Lawyers Of Reddit - Interesting Cases & Ridiculous Clients [2 Hour Compilation] (r/AskReddit)

divorce lawyers of reddit what plot twists or crazy antics or demands have you seen go down from either spouse story from my parents who are lawyers so throughout the divorce proceedings there was a car that was a huge point of contention between the husband and wife after months and months of saying he would never let the wife have the car the husband concedes in exchange for something great like one of their summer houses it turns out he had been driving the car for three hours every day in a big loop around the city putting thousands and thousands of miles on it basically making it worthless the amount of planning and spite that went into that was amazing should put it on jack stands and set the cruise control to 120 miles per hour get miles faster with less effort never tried it just an idea i'm an accountant not a divorce lawyer had a client hide ziploc bags of ground me throughout the house in air vents the attic behind water heater etc i think it was at least 20 30 bags that took months to find all of them parents divorce seemed simple dad cheated on mom mom gets custody of me dad didn't like paying alimony and child support to the tune of 2 k a month after he gave up rights dad had great idea pay a hitman 15 k to kill soon to be ex-wife dad goes through with it idiot actually pays undercover cop the money dad then flies back to canada home and wait for results international task force is formed to try and detain him geraldo rivera cover story idiot dad gets arrested in toronto and flown back to california in this process i was three in care of family back down south mother in protection by police dad's family apparently wealthy gets good lawyer is charged with 17 felonies can't remember how many he was convicted of he gets 18 months after all of this mom still had to sue for divorce it took two years a woman in my town is a principal at a local elementary school she is in her mid-70s at least i asked someone why she doesn't retire and they explained that she and her spouse went through a very contentious divorce about 15 years ago and she has to give him a portion of her retirement so she has decided to never retire so he gets nothing ever hahaha my uncle represented this guy getting a divorce from his wife of 15 years super toxic breakup and they split everything 50 stroke 50 even the land that the house they lived and sat upon well she decides to build a house right behind the other house mind you this was a lot of land probably 200 yards separating both home sites so that the back of the houses faced each other the house gets built and my uncle gets a call from his client asking about the legality of a situation he had gotten himself into apparently his ex-wife would spend a lot of time in her backyard so he saw her all the time what he did was buy a female dog and name it the same name as his ex-wife anytime he would let his dog back in from letting her out he would yell susan newby get in here he would also yell if she was peeing on the flowers susan you be quit pee on the flowers or susan you be quit digging in the dirt the ex-wife called the cops on him a couple of times but there was nothing they could do because the dog was registered under the name of susan and it was in fact a bee so there you go this shouldn't be funny but it really is my mom was a real piece of work in this department my mother is mentally unstable and was very abusive to me as a child when my father finally moved out and asked for a divorce i was luckily old enough 13 to legally decide who i wanted to live with i of course chose my dad and that enraged my mother by court order she was allowed to live in our four-bedroom house while me and my dad had to move in with my aunt into a two-bedroom house we lived there for four years while my mom did everything she could to slow down the divorce proceedings during this period my father was caught ordered to pay the mortgage and utilities on the house my mother was living in she would leave all the lights on and crank the heat with the widows open just to drive the utility bills up she once left the garden hose on for a week into a drain to even make the water bill outrageous when it was finally all over and she had taken my dad for as much as she could she decided to sue him for my college fund i called her and told her if she went through with it i would never speak to her again she told me if i wanted it i needed to move in with her before i turned 18 so she could get child support from my dad i refused she won the case for the money and my dad had to use most of what was left of the fund to pay for her lawyers costs ro what a bee the couple separated 10 years ago but didn't officially divorce until a couple years ago she was going to get his house so he burnt it down then faxed her the transfer of ownership forms he might be going to jail for arson though worked at a law firm that was subpoenaed as part of a divorce between a partner at the firm and a partner at another major law firm the woman issued more than 70 subpoenas to banks firms investment companies you name it because she was convinced he had squirreled away 20 plus million overseas behind her back it got so bad that she dug up receipts from 25 years ago to try to put together this grand conspiracy puzzle in the end after she racked up dollar sign 1.5 million in legal fees and seven different lawyers the judge said this crap is ridiculous there was no conspiracy and you are not entitled to a portion of this phantom 20 million mind you this was a major law firm partner who was acting this way she made millions per year in her career but she apparently lost her mind sounds to me like she had some money squirreled away and was looking for his stash to pilfer my ex and i separated before the divorce she agreed to watch the dog while i found a new place she had the dog put down instead at the time i worked on bank equipment my favorite was opening safety deposit boxes for the bank so i was asked to get there before the bank opened which was odd i show up and greet the bank employee along with a lawyer and a very angry looking woman i get the lock open and swing the door open as the angry woman shouts let me in there and i step outside the vault that mother sucker and storms off but she threw down a piece of paper that said frick you b it had been a nasty divorce and the ex-husband got there before she did the worst part about this story is we have no idea who was actually the bad guy