in a drug-related robbery mother blamed me and said that the devil was working through me that we were all demons criminal defense is a hard business i think the common thread here is more mother than you it sounds like the kids who never got disciplined because they were made to believe it was always someone else's fault they messed up did a divorce where the husband who i was representing wanted to trade custody of his children for a set of bedroom furniture the bedroom furniture was not even like a family heirloom it was furniture that you could probably get at a rooms to go or something ugh still makes me ill that's why i got out of family law thank goodness he fought for the furniture and not the kids if that's the kind of dad he would be choosing objects over his children i a summary judgment motion that my firm filed not expecting to win we had a decent argument the odds were way worse than a coin flip and judges don't like granting summary judgment because it's an extreme remedy client initially was thrilled case is over we tried to break the news gently nope three years later we're back in the same spot we were before we won our motion the other side appealed it up to the state supreme court and won because the supreme court said the trial judge should have denied our motion so we are back at square one north of 100 k in legal bills with no resolution maybe it'll settle maybe it will go to trial i'll find out in the next three four months eta clarified my parenthetical the one i particularly hated happened at my first law job this woman was a long-term client of my boss in the past 10 years or so she has been caught driving under the influence eight times violated home incarceration countless times been caught with controlled substances a few times and stabbed two people on home incarceration my boss at the time was a master of getting people off for duis so she had only been convicted of a dui third and always managed to stay on home incarceration with whatever releases she desired i always regretted her cases because that woman is truly a danger to the public she's undoubtedly going to kill someone someday but i'll be damned if she isn't the luckiest woman alive in getting away with duis little late to the party but i've got one i still think about a lot worked in criminal defense represented a guy in a dui he had priors so another conviction meant time loss of license problems long story short he was pulled over by police after they followed him leaving a bar at trial i elicited admissions from the arresting officer that during the 2.5 miles he followed him for he did not observe a single moving violation no speeding erratic driving driving over the lines blowing stop signs running red lights didn't even stop suddenly at red lights also got the dre officer to testify that the accused only spoke spanish and they couldn't get an interpreter officer to the roadside to explain the field sobriety exercises which the officers documented the accused refused to perform jury came back in 15 minutes guy was extremely grateful and his lovely family was very gracious in thanking me and our office feel good about the whole thing couple months later i'm in county to meet with a client and i see him in one of the pods find out sometime after the trial he violently sexually assaulted his eight-year-old step-daughter think about that one a lot not your fault by any means and you must not blame yourself just because he did something unspeakably evil later doesn't mean he didn't deserve to be acquitted in the first case you did right by your client which is the very best that can be expected of you what he did later is on him and him only there was a case that i saw that involved a claim with fee shifting meaning that if the plaintiff won their attorney's fees would get paid by the defendant defendant pushed an aggressive legal position at trial that the judge agreed with and one avoiding a few thousand in liability to the plaintiff and a few thousand in attorney's fees so far so good but then the plaintiff appeals all the way to the state's high court requiring a ton of briefing and time high court agrees with plaintiff reverses and sends back to the trial court which now enters judgment against the defendant for a few thousand in damages against the plaintiff and tens and tens of thousands of dollars in attorney's fees from the appeal the defense lawyer probably regretted winning at first on that aggressive argument to the trial court i convicted the father of murdering his wife and years later found out he lied when he confessed to cover for his teenage son who actually been the one who killed her in the meanwhile the son committed suicide father was content to serve his time in prison this probably won't be the best answer but it is a real one after law school i had to turn down a criminal defense job offer because my wife got a better offer somewhere else so basically i followed her along and was desperate to find something after three months of fruitless efforts i would take just about any job that required a jd whereas literally the only thing i ever wanted to do was criminal defense three months after moving i got an interview for a real estate litigation job they hired me the next day looking back that was probably red flag number one first day on the job they taught me how to foreclose on a claim of lean these are two things i had never heard of before turns out it is totally brainless work if you have the right forms mind-numbingly boring basically just cutting and pasting new addresses and amounts owed so anyways it took me about two months to realize this when i had my first set of hearings be literally my sole purpose at the firm which represented over 100 homeowners associations was to take people's houses away from not paying their homeowners association dues after my first set of foreclosures i actually slipped into a pretty legitimate depression i was getting paid peanuts to drive nearly an hour to work every day to do work i despised on behalf of people i literally could not pretend to care about the straw on the camel's back was when i started signing the foreclosures and realized i was that guy you know i understand someone has to do the work i guess there certainly is a lot of money to be made but it was not for me i did that job for three months came home one friday and told my wife i'd rather be homeless than go back on monday by some stroke of luck i started a stellar criminal defense job within two weeks and all of the heartache has 100 been worth it i've won a lot of cases you have to redefine winning and losing when doing criminal defense because sometimes even a particularly juicy plea is a winner and never once felt bad about it for example i got to guys plea deal cut from 60 years to 15 years for a string of robberies where the interrogations and confessions were overwhelmingly unconstitutional like the interrogations were textbook how not to do an interrogation missouri v cybert and stuff like that never lost sleep over someone not going to jail so yeah every case where i took someone's house away probably two dozen times for not paying her fees generally four thousand dollars or less was the worst case i ever won frikoas frikoas a blight wherever they go not my case did a former associate of mine won a ppo motion hearing personal protective order where he represented the person who the order would have been put against not the victim the victim's request to put a ppo on his client was denied and like two months later the victim ended up getting put into the hospital by the client he beat her but that one still bothers him family law is a little different in that you never really win per se you may get more favorable rulings or better terms but unless the opposing party did something illegal or mind-bogglingly stupid it's never a decisive win really although i did have a case where my client fought really hard for the dog and then ended up turning him over to a shelter freaking butthole the ex-wife received an anonymous tip and was able to get him back quickly so the fight wasn't even for the dog it was just to take something she loved away from her jesus divorce really can bring out the absolute worst in people my client made a lot of promises to his staff and never had planed to keep them was sued one i hated every second of the case late post so this will probably get buried this is another family lore story using a throwaway because some of my colleagues use reddit the summer of 2018 i get work regarding what seemed from the client's description a pretty drawn-out and messy divorce case the husband was my client and he made it seem very adamantly that his soon-to-be ex-wife was after his every penny given he seemed to have a fairly high paying job it seemed like a pretty common type of case the city i work in has many instances of this it has a high cost of living and a lot of well-paid working professionals in private industry he was a very well-spoken amicable guy in his late 50s and truly seemed like he'd been taken by surprise and betrayed by his soon-to-be ex-wife when i actually got to the case however i was basically flawed his wife was a working professional as well worked in government they'd been married for over 20 years and had two kids together and a paid-off house before taxes he made almost three times what she did not counting his stock options and yet she'd contributed equally to their mortgage on every home they'd owned over the course of the marriage by all accounts despite a vast difference in income she'd carried her weight raised two kids and worked full-time during the entirety of the marriage i live and work in canada she could have easily raked him over the coals in the divorce if it had gone to court instead it seemed like she'd done everything she possibly could to not have him subjected to that this divorce had been ongoing for five years before he hired me and it was basically him looking a gift horse in the mouth over and over a constant renegotiation on the contract they'd both signed initially with him skimping on alimony and then debating on lesser terms he was basically given an inch and tried to take a mile dragging it out for so long that the divorce lloyd had to go to court i almost suspect he did so as a way to try and drag her through the mud though he may have genuinely been that delusional i consider it a win only because his ex-wife was adamant about only wanting what was somewhat fair and for it to be over because of the strain it was having on the family but the contract he owed her still about 50k in back pay but she was content with 15k which was less than this guy made in a month i did regret the win though she seemed like a very nice woman with the patience of a son while almost all of his anger towards her seemed to come from wounded ego i handle employment cases we took a disability accommodation case against a regional retail company to be clear we were right our client was not being given a pretty easy accommodation normally demand letters don't have any real effect we have stopped sending them to streamline the process and have just started filing with the eoc or the courts directly that stopped for us in this case we followed sop and filed with the eoc the company got in touch with us immediately expressing horror and regret the whole thing was one poorly trained manager acting out while that's common companies usually try to cover for the manager and often make things worse this one did not they immediately sent him to be retrained offered the exact accommodation requested and paid all lost wages and fees with some extra for emotional distress client happily accepted and went back to work after seeing the company's great response i felt bad for taking them to the eoc not bad enough to start sending time wasting demand letters again but if i ever see them on the other side i'll make an exception i did some custody work early in my career and won some cases more on the merit of my trial skills than on the merit of the parents the thing with family law work in general is that there is essentially no bar to entry anybody with a law degree and a pulse can get a family law practice up and running quickly because there is just an absolute glass of work and what that also means is that 75 plus of the lawyers practicing family law are clueless and awful early in my career i certainly was clueless but at the least i was not awful therefore in a battle between clueless plus awful versus just clueless clueless usually won so yeah i can't recall any specific cases except to say that fighting over children in court is a terrible thing and basically everyone loses i regret that entire portion of my career not really winning but i recently had a case settle where my client was so obviously lying it was painful he was an offender bender and said he was too disabled to drive or to work at the office as a result and that his employer fired him after he had been on disability leave for almost a year a few months after filing we discovered that he played in a national amateur full-contact football league and there was footage of him getting tackled endzone dancing and tackling during the time he claimed he was too hurt to sit at her desk even when i confronted him on it he claimed he hadn't played while he was injured despite having a stat line and footage of him playing from games dated on days he was supposedly getting physical therapy we didn't settle for as much as most of my cases but he still walked away with like 20 k i'm happy to be a plaintiff's attorney for the most part because my clients have typically been wronged but he was such a bald-faced liar it really peed me off i helped a man regain visitation of his child after a year also in jail i thought i was a great humanitarian oh the hubris that comes from being a baby attorney as we were shooting the crap after court waiting for his ride he showed me his prison tattoo giant letters on his torso that spelled war white aryan resistance i'm a blue-eyed blonde so i guess he thought i was down with the cause i went home and threw up fortunately that child has two parents hopefully mom isn't a racist pose lawyers offered it has any client ever made you go how the frick am i supposed to defend you and if so how did it go my client gave a textbook perfect confession to a robbery the police had no leads on he had walked into the police station and told the front desk that he thought the cops were looking for him he then volunteered that he and a friend robbed a gas station last week then after police arrested and warned him right to silence etc and after he spoke at length with council not me he repeated his confession in an audio video statement he wasn't forced or coerced he hadn't been detained for an unreasonable time in cells first they hadn't even interrogated him but as a result of his confession they were able to get a dna warrant and matched him to blood swabbed at the scene and the best part the police had no idea beforehand that it was him my client and his friend had covered part of their faces the surveillance video was horrible quality and they had bear sprayed the store clark a 16 year old kid immediately upon entering so the kid hadn't been able to provide the police with us description beyond two males and since he had no criminal record he wasn't in the dna database from previous crimes he had just heard a rumor that police were investigating and assumed they knew it was him i had to laugh when i got the police report and read all of this i then focused on securing him as fair plea deal because he had no chance at an acquittal i'm a criminal defense guy so i have had plenty most infuriating one was a guy that got busted for selling rocks to a confidential informant the ci was wired for sound and video so the whole transaction is crystal clear plus the cop cited his car as the one that drove up the scene and he was stopped a couple of hours later with the buy money in his possession serial numbers were recorded he had three prior convictions for c sales the prosecutor offered him five which was the mandatory minimum he absolutely declined to even consider a plea insisted on a jury trial insisted on taking the stand and telling a ridiculous story about how it wasn't him in the video there wasn't any doubt i felt like lionel hearts trying to string together a closing argument with a straight face he got 20 years it took me until he had three prior convictions for c sales to realize this person wasn't selling literal rocks dang i'm dumb i had a family client whose ex wasn't letting him see his kid so we were in court with him explaining how important parenting was to him how much he loved being a father etc after 45 minutes of this the mother says i don't know why he's saying this he abandoned his other kids cumie who has never heard him mention having other kids turned out yeah 100 abandoned them has had no contact for years never made any efforts please give your lawyers important information especially if another party involved knows your secrets at a deposition it's the questioning lawyer's responsibility to ask the right questions to get the info he or she is after and the lawyer has to be thorough and methodical if they neglect to ask about something that's their problem those defending the witness always tell the witness not to volunteer information and to just respond to the questioning lawyers questions again don't volunteer i had a witness come in and we went through the whole preparation meeting where i gave her all the instructions and told her not to volunteer again don't volunteer i ask if she's reviewed anything to prepare nope so that's good you have to disclose things you've reviewed we go through the deposition and she does fine questioning lawyer is done he's packing up his stuff the court reporter is packing up her stuff and the lawyer is waking toward the door witness says did you want to see this and pulls out a stack of books that no one had ever asked about she hadn't told me about and which contained stuff that the other side was able to use freaking dumbass the client who said they didn't speak english so we had to get an interpreter when asked questions the client kept answering in english and the interpreter would have to stop and ask again and then answer in the language long confusing deposition to say the least the client spoke better english than anything a lawyer told me some clients who speak english get a translator so that when they are asked something they hear it in english and then hear it again before they are expected to answer this delay give them a longer window of time to cook up the right answer as well if the judge catches them in a lie the accused can pretend they didn't lie just that the translator said it wrong it's a toss-up between the one who called the judge a seat to her face and the one who didn't show up for a hearing because while out on bail he got arrested in the next county over and was in their lock-up at the hearing time in a paralegal although i am in it now but previously i was in other areas well in court the case before hours at the time was for theft and was going on much longer than it should have defense lawyer calls for a motion to dismiss claiming lack of evidence judge says he will entertain said motion after lunch hits gavel says court will reconvene at 1pm court dismissed defendant stands up and says real loudly told you i could get away with stealing that crap he thought his case had been dismissed i had to try to defend a man who walked into a convenience store with a knife demanding money he wore no masks just his casual clothes and walked through every aisle before he robbed it being spotted by every security camera in the store after the robbery he ran back to the hotel he was staying at also carrying an open backpack full of money being seen by the hotel's security cameras in the process he then went into his room through the bag on the floor and hid under a bed until police arrived i spent a long night thinking about it before passing the case to somebody else because i have no idea how to defend someone who has so much evidence against them i'm surprised he didn't put the money in a bag with a large comical dollar sign on it i've told this story here before but it's a good one my friend's mom was a defense lawyer for a hospital her job was to represent doctors accused of malpractice or anything relating to dr patient interaction i forget all of the details but she had one case where a female patient had accused a male doctor of sexual assault the claim was that the doctor groped the patient several times during a procedure allegedly the doctor had been coached to say that during a routine procedure it's possible that he had inadvertently brushed up against the patient's chest and that if it happened it was an unintentional consequence of following standard procedures so they get to the deposition and i guess the first question the doctor gets is something along the lines of walk me through what happened and the doctor says i don't know what you want me to say man i'm a tiff guy always have been they settled not that phrase on two different occasions in the last three years i have declined representation and in each case it was someone who had been sued was served with the papers had completely ignored them was defaulted received and ignored the request that the court enter a judgment based on the default and then ignored subpoenas and other directives relating to creditors exams then it finally occurs to them that they should consult with a lawyer far too late to do anything my question not spoken out loud how in the world do you get through life you wonder how people like that live when they're such idiots but somehow they managed to stumble into enough food and housing to keep surviving i'm pretty sure the lawyer who served the girl who sued my brother had that same question for her my brother started dating the girl right after he and his first fiance called things off from the get-go this new girl was bast crab he brought her home to hang out and she burst into my room without warning to introduce herself and tried to hang out with me she told my brother she wanted him to get me our mom and our stepdad together downstairs so we could all meet and play board games she found our dad and stepmom on facebook and friended them she was the weirdest clingy girl i've ever seen my brother wasn't looking for that kind of relationship so he ended it with her this girl proceeded to frick with our house his car his friends she started making calls to the local police saying she'd seen criminal mischief happening and she thought it was my brother after months of trying to ignore her and hoping she'd go away it didn't work my brother came home and found her sitting on our porch with this other girl apparently they were in a relationship and they wanted my brother to have sex with them and get them pregnant so they could have kids my brother snapped after months of stalking and basically threatened her with violence if she didn't leave him the heck alone a few weeks later he got served to show in court to determine an order of protection against him filed by that girl he didn't bring a lawyer and he didn't expect her to have one anyway her lawyer started talking about how my brother had threatened his client and she felt like she was in danger and how my brother deserved to be locked up she also tried to have him banned from being near the local elementary schools for reasons unknown to us my brother was entitled to call witnesses so he called our mother me our stepdad and the three friends each of us detailed the months of stalking and property destruction then my brother presented the photos he had of everything she'd done the screenshots of messages sent to him to me to our relatives on cell phone and social media based on the look on her lawyer's face she hadn't mentioned and had probably lied about it she'd instigated everything my brother was given an order of protection against her that she ended up breaking a few weeks later she moved away after she was released from county jail and last i heard she sells her body for drugs and money like i understand his mentality that he didn't need a lawyer however i still think it's a dumb move at least get a public defender this isn't my story but is just too perfect to not mention when one of these threads comes up so we are at a bail hearing for the client an older guy in his 70s accused of sexually assaulting his granddaughter who is in her teens and we are just wrapping up have made all our arguments that the client is an upstanding member of the local immigrant community no priors act and the judge has granted bale with a reasonable bond all done right number the client insists he wants to say a few things so he stands up and gives his bit that he hadn't mentioned to his lawyer at all about how he doesn't get why there is all this fuss he didn't even penetrate her with his penis after all and she was asking for it with that short skirt at this point the judge tries to interrupt this by suggesting that maybe this comment would be better suited for sentencing but the old guy isn't done digging he just has to tell everyone how he really doesn't know why people are wasting so much time over all of this as he is going to fly back to his home country in a couple of days anyway so yeah apparently that one didn't go well what a piece of crap i went to a meeting where an older couple 80s sent their life saving to a nigerian prince 2009 who was going to triple their money and send it back they sent money into installments grand total was around 40k and it was obviously stolen they wanted to know every option they had to get it back and the answer was simple none there's nothing you can do to get your money back i've never seen two people so mentally broken they were retired and no longer had access to money in any way i excused myself from the meeting by faking a call and started crying in the bathroom i couldn't handle it i had a client come in and spin me this yarn about how he owed all these child support arrears and the payments are killing him and could i file a petition to have the payment reduced he spins this tale of his spouse alienating the children and that's why he never saw them i filed the petition and the clerk called me aside one day and said i might want to review his actual divorce file not just his child support file that was a wild ride orders of protection due to stalking losing his visitation due to muse not making a single child support payment in 14 years i do the best i can until he admits on the stand that he smokes a cart in a week and drinks over a liter a day so that's over 200 a week in cigarettes and liquor and a little weed sometimes it did not go well i was a baby attorney at the time and i could tell the judge wanted to tear me a new one for even filing this but i was so beaten down by the end of the hearing that it would have been child abuse at that point as a pd pretty much every single client that wants to take their case to trial and is completely delusional about how strong their defense is i don't know if it's drugs narcissism mental illness but so many just are in complete denial even when you show them the whole thing on video they don't understand that a witness saying what they saw happened is evidence despite telling me they're being railroaded with no evidence especially with strict liability type offenses like driving under suspension and don't get that i was only driving three miles to do x and those cops just wait outside my trailer park waiting for me because they know my car isn't a defense often times during discovery you'll get requests for admission which are a set of yes or no questions designed to get basic non-contested info like whether our client was the one driving the car at the time often plaintiff's lawyers will throw in a gotcha question that pretty much states admit the whole thing is your fault and you owe plaintiffs a bunch of money 99.9 percent of the time we'll deny them because it would sink our whole case but i had one idiot defendant who insisted on admitting that one we lost sometimes pedophiles and fraudsters are often in denial they'll refuse to enter a plea of guilty even if the evidence is overwhelming and even though a plea would substantially reduce their sentence in those cases you're just put in the position of explaining to the client their low prospects of success and putting the prosecution case to the test in a guilty plea you have the opportunity to explain some mitigating details in the defendant's favor very occasionally the defendant is a miserable and repentant who had every advantage in life and still fricked it up in those rare cases i'm forced to brush over the defendant's antecedents and focus on making sure the sentence is in range teenage boys can be very difficult to work with because they are focused on impressing you so getting those mitigating details is like extracting teeth note if you are a teenage boy this doesn't impress us the actual hardened criminals we deal with have danced the dance many times and they are forthcoming with details like their difficult upbringing the courses they've enrolled in and so forth fortunately in the case of teenage boys their mother often comes with them so i can ask her for humanizing details like their favorite subjects at school their future plans how they fell into a bad crowd and so forth all i can think of is i saw this guy on the tv dutch who was accused of possession of firearms he didn't have an attorney as he didn't want one his reason he didn't need an attorney because what he was doing was actually legal the judge asked him if he was sure he said he was then he was convicted that was pretty much it i interned at legal aid not our client custody case he accused her of using coke all the time which made her an unfit mother she defended herself your honor i have never used c in my life and i wouldn't i only smoke crack case closed usually you get it the other direction dope heads think powder c is classier than crack rock most normal people think you're degenerate either way i worked in the system i heard no i only do powder c a lot part of it was the fed sentencing disparity too this is usa which is more or less resolved now i have posted this here before i'm not a lawyer i read about this two guys were being tried for robbing a gas station a customer who saw the robbery was now on the witness stand the prosecutor asked him to describe what he saw the witness said that he saw two guys robbing the store and while running out one of them bumped into him then the prosecutor turned towards the two defendants and asked are those two men in the courtroom today at which point the two idiots raised their hands i'm sure the defense lawyer thought how the frick am i supposed to defend you now there's quite a famous case in my country that i heard about today i'm a law student it was an example we skimmed over it though the details may be wrong it wasn't the victim that made the lawyer go how the frick but the prosecutor there once was a company who had an illegal business of selling radioactive waste or something like that doesn't matter for the sake of the story just know it was illegal years of criminal persecution in vain as the accused refused to say anything they got nothing out of them not a single word so they decided to get them to a parliamentary investigation court back in the days there was a special oath to be sworn if you had to appear for a parliamentary investigation court the oath stated that you had to answer any question truthfully the accused had two options one degree tell the truth go to jail two degrees tell a lie commit perjury go to jail what did they do they told the truth but like the whole truth every single detail the prosecutor did not need to ask any questions the accused told them everything the investigation court was very pleased to hear them turn themselves look at how efficient we are what the criminal court couldn't achieve in years we could in mere minutes we're the best guys then the lawyer stood up according to the bupo treaty of the eu i don't know if it has another name in english that this country signed the accused cannot accuse themselves and be persecuted for that my clients just accused themselves so you cannot condemn them the investigation court had all the information at their fingertips but it was useless the accused walked out as free men the lawyer became known in my whole country and they changed the oath from now on you are allowed to refuse to give answers to questions in a parliamentary investigation court end of story again i'm not sure about the details we briefly skimmed over it it's a fun story to show that parliamentary and criminal investigation courts are not the same and had different rules back in the day i did not focus on the details of the story only on the gist of the message aka you can be silent a few years ago you couldn't so don't shoot me if it's wrong interesting in the u.s people have the right to not accuse themselves but if they choose to do so anyway it's fair game a group of three young boys in my city drowned their neighbors cat and recorded themselves doing it with their phones the videos were copied by their friends and would inevitably be shown to the jury in court it was a case of the evidence speaking for itself all i could really do was to argue for lighter punishment using their ages defense and the disastrous effect that group mentality can have on young people i'm sorry but i hope they got whatever the max punishment was never once did i get together with my friends as a teenager and drown someone's cat wtf former criminal defense attorney here the answer is almost every single one but keep in mind you don't defend clients you make prosecutors do their job i work in the legal system not a lawyer sorry but this situation is pretty good not to share a defendant was arrested for a breaking and entering went into a neighbor's home after being told not to unsat down acting like they owned the place and started smoking a cigarette if i remember the charging court paperwork correctly when the police came and proceeded with an arrest the defendant straight up with no prompting said basically oh and i killed my other neighbor they didn't have many leads so this pretty much gave them what they needed i don't know how the defendant's attorney is going to be able to defend with that confession it's less a matter of guilt than a matter of how much time and where at that point my lawyer father once had a client who was suing the federal government because he claimed his parents had sold him to the feds for testing as a child the client claimed they had him constantly under surveillance when asked how he knew who was watching him the client said the government used mini vans and station wagons late 80s and they were always parked outside his residence the client lived in a motel in a resort town my aunt is a retired lawyer she once had to defend a guy who was in the possession of weed and other drugs he swore he didn't have any but he obviously did because on the days leading up to his trial he looked and smelled more shittier than the day before finally on the day of his stream he showed up with a cigarette in his mouth and a can of lager he was high as frick and there was obviously some drugs in his system my aunt told me as she was retelling this story as soon as he walked in i knew it was about time for me to freaking retire ps he lost the case even though my aunt tried to get him a lower sentence i think he's serving like 20 