here my father went through the process recently amounts of money aren't the real concern the assets must be split as close to 50 stroke 50 as possible so the freaking over generally comes in the form of inequitable distribution of one-of-a-kind things my father had a precious set of old inexpensive kitchenware that his late mother gave him before he even married my mother when the divorce went to mediation and she told the mediator that she wanted those pots and pans she got them she got them because she was willing to give up something else of equal monetary value so something worth less than ten dollars and was willing to sit in mediation for hours racking up thousands in lawyer fees for both sides until my father consented again and even financial trade but a sentimental trade of overwhelming disparity just as a final frick you non-marital property that isn't intermingled joint accounts shouldn't be split during divorce i met with a scummy one when i was looking to get a divorce the first lawyer i met with who had been recommended by a co-worker as an amazing divorce attorney suggested that if i wanted full custody i should make sure people knew the relationship was abusive tell my friends family make sure the neighbors heard me screaming begging him not to hit me document every bruise even if i wasn't sure it came from him thing is my relationship wasn't abusive and i'd already told her that multiple times she never outright said i should fabricate evidence or anything but she ignored my repeated statements that there was no abuse and kept on with her detailed instructions of how to document any abuse that might happen i got the distinct impression that she was letting me know how to create an abusive relationship out of thin air in order to get custody of my kids i ended up not using her as an attorney for obvious reasons and in the end my ex and i shared 50 stroke 50 physical and legal custody of our children and raised them together despite whatever issues we had with each other i can't help but wonder though how many dads lost her relationship with their kids because of her zealous coaching thank you for not being a complete butthole and making things worse for your kids kids can survive divorce if the parents can act like adults i'm always impressed and envious when divorced parents are civil mine weren't i literally didn't know it was possible a friend of mine in high school worked at a pizza place one of the delivery drivers was just ridiculously smart when i talked to him later i found out that he used to be a nuclear physicist his wife was also a nuclear physicist but left him for her lawyer he got screwed out of his kids most of the assets and had to pay a lot towards alimony child support he did the math and figured out the tips he didn't get taxed on plus his minimum wage delivering pizza was more than keeping his job as a nuclear physicist plus he got a little satisfaction not having to pay her as much the guy was really nice i always felt bad for him my dad actually got fricked by his divorce lawyer during my parents divorce last year my dad and my sister have never gotten along and over the years it got more and more strained they eventually got into a physical fight which led to a cps report and him getting slapped with a child abuse record they labeled it as confirmed but isolated so he's not on the registry and you can only see it with certain background checks in this case my mom was obviously going to get full custody of my sister my mom also wanted to give my dad the house and his cars and his money pit of a boat lawyer decided because my dad is stubborn as frick that he would string old dad along the lawyer spent hours with my dad trying to convince him that dad could get more money and custody from my mom they did a divorce mediation so they wouldn't have to go to court and lawyer dragged it out for four hours the whole time he was riling my dad up thinking he could get things like the original down payment on the house half custody of my sister my mom's car etc at the end of the four hours of mediation lawyer told my dad he should take the deal that my mom and her lawyer had originally offered in the first place and dad signed that so he paid about twelve thousand dollars in completely unnecessary legal fees what a piece of crap i did surgical rotations with an ob gyn and have personally seen the lowest of the low in divorce hearings people say a lot of crap when trying to place blame or get custody a lot of it is straight up lies not all lies can be erased or taken back the worst one is an accusation of sexual abuse you cannot redact an accusation of sexual abuse against a minor it happened ridiculously more frequently than i can stomach a spouse trying to get the upper hand makes the claim now the lawyer court state is bound by law to investigate and suddenly that precious innocent child that mommy is trying to gain custody of is brought to the or sedated and then investigated inside and out for evidence of abuse those are about the only days that nobody in the entire wing says anything no jokes no smiles just a sick feeling in your stomach that takes away all appetite and joy so many times the parent who makes the accusation finds out what they're about to put the child through and tries to take it back tries to cancel the procedure tries to say they may have been confused or mistaken or even admits they flat out light doesn't matter once that box is opened the investigation must continue of the couple dozen cases i saw i can only recall one that supported the accusation freaking disgusting pieces of crap banker here had heaps of situations where joint overdrafts credit card comes up just before divorce to the absolute surprise of one of the parties drained down to zero of course especially sad when its students young kids who find themselves heartbroken after the breakup and with a debt they can't afford my dad divorced his first wife and promptly took his name off of all the credit cards she proceeded to buy all kinds of crap thinking she'd stick him with the bill she was not happy to hear she was the only one on the account dad was a real butthole and mom tried to save him a lot of money during the divorce they have three kids who were 16 13 and 8 dad wouldn't sign any agreement my mom's lawyer produced it had to be his idea and from his lawyer or it wasn't getting signed dad's lawyer was incompetent and sends an agreement that states he will pay two thousand dollars a month in child support until all kids are 18. mom tried to explain