years or something now lol i had a client once was self-represented in a divorce case prior to retaining me comes to me the day before a case conference i ask what he's filed with the court slides an envelope across the table i open it it's a multitude of pictures of his overweight wife spread eagle camera three feet away showing her vagina yes the judge saw and no he wasn't pleased apparently x had caught wife sending these pictures to men on the internet now a lot of defense lawyers will defend some monsters who absolutely did the crime in that case their job isn't about proving the person innocent it's more about making sure they have a fair trial with everything done properly if things get done wrong the person can walk free because they didn't have a proper trial declare them guilty not a specific example but the entire criminal prosecution industry would literally shut down if even 50 of defendants would just say lawyer and nothing else during the arrest process but they just can't help themselves even after they have been arrested and convicted based on their confessions several times i always heard it wasn't about defending the client but about defending against improper state behavior the police and prosecutors need to be held just as accountable for how they conduct investigations evidence interviews etc no one likes it when a child molester gets off on a technicality but defense makes sure to the best of their ability that the state can't overrun procedure not a lawyer and not the one asking a lawyer yet i got a story for that one my ex's landlord sold the apartment and the new one threw my ex out following all the rules like in total detail and even offered him money if he moved out before the deadline and a new apartment to move in the next day pretty much those two things are not required by law and it was a nice helping gesture of the new landlord my ex's mother talked him into getting a lawyer and trying to sue the new landlord i tried telling him that this is bs he won't get anywhere with it needless to say he seemingly always thought i was too stupid he followed his mother's advice and talked to a lawyer as far as i know the lawyer nearly laughed at him telling him he can sue the new landlord but he will lose and most likely even lose the two offers my ex still wanted to sue him didn't work out though pretty sure the lawyer didn't sue him as this was completely useless but there is a chance that the lawyer wrote some notes to the new landlord he also didn't get the offer department in the end landlord probably wanted to do a serious value add and remodel all the units lawyer selectors what is the strangest or oddest law that's won a case for you the weirdest case i have ever dealt with was jolie v paleta 1999 oj number 1728 scj i did some research for this case when i was a law student some background this was at a time when the ontario court of appeal had held that if there were any factual matters in dispute a case could not be dismissed on summary judgment if that is not the case today it was discovered that this position basically ruined summary judgment as a useful process but it was at the time in such a motion all facts alleged by he plaintiff would be assumed to be true what happened was this a man sued among others the college of dental surgeons for persecuting him and interfering in his ability to live as a generic martian the plaintiff claimed he had been cloned from space debris nasa found in the 1960s he claimed he had a genetic test to prove this but it had been falsified by the cia as part of the conspiracy against him well naturally this claim raises the concern that the plaintiff was bonkers but there was no evidence aside from his bizarre claims of that in court the case was decided on two alternate grounds first on the boring grounds that the case was patently frivolous and vexatious because it was absurd however it was also decided on the more entertaining basis of standing justice epstein held that only a person could commence an action in ontario the rules of civil procedure define a person to be either a human being or a corporation the plaintiff's whole case was based on him being a martian if he was not a martian his case had no merit if he was a martian he lacked standing to commence a lawsuit in ontario in short we now have precedent that martians cannot see you in ontario that's hilarious i love when actual legal precedent sounds like a hypothetical from a grade school mock trial i had a case where a guy was charged for running a red light the thing is he had been sitting at the lights for five minutes and it hadn't changed the wording of the specific section under which he was charged related to stop signs and traffic lights and referred to them as traffic regulation devices i successfully argued that as the traffic light wasn't changing it wasn't regulating traffic and he got off i couldn't believe it when the judge ruled in my favor neither could a police prosecutor i got a pro bono client's removal biosis cancelled he had a low-level drug possession conviction from the early 1980s during that brief period the active ingredient of imodium was illegal under state law but not federal law so i successfully argued that they couldn't prove it wasn't a conviction for possession of a substance that was federally legal at the time and as such was not subject to removal the argument worked and my guy went back to his business and his family 47 usc 227 b restrictions on use of automated telephone equipment law student working at law firm we have a fax machine that gets tons of spam faxes our chief partner has a vendetta against spam and he uses it to give us practice in researching and writing petitions so we catalog each fax send replies to take us off the list document everything and wait for them to fax us again then we follow up with our fcc complaint and demand letter a couple times this has ended up with the person getting mad and sending us retaliatory faxes black sheets of paper if they stop sending we don't do anything but we've gone to small claims a couple time and gotten five hundred dollars per page a couple times but we also got someone trying to sell drugs through facts but we just turned that over to the police imagine sending a spam fax about drugs to a law firm the canadian interest act specifies that all interest must be specified in a per annum percentage if it is not it struck down to five percent simple interest per year the number of lenders and creditors who try to pull off a four percent monthly compound interest but aren't familiar with that provision of federal law i41 would like to hear a great bit more detail about this i won a case where the defendant new york city tried to exploit a really stupid law which i was able to use to win the case this was a slip and full case where my client had tripped on a piece of broken sidewalk outside of the natural history museum and shattered her arm and wrist the law is that a property owner is responsible for the sidewalk directly outside of their property the theory being even if they can't fix it they have a duty to warn people about hazards and mark the area of the museum was owned by the city there's another concept called sovereign immunity which is that governments can't be sued without their consent so the city had passed a very very stupid law that they would be exempted from the rule that they can't be sued for sidewalk injuries unless you can show they were on notice of hazard meaning you would have to show that you informed the secretary of state governor mayor etc of the exact specific crack in the sidewalk before the injury occurs and you had to do so in writing with ample time for the city to remedy it 180 days in advance if i recall correctly under normal circumstances this is impossible because no one anticipates tripping on the sidewalk 180 days in advance with the foresight to write a letter to the mayor about that specific crack luckily someone did have that foresight and there was a non-profit called big apple maps which would go around the city and with maps of government property and record with insane specificity each and every crack in the sidewalk pothole protrusion and other hazard and then publish these maps while serving copies on the government with the express with the express with the express with the express with the express with the express with the express with the i got a hold of one of these maps and visited the site and i was able to take pictures of the section of the sidewalk where my client fell and you could see newly placed concrete over the area in the exact position indicated on the map showing where the sidewalk had been repaired after my client slipped basically the government's attorney brought up the sovereign immunity defense and outlined all of the stupid steps i would have needed to go through to overcome their motion to dismiss my response was oh you mean this and gave them the map immediate settlement had a friend trip over a huge crack on a sidewalk the city tried saying they didn't know i had submitted pictures and a complaint about the crack almost a year prior he was very thankful i did so as it basically won his case there was a case here in hawaii that got thrown out like this someone got pulled over because the police saw she had way too many passengers in the car then they noticed she was drunk open and shut case well apparently in hawaii there's no law defining the maximum number of passengers in a private vehicle so the issue was that all the extra passengers weren't wearing seat belts well this failed also because the law only says that every available seat belt needs to be in use if you have six passengers and only five seat belts there's nothing at all illegal about the sixth being unrestrained so since there was no probable cause to pull her over in the first place even though she was indefensibly drunk the whole thing got thrown out hawaii has some very counter-intuitive laws if your truck has seats installed in the bed your passengers must be buckled up if not they can just party back there while anyone in the cab unbuckled will get you a major ticket people regularly ride down the freeway in truck beds while sitting in lawn chairs not a lawyer but i did enough floor research to get myself out of a parking ticket one time when i was in college i was in the marching band we had a storage room in the basement of one of the dorms i was going to get something out of the storage room and parked in the loading dock behind the dorm there was just enough room next to a dumpster to fit my car i didn't want to spend five dollars on a loading zone pass and parking services because i was a broke college student so i just parked i was only going to be two minutes anyway i finished picking up what i need to sure enough i come back out to my car to a parking ticket except it isn't the 25 ticket for parking in a loading zone it's a 75 ticket for parking in a fire lane wtf there was a single sign at the very front of the side road leading up to the loading zone but no curb paint no indication of where the fire lane started and where it stopped i called parking enforcement telling them this and they wouldn't budge fine i took pictures of the loading dock and i submitted an information request to obtain the evidence pictures i got the pictures and started researching fire lane requirements in the state what i found clearly indicated that curb stripes were mandatory i called parking enforcement and told them what i found and they still wouldn't budge frustratingly i looked at the law again the party cited me for said that nothing could obstruct a fire lane at any time i looked back at the evidence photos and saw the dumpster next to my car if this was a fire lane then the dumpster was blocking the fire lane too the same state law they cited me with said that non-vehicle obstruction of a fire lane was subject to a fine of 1 500 day i found satellite imagery from four years prior showing that the dumpster had been there for at least four years so i argued to university parking enforcement that if this was a fire lane then the university had been obstructing it for at least four years and would overstate 2.2 million dollars in fines if i reported it the parking ticket disappeared immediately when i sent the appeals committee their own evidence photos sat imagery and the same state law they cited me with i drove by a week later and the dumpster was gone the curb painted and two brand new fire lane signs were up should have sent your evidence off anyway once the ticket was gone lol i have one where we won but didn't quite go as planned i had a client a while ago who was incarcerated at the state prison farm inmates had to spend 40 60 hours a week preparing slop for the hogs from expired restaurant food and cleaning the hog barns he wreaked every time i met with him even after showering he said it was miserable well he found out that some muslim inmates who couldn't work with pigs were offered to be able to work at a police horse stable instead five minutes down the road he wanted to sue saying that stable work is much less revolting than hog work and that this amounted to unequal punishment on the basis of religion i thought he had a point well the case didn't get thrown out and actually got some traction but then the prison changed their policies in response inmates who couldn't work around pigs or didn't want to would instead be transported to a factory chicken barn the next county over for work each day he asked that i dropped the lawsuit and the muslim inmates were not happy with him in my native country thailand there used to be a punishment called kakikai for political prisoners there was a two-story prison bottom floor housed the prisoners and the top floor was just a massive chicken cooperative but the floor of the coop was grated so inmates got pooped on by chickens i had a client with a serious medical problem that cost her her job and she was preparing to file bankruptcy on the medical bills and credit card debts thing was she had like fifteen thousand dollars socked away and didn't tell me it was all that was left of her life savings before we filed her case she gave it to her mom for safe keeping what she didn't know is that she could have kept the money through the bankruptcy but giving it away beforehand is a no-no i had to tell the court when i found out and when this happens the court gets the right to sue the mom for the 15 000 the thing is the mom's debt to her daughter's bankruptcy court also dischargeable in bankruptcy so the mom filed bankruptcy too and they got to keep the money after all over 10 years ago i had been at fault for rear-ending someone else i had no insurance and my license had expired i don't think i need to mention that i was in a very destitute low place in life struggling with almost every conceivable aspect of living the cop was very kind as we talked but wrote me a ticket for it all one was kind of a fix it ticket about my suspended license i sorted that out in the days after and nothing came of that ticket the cop had mentioned that he had to write the insurance ticket but to take it into court and get it lowered i was desperate to try and get my 800 insurance ticket lower because i couldn't afford something like that so i took the cops advice i went into traffic court weeks later and when it was my time to chat with the judge in front of everyone there the judge looked at the ticket stopped me and said i would like to use mr south seattle's case as an example to the gallery i almost died he went on this is a court of law but it is also a court of fairness it seems as if the officer didn't write the date of the incident in the ticket i can't hold mr south seattle accountable to this my jaw dropped i stood there the judge told me i was free to go twice before it registered i'm pretty sure that cop deliberately didn't write the date on that ticket thanks officer a guy got drunk and decided to ride his horse through town this was a small town in north carolina well he would stop at each intersection and fire his pistol in the air like some wild west cowboy anyway the guy was charged with a dui and discharging a firearm within city limits which was a felony so as one would soon find it is not just mandatory but a law that you must fire your firearm into the air at an intersection when coming through town on your horse an old blue law that never got erased he still got the dui and his horse got impounded but the dumb founder judge dropped the other charges i find the mental image of the police impounding a horse quite hilarious had a case where my defendant opponent filed an appeal from an administrative agency to the local circuit court the requirements for filing the appeal are very strict and the filing must include an appeal bond executed by the individual defendant or a corporate officer when my opponent s assistant electronically filed the appeal she attached a dart pdf of the bond without the corporate signature there's no question in my mind they had the bond with the requisite signature and simply attached the wrong version of the documents to the filing wish i could say there was a huge court fight over this and i got to slam my opponent but that's not how this works among professionals i waited until after the time to correct this error had passed i then politely called my opponent told him that i was holding the i win button and that i'd be filing a motion to that effect in a week but my opponent came to me with very favorable settlement terms within days to this day i don't know for sure if my opponent ever disclosed his mistake to his client but i doubt it eonor but the first and only time i ever used the subway station's emergency door to get to the train the ticket gate wasn't working it was 3 am i was a drunk college kid trying to catch the last train home i got caught by two subway officers and given a ticket with a huge attempted fair avoidance fine i showed up to the hearing and desperation and they ended up having to drop the fine as they were reviewing the case with me because one cop had recorded that i entered through the right hand emergency door and the other road that i entered through the left-hand emergency door never been so grateful in my life i'm just picturing two angry nypd officers yelling at each other in a comedic fashion damn my left not your left and so on oh and of course one of the cops has to throw down his hat in anger once won a case that forbade the possession or transport of human urine in order to adulterate a urine screen it wasn't human urine it was fake lab made urine from a website another one grandpa tell me about cornhole board guy happened to me when i was a teenager my friends and i bought some beer and then went to a high school football game the first week of my senior year we obviously got caught and all six of us got tickets for underage possession of alcohol i was the dd and had been driving my dad suburban with our very unique last name on the license plate so it was really easy to figure out whose car it was went to court a few months later the ada presents her case cops testify they even brought the alcohol in as evidence right after she rested her case my attorney steps up and asks the judge to dismiss the case we are all very confused the judge looks at the aider and just kind of shakes her head and agrees my attorney explained later that she forgot to prove that we were under 21 so there wasn't a case anymore i've never been so glad for a technicality in my life and that's why you hire a lawyer well and to negotiate on your behalf when you're clearly guilty my brother is a lawyer he got a dui charge dropped for a client guy gets pulled over cop asks him to step out to perform the sobriety test after he admits to having consumed some amount of alcohol he complies but after stepping out of his car asks the officer if it's okay for him to reposition his vehicle to move it further away from the road because he feels uncomfortable being that close the cop obliges apparently the charge got dropped because the officer willingly let an intoxicated individual operate a motor vehicle i once had a client who woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone in his home he retrieved a colt 1911 from a bedside drawer walked into his living room and confronted a figure in the dark the person didn't identify himself but moved towards my client who fired a single shot that went through the person's shoulder turned out it was my client's stepson who had snuck out been drinking underage and stumbled home but the problem with the situation was that my client was a convicted felon several times over that meant that while the shooting itself was legally defensible his possession of the firearm was not we looked into the history of the gun itself as our client had indicated it had belonged to his grandfather who had served in the u.s army in the early 20th century ultimately we were able to bring multiple experts in and establish that the gun had been among the very first batch of firearms distributed from coal to the us army at the augusta armory florida statute 790.001 creates an exemption of firearm-related laws including the prohibition for felons to possess a firearm if the firearm in question was an antique meaning it was manufactured prior to 1918. since we could establish the history of the firearm to have been manufactured before 1918 our client couldn't be prosecuted for the offence and got out from underneath a potential mandatory prison sentence that's some beautiful lawyering right there but also your client probably needed a divorce lawyer after this prior to becoming an attorney i worked retail for a few months the way my assistant manager scheduled me i had to work 10 days straight including a couple of 12-hour shifts with no days off and minimal overtime the way they got around the overtime was by scheduling me the last five days of one week and the first five days of the second week so i only worked 40 hours in the work week plus the four hours of overtime for the 12 hour shift that did not seem right to me so i looked up the law in virginia while they could technically do that there was an archaic law at the time in virginia that stated if a non-essential or non-managerial worker wanted sundays off the job had to give the sundays off without penalty this was true even if the worker agreed in accepting the job to work on sundays the worker under the law could change his or her mind and ask for all sundays off as long as the worker was not essential or a manager then the employer had to accommodate i took the law to my manager and said that i was not going to work sundays anymore he said that they wouldn't schedule me that many days in a row anymore but i still had to work sundays i told him that i did not and gave him the statute it caused a big stink and i ultimately found a better job not long after but i never worked to sunday there again ironically a few years later the virginia general assembly accidentally created a law that nullified the essential worker and manager bit of the sunday law that made the news and suddenly people were aware of this archaic law that they could ask for sundays off i remember the news saying that no one knew about this law because i thought to myself i did the general assembly repealed the entire law about sundays so now workers do have to work sundays that was the only time though that i found an archaic law to help me out man that pisses me off when managers give crappy schedules like that i've known a bunch of friends who've had to work 10 days in a row or something ridiculous really sucks that the law got repealed i heard that virginia is at the bottom when it comes to workers rights not a lawyer but i got a charge dropped because of the cops bad handwriting i got a ticket on a monday night for speeding and was given the court date of like two months from then about a week and a half later i get a letter in the mail that i'm being charged with a failure to appear for court i'm in court two days later for that and tell the judge not guilty on the fta and no contest on the speeding after asking him to just look at the date on the ticket and my supposed original court date he sets them down and goes you have a point there not guilty on the failure to appear and how do you plead for the speeding charge i replied no contest i was speeding your honor he looks at the ticket sees that the cop had initially put 10 over under the nodes put my actual speed like 20 30 over and goes yes it certainly looks that way lol early in my career i had a fairly minor case in which my client's neighbor cut down a bunch of shrubs and small trees bordering their properties because they blocked his view this really irritated my client as he wanted his privacy now the monetary damages were actually not that much and this was looking like a case that really couldn't be economically litigated for what the client could afford however in researching the issue i found a rather obscure law that provides for attorneys fees to a winning plaintiff when a defendant has willfully damaged the border foliage of a ranch or farm in looking up the definition of these terms i realize that my client's property actually qualified for the statute as he used his land for growing a variety of produce for market once attorney's fees were on the table the other side quickly came and wrote a big check to cover the damages i wasn't the lawyer but a bailiff at the time this wasn't strange so much as funny in a way so an officer pulled over a man for obviously driving while intoxicated also it seemed swerving a bit slower than expected for the flow of traffic which yes that can get you a ticket and blowing through a stop sign soon as the officer pulled the guy over the man stepped out of the vehicle and took a big butt swig from a bottle of whiskey officer arrested him with dui and dude did blow well over the legal limit fast forward to the trial the guy's lawyer argued that while his client may have been impaired driving the fact remains that since he drank a big swig of alcohol as soon as he was stopped and stepped out of the vehicle the officer couldn't be certain if that was what pushed him over the legal limit or not the lawyer counted that the officer couldn't then reasonably charge him with dui as it was entirely possible that he was fine before that last big gulp long story short the judge agreed and had to throw out the dui charge though he didn't want to as he reasoned that while the defendant's reasoning was sound in the law by the same token he feared it might encourage abuse whatever the case the guy got off on the dui charge i later heard that this may not have been the first time the guy has tried that stunt i've heard of this strategy many times over the years in tx he could have been charged with an open container and public intoxication as well as driving while intoxicated if the keys were still in the ignition had a client who was a truck driver he got various penal infractions for issues with his truck several thousand dollars in fines basically anyway the evidence is pretty damning lots of pictures showing defects detailed description by the traffic control officer and so on however to find him guilty the prosecutor technically is to prove that the vehicle he was driving is considered a heavy vehicle the law says three heavy vehicle means a road vehicle or combination of road vehicles within the meaning of the highway safety code having a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of 4 500 kilograms or more b a bus minibus or tow truck within the meaning of that code c a road vehicle subject to a regulation made under section 622 of that code the traffic control officer had not listed the weight of the vehicle in his report there's pictures of it clearly an 18-wheel truck in the report but no weight written anywhere so i told the judge that the prosecution hadn't proven the weight of the vehicle per the definition of heavy vehicle the pictures don't prove the numerical weight just the shape of the vehicle she had no choice but to acquit him because all of the infractions he had received were for a heavy vehicle operator so he can't be guilty if they can't prove he was operating a heavy vehicle statue made it a crime to build structures in the park i.e homeless tents my guy gets picked up with zero prep i get up look at the statute and see there's an exception if they have the governor's mers or parks debt permission i said the ticket didn't say they checked for permission and they won't be able to prove that so it should be dismissed for lack of probable cause judge who hated the criminalization of poverty threw it out obligatory anal disclaimer my mom was getting sued by a debt collection company that was well known for suing people as a means of threatening them i had some time and i looked up the laws on debt collection where we lived at the time you had the right to demand in writing that they provide evidence that they actually hold the debt and they had a certain amount of time to respond under the law or they forfeit any right they had to collect said debt i sent them a certified letter we never heard back from them when we went to court i submitted the receipt for the certified letter and said they had failed to provide the proof within the legal time frame and cited the law case dismissed with prejudice the lawyer for their side didn't even care you can't lose too much sleep over your client's mistakes sometimes a client messes up a case or walks right into a trap it is what it is if i can't fix it no sense wasting more time on it than it's worth i've seen parties waste easily 50 k in legal expenses for the chance to get 30 k it's stupid if it's coming from the client and sleazy if it's coming from the lawyer i had one where a client was contesting a will halfway through the case the other side argued that my client was set to inherit less without the will if we won than she would with it if we lost and argued she lacked standing to attack the will the descendant had a very old will that benefited our client's deceased mother but that will had been revoked we found a very old doctrine and a footnote to something else entirely and argued to the judge that the law assumes you'd rather die with an old revoked wolverine with none at all therefore we argued he should look back to the prior will since our client would inherit her mother's bequest under the prior will he held our client had standing to bring the will contest we ended up settling the case shortly thereafter i never got why people contest will so fiercely it's like even in times of grief money still makes people into terrible persons and can't tear families apart over it in my family an old uncle died and one cousin was named in the will but wanted her mom to be named too they fought so long over it that the mom died and the money ended up going to paying lawyers court costs not me personally but this was a case we covered in my first year of law school essentially in 1912 the appellate division held that women could not be lawyers in south africa as the relevant statute referred to person and women were less than a person incorporated law society viwaki 14 years later activist-minded judges applied this finding to a pass-law case during apartheid to sum it up they reasoned that because women were not people and only black people were required to carry a pass black women were not required to and could not be arrested or penalized for not having a pass rex v dettody had a guy in use of basic training that should have been a lawyer when pulling dorm guard duty we were supposed to ask anyone requesting entry to show their military it through the window in the door and compare the name shown to an approved entry list failure to confirm it before allowing entry was a security infraction so this one dude is dorm guard when a ti training instructor is going around from dorm to dorm to make sure the airmen on duty are following procedures the ti knocks on the door and demands entry for whatever reason the airman lets the time without asking to see it the ti blows a gasket and starts screaming at the m and how much trouble he's going to be in when the ti reports what happened he demands the airman hand over a form 341 which is used to document rules and fractions airmen sir i'll give you a 341 but i think you should know this door is broken a ti wft are you talking about airmen airmen sir we found out if you kick the door on the bottom left corner it opens whether it's locked or not t.i show me what you're talking about the two step out into the hallway and the airman shows the ti where to kick the door airmen sir let me step back inside and lock the door so you can try it yourself the airman steps back inside the door then locks it the t.i tries kicking the door but it remains locked ti airmen i thought you said this door is broken airmen huh it worked the last time i tried it ti well it looks like it's working fine now open up and give me a 341 airman sir if you are requesting entry to the doorman i'll have to see your at first i once got out of a parking ticket by refusing to admit i was the driver in the uk parking companies that use automatic number plate recognition can get the contact details of the registered keeper of a car from the dvla our dmv and send them the fine in the post but i did some googling and found out that legally it's not the registered keeper who is liable for the fine it's whoever was driving at the time this isn't always the case there are situations where they can hold the keeper liable but in my specific case this didn't apply they really don't like you knowing this their letters are worded very carefully to give you the impression that you are liable for the finest keeper of the vehicle without ever actually outright saying that and they do the crap where you can either pay a reduced fine now or appeal and pay a bigger fine later i appealed i didn't lie and claim i wasn't the driver instead i just pointed out that they are contacting me as the registered keeper that the registered keeper isn't legally liable to pay the fine and that i am under no obligation to give them any details of who was driving at the time it took months and two appeals but eventually i won and didn't have to pay the 20 pound fine i would have paid but i felt like i hadn't done anything wrong i'd not parked illegally or over time or not paid or anything i'd just forgotten to validate my parking after shopping at tesco lawyers of redit what is the most morally challenging case that you've worked on not a lawyer but a lawyer's assistant my boss asked me to falsify the signature of a recently dead man in order to have a will validated in my country when a person dies it takes up to four days to have the act registered and in that time frame my boss legalized a secret will in which one of the sons of the deceased would be substantially benefited it was of course her client i was born and raised catholic married into a very prominent catholic family i joined the firm that was representing physical shaming and abuse victims i initially stayed out because the bishop who was in charge of the bad priest married my wife and me but the more i observed the case and his lying i couldn't sit by when the case was dismissed at the trial level the partner asked me to write the appellate briefs because that was my forte i did and the dismissal was reversed and the church quickly settled highlight of my career and spiritual life jesus had the harshest condemnations for people who harm children in some areas of law you get a bit of everything i'm in one of those areas