to dad that it needed to be revised to lower every time a child turned 18. dad called mama c during that negotiation so mom said frickit and signed the agreement and dad paid the 2 000 a month for 10 years when he should have been paying around one thousand four hundred dollars a month for five years and seven hundred dollars a month for the last five years your mom sounds nice no sarcasm she tried my two bosses were married and opened a bike shop together he was the brains in the backbone since he was a former olympic mechanic she just sort of balanced the checkbook and worked a couple days a week unfortunately he had no credit and she did so when they opened everything was in her name all he wanted in the divorce was the bike shop and was willing to buy her half she wanted the bike shop too but didn't want to buy him out for his half mind you her father passed away and she was sitting on like 300 k in the bank and also had the audacity to take out student loans for her daughter to go to college he lost the bike shop and i think he got a little bit of money for his share what she didn't expect was that all of the high-paying customers would stop going there they were all his friends or they only wanted him to work on their bikes so i don't know why she would have had that notion so he opened up his own bike shop and all of the regulars have become regulars at the new bike shop finally a story with some justice this thread was stressing me out divorce lawyers offered it what plot twists or crazy antics or demands have you seen go down from either spouse took the couple two hours to decide who would get the groceries left in the fridge estimated value of the groceries was around forty dollars two hours of my time opposing council time and mediator time added up to about one thousand dollars it all came down to a costco sam's club-sized jar of peanut butter who keeps peanut butter in the fridge this is what happens when you negotiate on an empty stomach i had a couple arguing for three hours over who got the kids on christmas day only to discover at the end that they were both jewish i had another woman who said that her husband drained 60k dollars from their community bank account to pay for a sex change operation that he never told her he was planning to do i hate it when i find out i'm jewish i was a clerk for a law firm in marin county the husband grew weed in the house the town was supportive and even let him redo his electrical panel to accommodate his crop long story short in the divorce she demanded half of the weed proceeds today it doesn't seem like a big deal but 12 years ago i was shocked to see that in a court document my dad was a divorce attorney for some time he said people would argue over 150 dollars patio furniture for hours on end at a 300 hr8 each side it's not about the patio furniture it's about sending a message to your bee of an ex-husband wife i had a case where the estranged wife was calling my client's employer repeatedly accusing him of theft and other white-collar crimes to try getting my client fired the thing is the children were with her and she was also demanding child support which is based on his income for the job from which she was trying to get him fired fortunately the employer was on to her bs and my client wasn't let go the ex-wife hid his artwork works he had purchased long before the marriage and in mediation she tried to sell it back to him and then not necessarily a crazy divorce story but my dad is a lawyer and his friend has been married three times so my dad has been his divorce lawyer twice and his best man three times i love serial grooms brides i have an uncle who has been married so many times five that his own parents didn't even travel to his last two weddings grandma i'm so excited to see you at pete's wedding sorry kid i've got a bowling tournament that weekend and i've seen him get married plenty of times my now ex-stepmother was getting an 80-stroke 20 settlement and refused to agree until the agreement was revised include a bag of old beer can koozies and a dry rotted pool float she was crazy which is why dad was paying her to go away i'm not a lawyer but this is a story about my uncle and it's quite brilliant my uncle has been a lifelong videographer and still works to this day as a news photographer during the early to late 90s he stopped shooting news and started shooting freelance this was before everyone and their mum and their moms had a camera editing software whatnot eventually he became a sought-after photographer in the 80s when he was working as a news photographer he met and married a reporter news anchor of which he would go on to have two children with after leaving the news business to freelance he decided to start a video editing business with his wife that went extremely well for a while and they were making money hand over fist he would be asked to shoot for channels such as food network and hgtv diy etc and then edit it into the show she would work as the middle woman for his clients and as bookkeeper eventually she would turn out to be a secret substance abuser and adulterer and their marriage ended in divorce at this point my uncle was making a couple 100k a year with their business she decided to sue him for adam money mostly because he was worth a good chunk of change but also because she helped him build his business her demands were ridiculous something like 75 of the business for the next so many years or something crazy my uncle's lawyer was afraid she was going to win because she had played such a big role in building the biz fast forward to court day her lawyer stands in front of the judge and lists off what she wants in the divorce once he is finished it's my uncle's turn he blindsides her and offers to give her 100 of the business the judge and both lawyers are confused and ask him if he is sure without him shooting and editing there is no business so basically she would be left with a heck of a lot less than she asking for by asking for x amount of profits the judge reasoned that his offer was fair and that she could take it or leave it she was p her lawyer was p and she ended up getting nothing tl dr my uncle started a biz with his wife she turned into a cheating drug addict divorce she wanted x percent of profits from bit and divorce he offers her the entire business total awesome dong move he is a photographer so she can't do crap with biz because she isn't a photographer she gets nothing your uncle is a genius i love to read stories like this i was in a mediation where it took the couple an hour and a half to split their personal property retirement accounts real property and custody of their six-month-old son the rest of the day about four hours was spent arguing about how to split the time with the dog for the kid they just put as agreed upon by the parties but the dog had a strict calendar schedule working out holidays and strict pickup drop-off times i was ashamed to be a part of that unbelievable display my parents stayed together for years because they couldn't agree on who got the dog when they divorced they announced to my brother and i that they were divorcing the day we had to put the dog down my friend's ex-husband tried to force their daughter to have to choose which parent she would live with every year on her birthday the daughter wanted to live with mom dad is always out of town for work anyway the judge told him that in no way was he going to force this girl to disappoint one of her parents every year on her birthday her ex-husband is a dong not a lawyer but i work in a law office we had a guy who cheated on his wife transfer all of his money slowly over time to his girlfriend before the wife found out about their affair and file for bankruptcy to avoid having to give his now ex-wife anything in the divorce that dissipation of marital assets in the court would have ordered it returned also bankruptcy judge has no authority over division of marital assets child support etc not a divorce attorney but i clerked for a judge that handled divorce cases we had a couple that were both lieutenant colonels in the air force they had one daughter that was about 11 or 12 both had gradual degrees and were generally intelligent people while the husband had an affair and things went sour with the relationship the daughter was at that age when her relationship with the mother was starting to get a little strained and she mentioned how she wanted to stick with her dad because he was about to be stationed elsewhere and the parents would be going there separate ways the mother absolutely freaked the first thing she did was go to the local police department and claim the father had been molesting and raping the daughter they investigated and couldn't find any evidence so they dropped the case the mother still furious then goes to the air force office of special investigations and reports the same thing the air force then suspends the husband from duty and conducts their own investigation same result no evidence of wrongdoing and the case is dropped the mother then goes to the next state over where the husband is about to be transferred and contacts the local police there with the same story about molestation and rape they of course do their own investigation but same result cases dropped of course this whole time the daughter has been interviewed a dozen times by psychologists various therapists the police the air force and who knows else the daughter is straight up traumatized by this people constantly asking her if her dad had been touching her raping her and so forth not to mention the harm it did to her father's career he was basically screwed from any possible promotion just because of the allegations as well as the fact that infidelity in the military is a big no-no but that was his own doing well once word of all this gets back to the judge he is furious he's a former air force jag and still has contacts in the ranks well anyway the couple comes in front of him one day for a hearing and he outright tells her she better stop this behavior or he is going to hold her in contempt of court for the maximum amount of time he can lawfully hold her in a cell contact the door and recommend the filing of charges contact her air force superiors and recommend reprimand to the fullest extent possible and basically anything and everything he can do within his power it was one of the most messed up things i've seen during my relatively short experience in the legal world surely she belongs in jail for such repeated extreme slander when my parents got divorced my dad had written in the divorce decree that my mother could not make any religious decisions for me including regular church attendance baptisms etc my mother was raised mormon and my father was pretty adamant that i would not be raised in that religion too as a lawyer who did a stint in high asset divorce law this is pretty standard i've written this clause into settlement agreements a lot a father and his friend go to pick up his child for some time together he rings the buzzer of the apartment no reply he phones too no answer this is odd because he is there at the scheduled time and the mother never misses an opportunity to claim that he doesn't care about spending time with his child and that he routinely misses scheduled times together the father and the friend figure that's odd let's walk around back to the parking lot to see if her car is still here they go around to the back to find the mother and child sneaking down the back stairs to leave the building the child sees the father yells hi daddy then turns to his mother and says see i told you dad was coming to see me today i was a clerk for a family court judge we had a woman try to get an injunction to keep the father from taking the daughter on a trip to disney world to play in a concert it was sad this is a true story and it happened in new jersey guy getting a divorce becomes suspicious and insanely jealous that his separated wife is having an affair he secretly follows her to a bar and waits outside in his car she comes out many hours later in the dark and follows another car to her house husband follows her staying back and parks down the block he gets out sees the house her car is parked at and goes around into the backyard he's sneaking around looking in windows and finally opens a sliding glass door and enters the house his wife and the guy she is with hear him moving around lock the bedroom door and call nine one one he starts pounding on the bedroom door and shouting at his wife and then the cops kick in the front door the cops get everyone downstairs to sort this out that is when the guy realized for the first time his wife was sleeping with his own divorce lawyer the lawyer got in lots of trouble definitely one of the most entertaining ethical board decisions of all time one of my uncle's ex-wives actually hired a hitman to kill my uncle so she could collect his life insurance the hitman was actually an undercover cop she did four years for the crime if this gets any response i'll tell a more in-depth version of the story