i do not do family law but i had one case where an ex-husband and ex-wife were against each other both were completely fraudulent both were trying to use their young daughter against the other one was a chronic cheater opportunist and the other was constantly high or drunk and constantly trying to access his former wife's financials she was quite well off when they got together this was not a divorce case but due to the nature of the case all attorneys involved were privy to the entire record of their divorce i feel like our client aged out our opposition very minutely in being a slightly better person but it was a hollow victory como i do not do family law best decision you've made since the disastrous choice to become an attorney i defended a man accused of abusing his gf and it was the third time he'd been charged in the same relationship it was obvious he was guilty but the gf essentially was under his spell and stopped cooperating obvious pattern of some pretty serious abuse eonal but i have enough experience with dv victims to know that that textbook abuse victim behavior it makes my blood boil that our legal system hasn't been changed to account for that because it's virtually impossible for a victim to get out of the situation without testifying in the presence of their abuser who most likely is very good at manipulating them defended a guy charged with child physical shaming not the challenging part he clearly did not do it he was however an admitted and convicted diddler from an earlier case yuck but everyone is entitled to a defense and this guy clearly didn't do this one so why challenging he so clearly didn't do this one that as the case developed the prosecutor realized he didn't do it but this was in the last two months or so before the prosecutor's re-election in a roundabout didn't say it big clearly conveyed it manner prosecutor communicated in effect leave it alone until after the election and it will go away client was in jail and couldn't make bail we let the case delay election passed and a couple of days later charges were dismissed it sucked bill had we tried to fight it client might well have been convicted by a jury since he had a previous conviction and he could have went away for over 10 years for something he didn't do i worked defense before becoming a prosecutor two years ago the hardest case was a guy who was accused of molesting his family friend's daughters who were five at the time he hired us he didn't want to register as a diddler and didn't want to do any jail time we knew he did it we heard his interview with the police yet we had to defend him to the best of our ability we trawled through the family friends facebook accounts finding obscenely suggestive photos to show that the kids learned this on their own but we said they were coached by their vindictive grandmother it felt disgusting and repugnant it was our job but dang it left a bad taste in my mouth i left and became a domestic violence and physical shaming and assault prosecutor which i still do my friend told me about a case where a bunch of 18 year olds were drinking and of course one of them said hit me the one who said hit me ended up hitting his head and dying he is representing the dead boy's parents who instigated the whole thing not me but a friend from university who was is and i don't mean this pejoratively i do gooder looking to make the world a better place a few years after the fact he told me about one of his earlier cases as a public defender his client was a clean-cut good-looking kid from a lower middle-class family up on a public mischief charge vandalism he brought the kid a clean dress shirt and tie for his initial court appearance when the kid took off his t-shirt to change into it big old nazi eagle tattoo on his back according to my friend after helping get the kid community service he had to go into the men's room and vomit i worked on a case in law school about a native american nation that was disenrolling its members because of corruption and wanting to have more money for the rest of the community members they kicked over 100 people out of a community of a few thousand and those people lost their housing and health insurance because of it you can't live on the reservation if you are not an enrolled member of the nation but the solution was to involve the us federal government and ask them to force the nation to re-enroll those folks so on the one hand people are literally dying from losing their health insurance nd on the other you're asking a colonial power to interfere in the sovereign right of an indigenous nation to determine its membership it felt freaking bad mayo not mine but a partner in my office client was charged with domestic violence he refused to allow his wife to have a phone and one day her car broke down in the middle of nowhere she had no phone to call anyone and was stuck on the side of the road for an entire day before an officer was driving down the road and stopped when she called her parents the husband had already called and told them not to pick her up officer finally went to take her home and she started crying uncontrollably while telling her story client also demanded the jury trial not sure what happened to him i represented creditors in foreclosures evictions ejectments overall it made sense to me if you can't make payments on the home or pay rent then we would have to start the process as needed but not all cases were the same at some point i ended up with cases that involved specifically deceased mortgagors or occupants with a few that committed suicide within the home a lot of these people who don't have the funds to pay their mortgage or rent also can't really afford to hire their own attorney so basically i'd be the only attorney they'd speak with it'd provide a disclaimer that i wasn't there as or survivors attorney i was the attorney for the bank but overall most people just wanted someone to talk to about it how they found the deceased how they can't clean it up how they can't afford the house they lived in 30-plus years after funeral costs etc it got very depressing very quickly law student not a lawyer i was helping on a physical shaming and assault case involving a child it was hard to watch as we i mean the defense not me personally were trying to undermine the credibility of the very young victim basically calling them a liar while their entire family was watching the events had happened a few years ago and you know how memory isn't perfect one of the lawyers working there is now a prosecutor he said he's never doing defense again because of that kind of case a few years ago a partner in a law firm i worked for at the time asked me to do some pro bono work to incorporate a non-for-profit organization that provided psychological aid to young children sure i was glad to help upon further research i realized it was an organization that promoted conversion therapy the founder lost his license on his county of origin and wanted to come to my country to keep this business going i told this to the partner and he said well it is at the end psychological aid i refused to do it and he gave the assignment to someone else who also refused he ended up doing it himself but apparently told the client not to use the name of the firm in anything criminal defense attorney here represented someone for forcible sodomy on a child under the age of seven ugly facts ugly case i got a not guilty because the victim was not very clear on the stand as is to be expected for her age and the detective that took my client's statement was very very dishonest about the statements and i caught him in several perry mason moments got a full not guilty and i honestly felt like crap about it my job as defense attorney is to make sure that the government does its job i cried in my wife's arms that night instructed to say that a mother had been negligent in allowing her child to play with an elevator my clients had failed to maintain the elevator started moving with open doors and decapitated her daughter right in front of her eyes i don't work for insurance companies much these days when i was a prosecutor i did child p bestiality cases challenging to keep basic principles of justice in mind and not get all hangings too good my lawyer colleague used to work in the hague at the united nations residual mechanism of criminal tribunals for the non-familiar the nicest thing you get there is a war crime rwanda and former yugoslavia just for some number dropping and some one of you might not know this court also takes care of the defence council meaning that you might find yourself in going through the evidences of a genocide trying to understand how to set up a valid argument in favor of the alleged dude who wiped out a full ethnicity you can start the discussion about everyone's right to defense here d a friend of mine had quite the challenging case he first defended a man accused of striking his mother and and subsequent death he was accused of hitting her with a skillet after he successfully argued that his client was exonerated due to procedural errors and lack of evidence the client allegedly struck again this time a neighbor who thiet and to go to the police was found dead same injuries a caster and skillet to the head later after that trial and aquital he defended my friend's elderly law clerk he ended up taking his life in what she claimed was self-defense as the deceased began talking about killing again and how he would leave clues next time not my side in the case but i felt for opposing counsel i worked insurance defense for a loosely affiliated party to a med mall case discovery revealed rather late that the doctor had a gender-based harassment claim filed against him just to claim no negative disposition so the friend of the plaintiff is in deposition the day after this comes out and makes up this whole yarn about being on a phone call with the plaintiff and overhearing a completely on-the-nose interaction with the doctor where he is physically shaming and assaulting her keep in mind the plaintiff was not exactly an ideal candidate old ugly and just out of surgery plaintiff's counsel asked for a break as soon as he could his demeanor showed he clearly knew he was about to get screwed and took her out of the room to try to get her to correct her testimony she didn't but what can he do he can't contradict her he wasn't there he can't shut down the deposition well he could if he was smarter about how the entire thing was excruciating to watch because the attorney heading the deposition was just toying with her for a good 30 minutes over it and the in the pl attorney had to sit and take it two things one i honestly don't think it's morally reprehensible to provide an adequate legal defense to anyone lawyers just present the client's argument and make sure the other side doesn't take shortcuts it's up to the jury to listen to the evidence and make the final call not the lawyers two why are there never any questions asking about our most personally satisfying cases my firm takes on a lot of refugee asylum cases pro bono and bloody heck talking with someone who has barely escaped with his or her life and now has a chance to start again in a new country makes me glad to be a lawyer the shortcut thing is not well enough understood by me and my fellow lay people it's a slippery slope from not giving a crap if weinstein gets a fair trial to various people of color being railroaded by the system because we always give prosecutors and police the benefit of the doubt criminal defense lawyers are essential to rule of law otherwise we're not much better than vigilantes a lawyer friend of mine confides in me occasionally about some of his awful cases the first one was a divorce the ex-husband and ex-wife were both squabbling over about ten thousand dollars paid as child support over the course of ten years each parent spent about 50 000 litigating this issue these people litigated against each other because they hated each other and the poor kid in the middle is getting screwed because of it the second one involves an investment made into a company so an investor who buys shares of the company puts about six million into a company and the company investors straight up go to vegas and blow loads of that money transfer it to their own bank accounts living trusts etc investors want to see an accounting aerobuffed and about eight months later the investor shareholder sues the company and its officers after that the officers declare personal bankruptcy the investor pursues it tries to fit the debt into a non-dischargeable exception and files an adversarial complaint to try and revoke the bankruptcy from what my buddy tells me if you win one of these the people declaring bankruptcy can never get the protection of bankruptcy again meaning predators can rip you to shreds after as he put it you can sign someone to homelessness anyway turns out one of the officers of the company has a terminal disease and they agree to settle after months of negotiating investor isn't getting much money back there's a payment plan over seven years for something nominal but the investors wanted their pound of flesh and the settlement agreement had something like a four million dollar stipulated non dischargeable judgment against the officers if they default on payments and a death by suicide doesn't discharge the debt clause a bankruptcy judge found that thing to be too oppressive and won't sign off on it not sure what's happened since he drank pretty hard after being on the investors side and negotiating that agreement i do a lot of domestic violence defense work but the following is always the first case that comes to mind when i am asked this question assault on a female state's witness ra can't understand saying her boyfriend never laid a finger on her and never set her on fire she came to court with a swollen burnt bandaged face and a bunch of missing teeth where she was allegedly thrown into the wall went into chambers everyone's just staring at me although we're all professionals and we all know what's coming my client has a right to remain silent and my duty is to my client back in open court the judge doesn't even give me a chance to make a motion to dismiss the case at the close of state's evidence he throws it out himself my client gets to walk out of the court his girlfriend is held in contempt and given the maximum 30 days sometimes the easiest cases are still the ones that still make you think years later i was working a child abuse case it started with allegations of drug use by the father but he was still taking care of his kids and he began drug treatment then the stepdaughter started claiming physical shaming and abuse i was already in it but now i'm dealing with something i'd rather not touch i never did have to address it though i advised him about how to deal with police but he was never able to complete the required steps for return of the children not me but my sister is a defense attorney for the public defender's office one of her first cases right out of law school was for the defense of a man who was suspected of first degree murder he pled his innocence to her so she worked tirelessly with the evidence she had to prove his innocence she was successful and the charges were dropped unfortunately when he was released his first day out of custody he killed another innocent person it turns out he had lied to my sister about his involvement in the first murder it's generally ill-advised to lie to your lawyer even if you are guilty and because she was able to get him off one of the first things he did was kill an innocent person she took it pretty rough and couldn't help but feel guilty that she had somehow inadvertently caused the death of someone else that event weighed heavy on her for a while but i know it wasn't her fault she's doing well now though love you sis i work in probate my job is to help the relatives of a deceased person administer the estate i spent four years working for myself and loved it but i got recruited by a big probate law firm and jumped at the opportunity to have a guaranteed paycheck rather than having to hunt down business firm life started off okay but quickly went downhill management of my firm is obsessed with us attorneys hitting our billable hours as a result we nickel and dime the crap out of our clients we don't do anything inherently unethical but our billing practices are definitely morally questionable we've racked up legal fees on estates worth far less than what we're charging and taking people's inheritance in the process mexican lawyer i think family law is often the most morally challenging because a lot of people think of their kids as weapons to be used or exchangeable good to trade for money in this sense kids are usually subjected to violence and to call them into trial ends up re-victimizing them and of course causing more damage in such cases i try to negotiate with my counterpart and leave the kids out of the trial i also tell my clients to cease any kind of violence against their ex using the kids as to hurt them or stop talking crap about the ex in front of them however clients not always listen i worked as a paralegal for a year it was a divorce case and the client had selected to do a regular delivery of service instead of sheriff delivery despite the fact that she was divorcing him over abuse you can if you need to deliver service and a restraining order at the same time the sheriff or equivalent police officer delivers it our client selected regular delivery because it was 45 cheaper the husband brutally beat her and violated her i cried for an hour plus because i even though my boss directed me to do regular service i could have done the sheriff service i do a lot of criminal defense work so the more heinous accusations should probably qualify but there's an element of