some crazy crap happened in all honesty i've never heard of a hitman hired in the last 30 years that wasn't an undercover cop or an informant or a con that turned the client in maybe i haven't looked hard enough but you'd think that the legitimate hitman market would be hit pretty hard from the trend of police in their ranks not a divorce lawyer but my sister just went through a nasty divorce it sounds like a movie you would see on lifetime they split up after 28 years of marriage because he fell in love with a lesbian stripper half his age he emptied their savings and borrowed against their 401k so the lesbian could start her own lesbian bar which was bankrupt after six months there are many more sordid details which i'll go into if anyone is interested first of all my now ex-brother-in-law is the least likely guy to do something like this imagine mr cleaver from leave it to beaver cheating on mrs cleaver totally unexpected my sister found text messages on his phone the lesbian in question already had two children yes i know not a very good lesbian and was pregnant at the time she met my bro-in-law the lesbian would show up at his work approximately once a week and get a check even though she was not employed there he bought her a car and rented a house for her for a year paid in advance even when all of this came out my sister wanted to reconcile at the first counseling session he gets up after 15 minutes and says something like nope not gonna happen and leaves so her divorce lawyer requests financial documents from his business to decide aluminium child support i forgot to mention they have four children together the youngest of which is in college right now anyway he didn't want to release any of the financial documents pertaining to this business so my sis says fine i get the house and car and you get all the debt he agreed to that which makes me want to know what he's trying to hide by not releasing the documents anyway the divorce was just finalized and my sister is devastated this is the only man she's ever been with they met in college and now 28 years later nothing the worst part is if he asked her i wouldn't be surprised if she took him back i would lose all respect for her and do my best to talk her out of it it was a real shock i know the divorce is common but not in my family mum and dad were married 49 years before mom passed and none of my numerous siblings went through a divorce big scandal more sordid details are required to accompany my morning coffee while i pretend to work i'm late to the party but here goes there's this rich couple that are suing a company for something or other a guy on the jury is hanging out with a friend one afternoon and his buddy starts telling him about this cougar he's banging supposedly she is a giant controlling bee but she spends a lot of her husband's money on him so he puts up with it part way through the convo he drops her first name and the jury dude goes wait is her name friend replies yeah do you know her turns out it's the rich lady from the case he is on the next day he had to recuse himself from the case because he couldn't look at her the same way the couple's lawyer demanded an explanation as to why he was dropping out in the middle of everything so he had to tell the judge the lawyer the lady and her husband backwood anyways that case was put on hold for a long time because they had a divorce to get to oh and i've been a piece of crap lurker for like a year and a half and this is my first post so yay my parents had an amicable divorce agreed fully that joint custody was the best option for my brothers and i and spent 18 years living near each other so my brothers and i would not have any issues traveling between they treated each other with respect and respected each other's rules if i was grounded at mom's house i was grounded at dad's house too her house her rules and you will respect them was dad's response one time when i was complaining about how unfair life was they never spoke critically of the other in our presence never attempted to use or indoctrinate us against the other they were flexible with custody times for vacations and whatnot and even jointly cooperated on major life celebrations such as graduation parties and my brother's wedding all of which to say the least is apparently absolutely crazy behavior for divorced people also i probably don't appreciate my parents enough my two favorites from working in a legal office one husband and wife get divorced wife went into the marriage with her own house and three cars him with nothing she mortgaged the house in her name as the bank wouldn't give her anything if his name was on it too to let husband start a trucking business buys all his trucks for him and pays off the mortgage herself he becomes successful they divorce she just wants enough money from him to square her mortgage he can have the business and everything else he sells everything to his friend for ten dollars next to nothing so that he's got nothing on his name and doesn't have to pay her squat she's now going to lose the house too custody battle over two children father threatened the mother with a shotgun cut her phone lines got charged for assault on her she flees town with the children he demands she come back and she agrees to visitation so the kids can see their father during one visitation he punches her brother in the face at the changeover point and tries to steal the children visitation stops and he chucks a fit that she's stealing his children and she's lying about being afraid of me i did nothing the court psychologist signs off that he'd be an emotionally abusive soul parent when the court says no to his demands that he gets sole custody he verbally abuses the judge his lawyer his barrister the psychologist and the independent children's lawyer in front of the entire courtroom he narrowly avoids arrest and the whole time this case is going he's always yelling and screaming in the office that the court system is biased and only women get custody it's a mummy's court you're all sexist against men etc etc no you're just a douche three man his wife and three kids everything in his name finds a younger model dumps her by text message changes the locks and goes into hiding wife has a chronic illness that means she can't work and now she's stuck with three kids and to rub it and he's changed all the bills and payments to her name mother's address and mailed her nearly ten thousand dollars worth of accounts and no one can find him he sells everything to his friend for ten dollars so that he's got nothing on his name and doesn't have to pay her squat i don't know what the law is like where you are from but that really doesn't work anywhere that i know such a sale would be voidable on multiple grounds undervalued transaction and transaction to defeat creditors being the big ones let's see one i've had a client come in to file divorce only to realize that the other party already obtained a divorce he lied and never properly served her and she defaulted had to under that one two put three fathers in jail for contempt they had a sudden case of raids recently acquired income deficiency syndrome and refused to pay support to their dependent spouses and or minor children three had a guy completely sandpaper key the finish of a brand new maserati that was given to the wife pursuance to settlement agreement because he hated his ex so much also took off the tyres four had a guy who funneled money over to his girlfriend thinking he was slick hiding it from his wife girlfriend broke up with him and kept it five have a guy who got a half million dollar settlement and so he pre-paid all of his expenses up front for several years so he wouldn't have to pay up six had a guy put all of his properties in the name of business partners so as to put it beyond the court's reach and thus the wife's reach had another guy claim he was unemployed but moved his paychecks to a friend's bank account seven had to get x party orders to inventory safes when i knew people had cash-based businesses and injunctions to freeze bank accounts so forth sometimes by the time we got it it was too late and money was removed eight absentee dads sorry to be gender specific suddenly become fathers of the year now he attends parent teacher conferences now he goes to doctors visits and soccer practices never gave a dang before date of filing nine men with midlife crises spending tons of cash on the girlfriend vacations jewelry etc yet cries poverty when it comes to aluminium long-term marriages where the wife was a stay at home for the past 35 years 10 one guy faked a divorce decree from another country to avoid paying eliminate 11. guy was adamant to the point of tears that he never had sex with that woman took dna test was the father 12 people wanting extra visitation just so they can get a reduction in child support then once the case is concluded they leave the children with a nanny even though the other spouse is home and willing to care for the kids 13. had a guy stage a break-in at my client's home stole her personal computer and other relics then presents us with photo evidence he obtained from the computer about our clients infidelity i have seen it all really had a guy who funneled money over to his girlfriend thinking he was slick hiding it from his wife girlfriend broke up with him and kept it loved that one im not a lawyer but my parents divorced when i was 17 and it didn't finalize until i was 20 when i was a minor my mom was saying i was living in another country with her when it was clear through school records i was not out of the country she made up stories that my dad abused me and didn't feed me when in two months of living with my dad i had a much better life than 16 horrible years with her after i turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned eight and they turned later well yeah once you're 18 it's a doll napping everyone knows that my ex-husband and i got divorced after four years we had no kids we were still dirt poor so we went to a divorce center paid a couple hundred bucks and did it ourselves we are still friendly three years later people we know genuinely think our friendly divorce is one of the weirdest divorces they have ever seen i know i'm late but this story is too good when i was young my parents had milk delivered to the house each week it was a good deal the milk was from a local coop and the delivery routes were privately owned the owner of our route was got divorced and told us the story of his mediation she and her lawyer had calculated the value of his milk delivery business to be two dollars and fifty cents million mind you this was the mid eighties she of course is seeking half that amount his lawyer begins to balk that their estimate is unfair it was probably legitimate when you calculated assets inventory balance lack of debit and revenue and they would never agree to it but he is cut short by his client our milkman then looks across the table and says something to the effect of i agree to your estimation go ahead and cost me a check everybody shows up at six you'll have to be there by five to have everything ready for them he then tosses the work keys across the table as he sits back down they eventually agreed upon a more reasonable number frick yet chicken milk my favorite i've worked on precisely two divorces they were both awful the first was just a terrible abusive situation sadly too common and not a good source for stories the second though was a mid-forties dink situation upper middle-class engineers nobody was gonna go hungry at the end of it of course we presume that it'd be a quick painless negotiation nobody told us the husband was a raging alcoholic with no social skills nobody told us that the wife was very attached to the dog we divided up the house all possessions the bank accounts everything in under a week except for possession of the dog she was convinced he'd put the dog down he kept saying it was man's best friend not woman's this case got slated for trial over who got the dog i mean that's downright extraordinary that a divorce goes to trial at all is weird that it goes to trial with no kids is weirder that it goes to trial where both people are financially stable and well-off is like comed hitting you unlikely that it goes to trial solely over the possession of a dog is so far as i can tell from talking to other attorneys unheard of so pre-trial conference and the judge is rip [ __ ] that any of this is going on he orders a final attempt at mediation to begin after lunch the husband sneaks away from his attorney to have a dick with lunch and comes back absolutely trashed starts yelling about how he's going to go home and kill the dog to deny her it tries to jump over the table assault to bailiff runs out through an incession court with the presiding judge on the bench i never did find out how that one ended as my internship ended before the case did but i always remember it as the moment i decided that i didn't want to do family law but fortunately for me my current boss doesn't take those cases whatsoever