suspension of disbelief that goes with being a lawyer it's not like people come to us and admit to being a diddler they give us their story and that's what we run with it's not my job to determine if they are telling the truth only to advocate for their side of the story normally people only cop to piddly crap like dui and they usually have no problem taking a plea deal ian albert i have been working in the criminal justice left field for almost 10 years now and the most gut-wrenching thing i ever had to take part in was an arrest warrant that was placed on a lady who obviously missed court due to medical reasons she barely had enough strength to walk on her own and was connected to an oxygen tank while showing us a gigantic ziploc bag of daily meds my dad works as a lawyer in my home state he went into family court one day and saw a 13 year old child coming with 80 percent of his body covered in injuries of some kind he was reportedly punched strangled slashed beaten with a f king chair and the mom even tried to run him and his dad over with their chevy you can those things are huge his mom came in with four armed guards hand and ankle cuffs on and wearing an orange jumpsuit the trial went 30 minutes before the mom tried to break away from the guards and tackle the child taste right then and there the child just looks down at her looks back up and says on the verge of crying his eyes out i don't care where you put me or who you put me with just please get me away from her i beg you trial ended immediately mom sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole not me my dad he was a public defender for most of his career it made him cry more than once but he was dedicated he was a crusader when i had seventh grade civics he let us come watch his hearings anyway the most controversial case he had was a wheelchair-bound man who was caught at airport security with a hand in his carry-on a human hand he was arrested and the victim's body parts started turning up around town and one he mailed to someone turns out the victim was his roommate and the guy was arrested for murder his story he came home to find roommate murdered so he decided to flush out the murderer by chopping up rumi with a skill saw put one part in someone's door mailed another part the hand went in the suitcase so he could personally deliver it i don't remember details my dad took it all the way to trial he hated plea deals and he lost jury didn't buy the story no one did sorry dad not sure if the guy is still in prison or not civil litigation my client was a mortgage broker via professional negligence insurance plaintiff was a lawyer with a certain reputation it was clear they had colluded to defraud the mortgage brokerage firm's insurer the convenient handwritten and undated me cool letter that ended up in the plaintiff's hands plaintiff's council's amazing ability to discern our strategies for months and the client's bizarre questions regarding policy limits settlement options and how fast payment could be affected after remediation had to cast the client out of most strategic communications since he was obviously passing it along and despite plaintiff's rough shot weak and overall sketchy claim there was just enough for a court to award minimum damages which would have set a bad precedent so we settled with the fraudster for a lot more than i was comfortable settling typically i would celebrate a settlement over a beer with co-counsel but i couldn't bring myself to do it the case has left a bad taste in my mouth to this very day and i know both the broker and the lawyer are still working and most likely hoping to pull it off again i can't get too much into it or who i represented without doubting myself but i'll say this it involved a horse boarding ranch dead animals starving horses large banks trying to figure out wtf to do with the horses on the land they repossessed and a really corrupt charity for horses which in addition to taking in horses and then refusing to adopt them out or returned them to their lawful owners also performed lots of horse abortions without telling the owners or anyone which actually made for a complete legal mess a whole bunch of lawyers on all sides struggled with this one and it lasted years i worked as legal aid in a county jail discovered an inmate who had basically been forgotten by the system he had been held pre-trial without even a bond hearing for nearly two years essentially the state had completely violated his constitutional right to a speedy trial justifying and resulting through a few motions by my team in the dropping of the charges and his immediate release unfortunately he had been facing charges of child physical shaming and abuse and the evidence against him was fairly strong i wasn't very ambivalent about his release i have no problem with prosecution and punishment but i strongly believe that the power of the state must be restrained by the power of the constitution i asked a solicitor i know about defending morally questionable people he rationalized it as a lawyer neither defending nor prosecuting a person but making sure the law is instituted fairly that is even if you know the client is guilty as frick you're not trying to get them off the hook person but make sure the punishment they receive is a fair and just interpretation of the law neither too harsh nor too lenient obviously our legal system isn't perfect and too often lawyers can abuse the system and get the guilty off scot-free but that isn't necessarily a lawyer's job lawyers offered it what is the sleaziest thing you've seen another lawyer try to slip into a document contract i once sent a contract adverse counsel for their clients signature we had negotiated the final contract this guy was a real sleazeball he changed the contract to include a favorable provision for his client had his client sign and then sent back to us for counter signature i don't remember how we caught it but that is borderline malpractice right there no borderline on that one though that actually does remind me of a pretty regular scummy counterpart i've dealt with he would mark up a contract with show changes only on some of the changes shown in markup and some others not shown so if you ever get an edited document from the other side always do a diff i got sucked into a dispute with a former employer once over intellectual property rights in an employment agreement they kept trying to sneak in a clause into the agreement in every other paragraph that gave them ownership of full rights responsibilities for and access to anything i did remotely related to programming or computers outside of work while not on the clock it was so broad even my non-lawyer books knew it was an awful thing it became a deadlock argument back and forth until i asked if they were accepting liability for any illegal activities i could perform outside of work suffice to say those clauses disappeared by cobb the next day in the agreement i get a lot of clients where the consultation goes something like this client can i do x m e no x is illegal and therefore you can't do x client okay i will do x anyway even without your help me okay but now that i know you plan to do x i can no longer represent you because i cannot assist in illegal behavior client can we pretend we never had this conversation emmy no we can't pretend we never had this conversation i get a lot of those i'm guessing they then go to another lawyer that they lie to this rarely happens you'll tank your reputation and other lawyers will refuse to accommodate your requests in the future if you have a bad reputation every single case is going to be a tedious fight instead of a negotiation and your clients are eventually going to figure out that you aren't effective that said i've only had two lawyers try to slip things in the sleaziest was a general practice attorney doing a divorce in my state divorce proceedings require that you submit a current financial statement almost every time you appear in court these statements are detailed but basically outline the extent of your client's assets and debts every time i got his client's financial statement i knew it was falsified his client appeared to be broke on paper but anyone could see that his lifestyle said otherwise since his client had to sign all of the financial statements he first played it off as though his client was deceiving him we did some forensic accounting and through a [ __ ] up of his own doing we found that he had a trust set up for his client a long time ago and he was managing the trust guess what we found in that trust a few hundred thousand dollars socked away in the years leading up to the divorce guess what was never listed on any of his financial statements i presented the lawyer with what we found and he immediately changed his tune and disclosed everything he played it off to the judge as though he had just found this account and had been duped by his client it wasn't his last item of stupidity on the long list that was this case but it was the final doubt to his credibility with the judge seriously his name was right there on the account and the documents i was told something really amusing recently my client has directed me to is basically lawyer code for this dude pays my bills and i don't agree with him that i have to make a good faith effort to get my paycheck so please judge and opposing counsel please don't believe i'm stupid enough to think this will work i see my client has directed me to a lot in criminal matters when an attorney indicates my client defendant would like to say a few things to the court and is not being given the traditional question and answer style of direct it is often a big wink to everyone in the know that the client is about to purge himself my intellectual property law professor told us a story where a company had a guy draw some blueprints fired him then changed the dates to make it seem like they had the prior art high ground my professor and his partner tracked the guy down he was in a dance band somewhere in the midwest and clicked at him he said that he was so proud of the blueprints he drafted that he sent copies home to his mother with the original dates the original documents were presented in court which proved they altered the dates and the company paid out the butt love hearing a good karma is a b story okay i'm just going to say this to every freaking person out there who has to review contracts with any regularity you need to invest in two things immediately one version control software being able to finalize document versions and then version them up whenever you need to change a document is huge absolutely huge two redlining software doesn't really matter which one you pick as they are all the same you can even do doc compares in word though they are admittedly kind of crappy and not really as good as any of the specialized products out there the reason these two tools are your best friend is because they give you so much more peace of mind when your workflow looks like this generate document that's version one it says v1 in the bottom right hand corner of the contract send contract to opposing counsel for initial review that guy comes back with changes save this into your system as version 2 and indicate in the comments section of your version control that version 2 corresponds to the first round comments sent over by opposing counsel redline v2 against v1 to see what the other guy changed if you're working with someone of good repute or a big firm you'll generally find a red line attached frick that thing just redline it yourself if you have good software it shouldn't take more than the time it takes you to get up and go take a p for the red line to run when you're done you now have a diagram of all the crap that's been changed from your own contract version up you're now at version three this is the version in which you accept or reject certain comments in the document that opposing council just sent you when finished with v3 run a red line against v2 send opposing console a copy of e3 and the v3 v2 redline so it's clear what if anything you changed from the version he sent across you can basically rinse and repeat with this the reason i recommend constantly versioning up and running a red line anytime the other side sends something across is twofold one you'll know right off the bat what kind of person you're working with two you can totally call them out on that crap and cc their client to the extent that the situation warrants it and three being a lawyer is essentially about covering your butt and your clients but if you're not taking every extra precaution to identify and isolate risk in your client's engagement you are freaking up although this isn't a story or anecdote i like this comment you've provided very useful information that maybe save someone in the future not a lawyer but a habitual defendant during deposition lawyers always tell you to go slow and when handed something to read never assume it is what the cover page indicates it is page through and read the entire thing i was being deposed in a business dispute and was handed a multi-page document from the first page it was clear that it was a document that i was very familiar with that was about 20 pages long i slowly paged through the first few pages and it was the document i expected i was about ready to set it down and say ready when my attorney said did you read the whole thing so i went ahead and continued through the document and what do you know in addition to the full document the other attorney had stapled some other important but disputed emails once i saw this a little sidebar went down off the record of course their attorney claimed it was an honest mistake but coming from an attorney i don't quite believe that i used to work in divorce i learned that if you included an offer of attorneys fees to be paid to the other attorney as a part of an offer really favorable to your client it seemed that that other attorney fought a helluva lot harder to get their clients to settle not that i'm cynical towards this profession mind you s i called my divorce lawyer out on that he's a state rep in ga now and still crooked a law firm in which i worked helped out with a probate the father deceased had two adult children who had testified that yes the most recent will had not included the half his age girlfriend of the past month the attorney for the gold digger sent a letter to the children which said in essence if you reconsider your testimony i'll fly you out pay for your stay and pay you seven thousand dollars to change your testimony the first person to reconsider gets double but only the first if you don't change your testimony i will come after you with every resource an attorney has to make your life miserable it's the sleaziest thing i've ever seen plus it put the firm in a tough position report him to the bar while the case was still ongoing it would look like you were trying to influence the case report him after and it looks like you're being petty and vengeful i saw the prenuptial agreement that stated everything husband makes is 100 husbands everything wife makes is 100 wifes however if wife works at husband's business all of her labor is considered a gift a husband she won't be paid and won't get a share of the business the wife didn't speak english the husband hired her attorney for her the husband paid her attorney extra to back date the prenuptial so it looked like she had more time to review it and husband got a nice free employee out of the deal haven't seen any of my lawyer colleagues try anything sleazy what i have seen are some really sleazy conduct from their clients though example man up for child abuse charges and wife abuse he has physically and mentally abused his son from age 3 until age 16 when this case was brought to court due to an attempted suicide by his sister to also a party in the case defendant father has over several years forced his son to attend a psychologist for various reasons some which were relevant to the beatings the sun received during the trial the defendant produces a signed document from sir child psychologist where she and a colleague of hers both assigned the blame of the abuse onto the sun the father has managed to convince two psychologists specialized in child psychology that somehow the child is at fault for being beaten this caused quite an uproar in both the courtroom which happened to be visited by a court reporter not a commonality in sweden who enter wrote a long article about this case he had witnessed and also in the psychology department i wasn't a lawyer when this case was presented i was a plaintiff in the case it had an immense impact on why i later became a lawyer even though i rarely work criminal cases these days scummiest thing i ever saw another lawyer do the company i work for was planning on leasing a fairly large parcel of undeveloped property i was involved with the lease negotiations from the beginning and they were taking quite a while basically there were constant revisions to the proposed lease finally after about eight months of negotiation we appear to have an agreement i send over a copy of the lease to the other company's attorney for final review and their client's signature if acceptable they send a signed copy back about a day later indicating that the contract is acceptable i do a final review before i send it up to the executive to sign since he didn't actually read these contracts he just signed them after reading our summaries and i noticed that there have been small but significant changes to the contract all in the other company's favor unlike all of the prior revisions which had been clearly marked this guy just made changes without notifying us their action almost certainly was an ethical violation bc they intentionally misled you to believe that this was the exact copy