i had a batched crazy client once involved in a dissolution of domestic partnership not married but had been together 20 years she had an insane amount of stories about the opposing party drug dealer he had killed a man and all sorts of other wild accusations no idea what was reality versus what she made up they had millions between them and were fighting over every last native american artifact household item etc at one point she offered me gold nuggets as a gift because she liked me so much which i had to ethically refuse as a non-damian ease gift from a current client i eventually got off the case when i changed jobs i think it's currently under appeal now so i can't give any further detail but there was some pretty crazy stuff involved in this case including accusations that the opposing party was sleeping with his attorney which shockingly had some basis in reality when investigated but i got off the case right around then when my parents got divorced my mom told my dad she only wanted me and not my brother and sister dad laughed and said she should try that in court and see how the judge takes her only wanting one child while abandoning the others my dad got full custody she also stole all of the money from their shared account and left us for like two years while my dad had to beg and borrow money to feed us and pay bills after she drained the account she didn't even show up for the hearing and the judge even asked if my dad wanted child support which he declined assuming collecting it from her would be more hassle than it was worth my mom is a crappy human being 16 years later and she hasn't changed a bit i work with a woman who is a devout christian she met some guy from nigeria online and fell in love he was working as a christian missionary in singapore she flew to singapore they got married and she helped him get us citizenship etc eventually she got pregnant and they had a daughter together as soon as the girl was born the father began getting her a passport and money together to take her to africa so she could get circumcised he eventually copped to marrying her solely to obtain us citizenship she divorced him and was able to limit his supervised visitations to one hour per week due to his insistence on taking her to africa to get the procedure done he's still adamant to this day that his now four-year-old daughter should have her clitoris clipped i worked in divorce law for a bit more than a year and then got the freak out some highlights of what i've seen guy cheats on wife with wife's best friend wife steals six million dollars from his bank account and disappears guy gets multi-million dollar inheritance during divorce he spends it all on strippers literally the whole thing couple has over five million dollars in assets spend over three years getting divorced couple has liquidated retirement and sold their house still not divorced lawyers have millions of dollars this is largely the reason i'm done with this crap ethically i can see why you are done but financially it was a terrible move based off bullet point three a couple of years ago my parents got a divorce they're both very friendly people and they were always very cordial throughout the entire divorce process in the end the only thing they ever seriously argued over was who got to keep my pet rock from when i was in elementary school they still argue over it to this day that's really sweet actually i'm not a lawyer but i am in the process of getting a divorce it's been quite messy and that's without kids being involved about two years ago my wife was cheating on me did not know until she filed for divorce she actually does not even know that i know still anyways much of last year she filed for divorce we had been separated since april of 2012 for work reasons we talked every day saw each other on skype and even visited each other on vacations twice in a 10-month period for 17 days each time overseas contract work nice pay the time apart the plan was to save up for two or three years and then buy another house and move into that anyways after she filed i tried to kill myself a few times did not eat any food for over a month i was so stressed that if i tried to eat i stupid eventually throw it up i could not keep food down for more than an hour or two it seemed just water and the occasional binge drinking we had all of our personal belongings in a storage unit we were living in a 2 400 square foot house it was full we also had a few bank accounts now i won't give an exact number but we had six figures saved up low six figures but six during the divorce process everything was fine aside from me wishing i was dead i had devoted nearly seven years to her for nothing we were coming to an agreement on who got what from our storage unit and how much money each of us would get from the bank accounts plus the division of the vehicles it was looking pretty fair she was getting a lot more than i was because i just wanted it done so i was pretty much letting her pick out what she wanted this was prior to court involvement i had not even consulted an attorney myself even though she had won then just before we reached a deal in july of last year she went nuts it was the third of july while i was away at my family cabin she drained all of the bank accounts every single penny was gone she went to the storage unit and cleared all of the belongings out even my personal things like clothing pictures my important documents medical records everything i owned and had accumulated during my 28 years of life except for a bed a desk and my computer with a few changes of clothes she said i don't deserve anything since i want to be dead anyway and just took off had no idea it happened either until i got back from my cabin it's still ongoing we had caught last month it was hilarious i hired a lawyer after she drained everything she was breaking her own agreement no assets were to be moved during divorce proceedings my lawyer said he has never even heard of someone trying to disperse the amount of money she did even with millionaire clients i'm on the phone so i can't do too much for details but that's what i got for now i'm not a divorce lawyer but my dad is a lawyer and he's divorced so wth my dad was a real gem when he divorced my mom he had my mom served while my sister was in the hospital with neuroblastoma she had raditation and chemo and was in isolation because she had no immune system to speak of the process server had to go to the children's hospital go to the cancer ward and break my sister's isolation seal to