you sent just saying i've been an attorney since june 2013 and i already have advice for newer attorneys that i had to learn on my own chatty attorneys are dangerous here's how you are ready for a hearing or other court appearance and as per the norm something they do not teach in law school you are waiting for 45 minutes for the judge to show up this is before the judge even calls the calendar which involves waiting another half hour unless you're lucky enough to be high on the list the opposing council notices you and makes small talk be careful yes it is true many attorneys are friends outside of work even if they are adversaries in the courtroom i've seen it and have some friends however be careful small talk will turn towards the case you are both appearing on and they'll say something like man this case is something else right if only there was a sign or something similar how i was burned i can't remember what was asked or said during the small talk which i assumed my bad was just banter while waiting for the judge but once he arrived and we were called the opposing counsel used what i said to prove his point without context when the judge asked if i said that i did they had to add that he left out context and the judge didn't care hearing lost ever since then as soon as an opposing counsel gets chatty i shut down with aha answers or go play on my phone like i got an email be careful you are supposed to say i don't recall saying that most of the time other lawyers don't really try to slip sleazy stuff into documents etc but there are some lawyers who will try to do really sleazy things in other ways it's really rare however this is primarily because your reputation in the legal community counts for a lot contrary to popular perception we settle most cases as a result trust matters example i am a plaintiff's lawyer if i pretend that every case i have is a one dollar million dollar case make stuff up pound the table manipulate witnesses documents etc it will eventually become well known the problem there is that when i really do have a one dollar million case every defense lawyer in town will know that i have a reputation as a consummate bullshitter who can't be trusted believe it or not i actually settled a case for one dollar million yesterday it was a class action and it was legitimately worth that amount but i have a lot of other cases that are not worth that much money and i won't pretend that they are if we my firm had a reputation as a bunch of lying scumbags we would have never been able to secure that settlement we just had a real estate contract where we had verbally agreed to a price and conditions when the buyer's agent sent the contract through it was for two thousand dollars less than our agreed upon price and had several rather unnecessary repairs that would have cost us several thousand dollars to finish had we signed it without reading closely we would have been obligated to perform those things that we had never initially agreed to on top of it all the buyer is trying to back out of the contract now even after she signed it it's all very frustrating not sure where you are from but in scotland verbal contracts are invalid when it comes to the buying selling acquisition trading of land so then changing the contract is scummy to say the least but if it were in scotland it would be your own fault for not reading it contract theory is based on a notion of bilateral agreement to terms lawyers know this and so they tend not to sleaze up contracts because they know how many ways there are to argue against unfair or deceptive provisions corporate entities however rely on people not being lawyers so they write sleazy contracts and rely on the money they make from nine people not challenging unfair provisions to offset the minor court costs of the tenth guy who brings a suit mortgage contracts are pretty harsh the bank has a right to enter your home at regular intervals they can prevent you from earning certain items pesticides gasoline in certain quantities there are a bunch of weird provisions that limit your total freedom but in practice they don't exercise them unless you are really screwing something up this wasn't something slipped into a contract but i still couldn't believe the other lawyer trying to get away with it i was representing the mother in a child custody proceeding she was a recovering alcoholic so the father had custody my client had to fight tooth and nail for any access we had the court order saying reasonably that neither party could discuss the court proceedings with the children well during one visit one of the children asked my client when they'd be able to see her again she said something like hopefully we'll find out soon once we go to court a few days later i'm speaking to the other lawyer and he says this was a breach of the order by my client and that the father was therefore denying any further access i wrote him a letter in which my barely controlled rage was evident and soon the father relented but i still couldn't believe the other lawyer would go along with it so as a regular person i managed to sneak something into my current apartment lease if i signed before a certain date i forgot rent was like 50 a month cheaper or 500 over the course of the 10 10-month lease when i failed to sign the cheap one they sent me a more expensive one i signed the cheap one and sent it in with my first month deposit and the lady at the desk accepted it and i saved 500 because and i suspect this is true with all corporate rental companies in my town they don't actually check to see if it is the same document i'm not a lawyer but an employment contract i was asked to sign had many pages and many places to sign a couple of them had to do with giving the company i was applying to rights to my image and likeness i just carefully removed those pages and returned the rest i don't think they noticed and i was hired another company company that i applied to sold tobacco and tobacco products and they wanted the right to take out a life insurance policy on me naming themselves as beneficiary i walked away from that one as the gavel was coming down on the final settlement of my divorce my lawyer stopped the judge and said each party is responsible for their own legal expenses in this matter my wife's attorney shrugged his shoulders said okay and it was done i've always felt a bit guilty about this one because it was an understanding all along that i was responsible for both legal bills it just never made it into the final written agreement assuming i was paying she hired a much more expensive attorney than i did her fees were 15 to 20 k dollars mine were under 10 k dollars sounds like your lawyer was really on your side for that one penalty fees in contracts from european attorneys if you don't do this you always dollar sign xx where dollar sign xx is vastly out of proportion with the harm from not doing it in the us those provisions are generally illegal not sure about the eu but here in the netherlands it's definitely illegal makes the clause invalid and has on occasion invalidated the entire contract there was an estate i was working on a number of years ago that was super sleazy there was one adult son who was the heir to his father's estate and the only asset in the estate was the house which they dissident in the air held in joint tenancy the estate attorney secured two mortgages on the property and a cash advance on the probate some of the money went to fixing up the house basic cleaning and painting to get the home ready to sell the rest of the money the attorney took the client to vegas and spent it on hotels and strippers which he tried to pass off as an estate expense receipts are in the court documents because you must account for everything several months after the attorney secured the funds and everything was spent the air was found wandering the streets looking for food the air's ex-wife checked in on him and found the house completely empty and her ex-husband sleeping urinating and defecating on the floor the ex-wife filed a conservatorship for the air and tried to set things back to right years of drinking destroyed his brain to the point that most of his capabilities were between a first and third grade level couldn't even properly count change the estate attorney that took the heir to vegas has been disbarred and is sitting in prison doesn't seem worth it for less than 200 k i'm not a lawyer dart but when my parents got divorced it was messy real messy and it dragged on for three years finally my dad got his day in court but almost had to reschedule because my mom owed her lawyer two thousand dollars and he was threatening to quit on the spot unless she paid him right then my dad agreed to pay the lawyer for her as long as it was in the settlement so they quickly made a new settlement something that was also changed was my mom was supposed to get half the money from the sale of their house about one hundred thousand dollars well i guess a lawyer was peter because in the settlement it never specified when my dad had to sell the house starting he got to keep the house until he sold it so he could have kept the house forever after she had signed all the paperwork then actually read the settlement she was pretty pee my dad ended up selling the house for way cheaper than it was worth several years later in a sales of a 14 million dollar asset portfolio the agreement between the parties was that the profit distribution would be split in a certain way with the managers who were the sellers of the portfolio the sellers could be removed but they would still retain their portion of the profit distribution minus the costs to everyone of new managers managers could basically be removed whenever buyer's council inserted a section that was hidden three levels down that is you had to bounce around the agreement at least three times before figuring out what it did but basically if the managers were removed they would lose their profit distribution which was the opposite of what everyone had agreed upon it almost sank the deal glad i caught it that still sounds like a dangerous position even without that new section could they fire the managers hire themselves as the new managers and give themselves huge salaries making the portfolio and profitable my dad runs a food company and one of their suppliers sneaked in clause stating that all liability for mislabeled allergens lands on my dad's company meaning if they bought guaranteed nut-free sugarcane and someone with a nut allergy died from eating the product made with that sugarcane then my parents company would be held liable this as you might imagine is insane my dad however caught it out lawyers had completely missed it as did the lawyers of one of our customers who we knew bought from a similar supplier catching this was huge because the cost of missing it and having an issue come up would have been devastating we of course told the our customer we caught the claws and they ended up dropping the shared supplier entirely and refusing to do business with them not a lawyer but i work in the legal department for a charity my favorite thing i've seen in a will was a clause which stated after my death i request my loyal friend to destroy my laptop and pc hard drives he knows why oh and i've also had two tons of be bequeathed in the will to the charity too needless to say we didn't accept that legacy in one case that i worked on a company had donated a bunch of money to various things in a small town that they were polluting and the documents always had a clause basically saying and you can never sue us for anything the people accepting the contracts just thought it meant anything related to this donation or whatever but nope i read every bit of my divorce papers before i signed there was a sentence in there that was worded if my ex-husband failed to pay on the car he owned i would be responsible the sentence just lacked one word to make it right and i pointed it out to the lawyer he tried to get me to sign anyway and he said he will change it back at his office i said no way so he had his secretary fax a new one and i re-read it and then signed does my landlord count told me when my lease was up i would switch to a month-to-month deal that worked for two months before they sent me a letter bad news 350 rent increase 30 good news if i sign a new yearly lease they will discount it 300 so not much choice i sign eight months down the road i have to terminate my lease new job i know there will be penalties but this took the cake eight hundred dollars termination fee that's okay i get it but then they tacked on the monthly discount as well so i ended up paying the monthly rate which could have been terminated at any time and the termination fee for the lease at that point it's just taking advantage of people just because it's in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable people like you are fish in a barrel to landlords i'm late but whatever my dad used to work for a big law firm in nyc they did bankruptcy work among other things one time the board of directors of a retirement community decided to sell the actual land that was onto a real estate trust a trust owned by the board of directors they immediately foreclosed on themselves evicted the residents and personally took all the profits from the liquidated assets it gets worse it was in a small town in upstate ny everyone in the town worked for the retirement home in some capacity they also all had stock in the home when the bod foreclosed they lost their jobs and all the stock they had paid back to them at pennies on the dollar my dad quit the law firm that day defense lawyers offered it what is it like to defend a client who has confessed to you that they're guilty of a violent crime do you still genuinely go out of your way to defend them my criminal law professor said that he preferred guilty clients because he could do his best to ensure a fair procedure but if he lost he didn't sweat it he took it a lot harder when he would lose a trial for a client that he thought was innocent 100 agree with your professor the emotional impact of losing a trial where you don't think your guy did it is pretty horrific everyone deserves a defense it's less about the defendant and more about making sure the state proves its case and can't railroad any defendants i feel like if more people understood this there would be less hatred toward lawyers i certainly did not think of it in this way public defender here i describe my job as part doctor part tour guide like a doctor sometime i can cure you but sometimes i can just try to make it hurt less sometimes i can't do either then i'm a tour guide who makes sure that you understand what is happening why it is happening and try to give you as much choice in the matter as possible at the very least i sit next to you in court so you don't have to face the judge by yourself also a pd and i love this description of the job it's about holding the state accountable i don't care if my guy did it if we let the state lock him up without doing its job properly that means next week it could be you or me or your mom that gets sent up for something we didn't do the point of a defense lawyer is not to get people off their sentence but to ensure the right to fair trial is upheld defense lawyers in that situation will be looking for leniency and sentencing to make sure the justice process doesn't become vindictive or vengeful i would have thought leniency would be the worst thing for defense i'm a defense lawyer 95 percent of clients are factually guilty no it makes absolutely zero difference to our motivation it's a huge misunderstanding that the justice system determines guilt and innocence it doesn't it determines whether the state has enough evidence to lock a human in a cage against their will so a client actually being guilty has nothing to do with that question moreover the vast majority 90 plus percent even if you're a very aggressive attorney ending up plea the issue is usually that your client is guilty of something for which they have sufficient evidence but the state has overcharged you find a reasonable balance based on the strength of the state's evidence a trial is a broken negotiation and typically only happens if one side is being completely unreasonable is dumb or has nothing to lose edit hi or i don't have time to reply to everyone individually but let me address the biggest topic of conversation overcharging couple points yes it happens all the time all the time especially in lower income communities police and prosecutors start from the very highest thing they could possibly charge here's what doesn't happen which has been brought up a lot in the comments guy steals a pack of gum state charges him with murder we plead a robbery bargaining in a legal case i still like haggling for a car there's not a high ball and low ball and we land in the middle that's because the defense is supposed to see the evidence so we know what the reasonable charge would be it's more like this guy steals a pack of gum stage charges robbery battery assault and resisting arrest because they allege a scuffle happened during the theft i look at it and say okay the state's got great evidence of the theft and really weak evidence of the scuffle and medium evidence for resisting arrest so we'll plea to the theft frick off with the robbery battery and assault and we had go over the resisting if i think maybe maybe they get the robbery then i advise my clients to eat the resisting because it really doesn't add too much and the penalty for robbery is 10 years if i feel confident that they're fricked on robbery we hold strong and only plea to theft so basically if you have a good attorney we just bash through the overcharging does it move the needle yes do people cop to charges a bit higher than they should because of the threat of the overcharged crime yes but are people pleading out to absurd things they didn't do because a state is waving bogus murder charges over their heads number good attorneys don't let that happen an attorney has an ethical duty to represent their client zealously that is true whether we know a client is guilty or not whether in court or during pre-trial proceedings we will challenge and evaluate the state's evidence true whether trying to get a client off all charges looking to plea or just figure out a defense strategy innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is a heavy burden it is a higher standard than guilty by clear and convincing evidence and by the preponderance of the evidence the reason is simple if the government is going to take a person's liberty or even their life they had better not be overreaching the burden is therefore on the prosecution a defense attorney holds the prosecutor to that one thing i've noticed is missing from many top comments is discussion of a lawyer's ethical obligations to the bar into the court if your client confesses his guilt to you you can an elicit false testimony from your client on the stand you cannot knowingly present false information to the court and if you become aware of that falsity after the fact you have an obligation to correct the record it can get communicated with things like your client testifying you can choose not to call your client's friend to the stand if you know he will lie but your client has an absolute right to testify when you know that your client is guilty but he insists on testifying that he is not you can have him give narrative testimony in which you as his lawyer do not participate the standard is typically whether or not you know that something isn't true not whether you strongly suspect it is the thing about robust legal defense is it serves a bigger purpose than just keeping one guy out of jail the state has enormous power to deprive people of their rights freedom or even lives the people writ large need assurance that the state can protect them from crime but also need assurance that the power of the state is not exercised capriciously or arbitrarily it isn't so much that we need people to try their hardest to set guilty people free it's that innocent people need to know that someone holds the state's feet to the fire and ensures that it punishes no one it cannot prove to a very high standard actually did the thing he is accused of we need confidence that we cannot be hauled off in the night and subjected to a kangaroo court for something we didn't do or our justice system becomes as big a threat as the criminals it is supposed to protect us from not a defense lawyer just the fed clerk but i'm in a docket with a heavy criminal docket first off you have to remember that most criminal proceedings end in a plea deal so whether or not the client is guilty doesn't really matter your job as a defense lawyer isn't to prove they're innocent in that situation it's to make sure that plea in an intelligent and informed way get the appropriate benefit for cooperating and don't get freaked over by the govt same with sentencing disputes the exact details surrounding what someone did can have major implications for sentencing even if the basic fact that something illegal happened is already established as for actual trials as the defense attorneys in this thread have noted the goal is to ensure that people are adequately represented the ideal of the us legal system is that an adversarial process is the best way to establish the truth i am a defense lawyer as well tldr the criminal justice system is so oppressive i don't care so if a guilty client or two gets off scot-free on the whole it benefits society there are two kinds of defense lawyers the ones that live for getting an innocent client off and those that live for getting a guilty client off i am probably the latter kind at the end of the day most defense attorneys especially those in more rural areas believe the sentencing and vines for most offenses are outrageous especially for indigent clients and perpetuate a system of oppression of the disenfranchised marijuana possession dollar signed 602 days jail and substance abuse classes operating while intoxicated whether sitting in a car with the engine running because it's cold or legit drunk driving easily dollar sign 2000 along with license suspension increased insurance costs in two days jail often sentences come with one two years of probation which drags on with 90 180 days in jail if they don't do well enough i had a lawyer i confessed to my grand theft auto to my lawyer but i was with four others who did it we spoke of plea options but he wanted to wait and grant continuances to see how the other cases were built i ended up getting off like a year and a half later one guy pleaded guilty and got safe house another got probation and two of us got off completely i never had to speak in court other than to ask for continuances when he was unable to make it then it just got dropped eventually i was the only one who lured up immediately the guy who got safe house fell for the we have you on video with no attorney present there ended up being no video if everyone had lawyered up we probably wouldn't have got any time because we took a car for a joyride that had the keys in it then ditched it somewhere else some fellow college students saw us in the vehicle and some guy stole some other guy's girlfriend and that guy went to the cops with information since we were blabber mouths and told people we stole it and that is what got us in questioning this was like 15 years ago when i was in college with all the crime dramas around and the internet it amazes me that people still fall for that bulls if there's anything i learned from just watching the wire it's that you don't ever talk about crimes electronically and you don't talk when you're being interrogated i'm a forensic social worker aka i work in prison hospitals for those who are extremely ill i do have a few clients who i think are innocent despite jury verdict and sometimes i have to take the stand as an expert witness to describe their mental illness one person confessed to violating over 20 children and as an expert witness i had to defend him because of my client laws i couldn't use anything he told me in trial because of the hipaa law on the other hand i have had innocent people on parole where i've gone balls to the wall as their social worker discussing their character and who they are as a person i've had a lot of people claim they're guilty of crimes but at the end of the day it's my duty to help them figure out what's going on inside their brains a privilege all of us should be entitled former cop checking in regardless of how many people i put in cuffs everybody everybody deserves a right to a fair trial it's innocent until proven guilty not the other way around for any defendant whether that's cosby dharma r kelly or the old guy down the street fighting a speeding ticket my hats off to the defense for doing all they do they have my utmost respect because they really do put in 100 to ensure a fair trial i think it's interesting that you see ethical questions like this for defense attorneys a lot but not the obverse of that coin for the prosecutors who deliberately send innocent people to prison that to me seems just mind-blowingly unethical i guess my sympathies are more with those innocent people because i've seen several lives messed up that way some of people i care a lot about the goal of a pd is to ensure that the state can't lock someone away without that person first having their rights defended to the fullest extent of the law and in doing so they create a legal system where the rights of the accused are protected i have absolutely no relation to lawyers but there's a scene in brooklyn 99 when jake and sophia are arguing about their jobs sophia being a defense attorney says that it is her job to make jake prove that the defendant committed the crime i feel that that is a very alive 5 explanation my father is a lawyer i asked him once why he didn't do family law anymore he told me about a case where he was able to get a father full custody of his children but by the end the off case my father wasn't convinced that his client wasn't molesting the children if they admit guilt you have an ethical duty to not make false representations to the court you have to work your best with the laws you have to make some sort of defense you can argue that the law is unconstitutional that he is insane etc etc but you can't lie and say he is innocent frequently i do not ask outright if someone did it or not you can sort of tell for example you can ask would you be willing to submit to a polygraph test about that and if they say no you can be pretty sure they have something to hide unless they have another reason to not submit to one however most of the time we are not arguing someone is innocent we are arguing that the defendant should get a lighter sentence and that there are mitigating factors there are some people i will never defend namely child diddlers because uh i hate them too much to zealously defend them which is a conflict of interest and b if i did zealously defend them and get them a slap on the wrist i'd hate myself for it when i started my first week of medical school one of the dean came to chat with my class he related a story regarding his first day in medical school ages before his class was required to sit at their desk and contemplate something his professor had written on the chalkboard primum non-assir which in latin means first to do no harm this of course is part of the hippocratic oath he told us that he felt deeply moved by this concept later that day he ran into a close friend whom he describes as being despondent and nearly in tears his friend had started law school that same day and was also required to contemplate something written on the chalkboard apparently the message written was the practice of law has nothing to do with justice the law student informed the dean that an attorney's job was to do whatever was required and permitted to protect and defend his client i still remember that lecture it left a deep impression in me no questions just sharing so i have a customer who is a defense lawyer we'll call him joe and i had a long talk about this same thing with him a couple of weeks ago joe said that he never asks and borderline avoids his client telling him if they are guilty or not knowing puts the lawyer in an ethical conundrum where he cannot put his client on the stand allowing him to lie joe told me that the one time his client told him he was guilty joe got himself removed from the case absolutely everyone deserves my most zealous representation i don't care if you cannibalize your own mother if the police violated your fourth amendment rights you're getting a motion to suppress filed argued and hopefully granted the system falls apart if we abandon due process to reach the right result even in cases where it's patently obvious what the right result is if the police feel like courts will make an exception for sloppy work because the case is bad and believe me plenty of appellate courts do pull that kind of bulls then their incentive for doing things the right way goes down when that happens society as a whole suffers unlike tv 99 of crimes are not to done it's where police have to choose between multiple suspects usually there's no doubt who committed the crime so my job becomes more about protecting the client's rights and helping them get a better sentence better question would be prosecutors of reddit when you know you've put innocent people in prison do you understand you've ruined their lives not a lawyer my law teacher in high school was a former defense lawyer she quit lawyering because she defended and won a case where she knew her client was guilty for killing a child greatest law teacher ever everyone deserves constitutional protections it doesn't matter what you've done the constitution isn't pick or choose defense lawyers at least public defenders in the us focus on that a lot of the time child rapists can be hard but if you remember that the constitution still applies you can get through it's a certain level of objective detachment a defense lawyer makes sure the government isn't steamrolling you and is actually following procedure defense lawyers are a bulwick against government overreach or they should be if they're competent also a lot of people who do violent crimes i believe scotus just held that pickpocketing is a violent crime for sentencing determination so violent is a legal term that can vary wildly to say the least have fricked up lives i know a guy who is severely schizophrenic who thought a woman was an angel robbing him but it turns out he was mugging her with a gun and didn't realize it he thought he was getting his money back from a thief public defenders usually try and focus on hooking people up with services and healing that they may not even know about also there are loads of women specifically in prison for violent crimes who are there because they were defending themselves against their abuser and got sentenced i personally know a woman who'd been in jail 20 years for killing her abuser who went after her child one night cinchoya brown is another great example these stories aren't the exception people who commit violent crimes are still people not everyone is a raving heartless monster or ted bundy those are the exceptions and even then it's still not the hardest thing to defend if at least in the us you frame it not as letting someone guilty get off surprise most people do not just get off i really hate when tv shows are likely gods off on a technicality is the fourth amendment to technicality is that really what you're saying right now i've never really understood the hateful defense lawyers they are a vital part of the justice system making sure the prosecutor is doing their dang job properly you know who are the true bottom feeders of society freaking real estate agents camel traders and carpet sellers shouldn't have a worse reputation than real estate agents i make sure i hold the government to their standards at every single level from the cops to the government janitors to the prosectors and judge i don't care if the guy did it i care if he's getting treated fairly every step of the way and not getting punished too severely i live by blackstone's theorem which makes it hurt more if they didn't do it my friend who's studying law told me that the defense lawyers role is not to defend a person percent but rather to make sure that the trial is led the way it should be according to law i'm not sure if that answers your question but that helped me understand how do people who are accused of grave crimes find anyone to help them [Music] the state has to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt they have the burden not the defense additionally an attorney is ethically required to zealously advocate for their client and cannot minimize his her effort in some instances an attorney may tell a client to not tell them what they the client did in order to evaluate the strength of the state's case my girlfriend is a public defender and she always told me that she doesn't have to like her clients but she has to make sure they have a fair trial i get this question a lot first i usually remind people that my function as lawyer is materially different than judge or jury and does not require me to assess guilt if i know someone is guilty it doesn't change my function please know that functional does not mean robotic or conscious less second i indicate that a court of justice is not a court of popular opinion or emotional retaliation as a society we have found boundaries appropriate for justice in terms of treatment and punishment under the law indeed impartiality is a core concern for our judges and juries as to the appropriate boundaries for justice mentioned above we as a society have also agreed that all persons shall be treated equally under the law third and aside from the core principles mentioned above attorney's licenses are often regulated by state boards among the regulations in nearly every state is the duty for an attorney to zealously advocate for their client it's worth noting that many states also explicitly reference withdrawing from representation if an attorney has a material disagreement with their client that would impede their ability to represent them conclusively we can see that our legal system is designed to benefit all equally and that fairness and impartiality are core concerns on the sides of both adjudication and representation it is the special role of criminal defense attorneys to honour the principles of law before their own personal motivations it's a duty above self thing in honor of evolved and learned society in fairness and with respect the existence of your question is why lawyers must be regulated and while laws must be adjudicated by impartial persons and one final sentiment many persons charge with gross offenses believe themselves to be monsters or less worthy many of them have been victims themselves in transformation to what they have become and while choice is always available you might consider the original position model of ethics as to what person would ever choose to be so despised by society and plagued with behaviors of condemnation mercy is meaningful and equal treatment is cognizant that truth and reality are contextual to our immediate existence i hope you found my answer to be beneficial to your understanding if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video [Music] bye for now

Channel: Updoot Studios

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Id: ZT2qcaw9MKs

Length: 205min 25sec (12325 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021