serve my mom the papers the nurses had to escort him out also it was christmas eve and my mom's car was stolen that night after she had just moved out of his house and had it filled with all our stuff and christmas presents this one is so horrible i just don't believe it lawyers over at 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 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 timestamp 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 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 i was a baby lawyer in my first year representing the 19 year old child of some rich people in san mateo county ca my client had gone on a bit of a sharp lifting spree and we were cleaning all her cases up with a global plea meaning we handled them all at once being new i filled out the plea form wrong swapping the count she was charged with for the count she was pleading to it's an easy mistake to make every court has their own unique form and i was unfamiliar with san mateos the judge calls my line starts reading off the plea form notices the mistake and then start screaming at the top of his lungs council what is this what is this is this your first day on the job this is a courty floor and we do not accept mistakes fill this plea form out correctly or i will have you taken into custody for contempt i did not expect a reaction like that my client who had clearly just taken a huge bong rip at 8 a.m and who was wearing an all pink velvet track suit was looking at me like i was the biggest idiot in the world i corrected the plea form the judge made me wait until the very end of the calendar to take my plea afterward he called me up to the bench in private he told me sorry to ream you like that everyone messes the plea form up so i always pick the youngest lawyer to yell at the older guys will grumble and complain but if you notice they all fix their own forms and we didn't have any more problems keeps the calendar running smooth where did you go to law school after that he invited me into his office for coffee and gave me some really good life work advice turns out he likes talking to new lawyers represented a woman charged with multiple very serious felonies she insisted that in the months before the offense she'd been seriously dating one of the detectives who ultimately wound up investigating and testifying in her case for a variety of reasons i trusted this client and believed her even though the detective never disclosed the relationship in his report so during his testimony i asked detective smith you had a romantic relationship with me's defendant correct he goes what no one is visibly offended the judge looks at me like i've lost my mind the commonwealth attorney audibly says what i'm freaking out because a large part of my cross and argument was focused on the bias formed by the prior relationship and now i've got nothing and i've lost all credibility i try again detective smith have you had an intimate relationship with me defendant as the commonwealth rises to objection the judge starts to scold me the detective goes oh yay we've had intercourse it just wasn't very romantic 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 coma and release the night after yes comeron 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 um 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 await 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 war 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 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 but 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 the 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-mouthed 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 dutt 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 am i rip 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 the case did not go very well to my client surprise and fury big sigh 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 bunny 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 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 never did follow up on how that played in the mediation but i can only imagine it gave some attorney an oh crap moment person i was representing was on trial for assault in 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 we lost the trial 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 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 counsel 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 lawyers over it what was the least defendable case ever brought to you i had a client who won just shy of a seven-figure settlement in a personal injury case she then dropped into my office to ask me to file a fee dispute against the attorney who represented her in the personal injury action that attorney took a little over 260 dollars on this case if you're doing the math at home this guy took a 27 percent fee on the type of case where 40 fees are common did a freaking fantastic job because the woman got nearly a million dollars and then she turned around and tried to sue him to recover any of his fees i rejected the case out of hand and then got an ethics complaint for discriminating against her sounds like she would have sued you for your fees if you had taken the case a woman wanted me to sue her previous lawyer for charging her a lot of money but producing almost no work to justify his fees she gave me what she told me was the lawyer's total work product a page printed off the internet for which she said she was charged thousands of dollars for legal advice she had already brought a claim via my jurisdiction's disciplinary body for lawyers she had lost and wanted to bring an appeal the judgment kept referring to documents that i hadn't seen i pushed her to give me everything and she came in with multiple files full of immaculate legal work that totally justified the fees she was fighting we told her to get lost but she wasted a lot of my time before we realized she was full of crap a friend of mine was in a case where a guy was accused for graffiti vandalism among other things and the conversation with the judge went like this judge sir did you make this graffiti defendant no i did not j but it has your signature at the end d yes an artist has to sign his work case closed worked in house for a famous character company with a large fan base a few crazies a year calling a guy called in claiming that we stole characters that he created and demanded to be compensated i calmly ask them to provide more details so i can determine whether this has any merit to it he states he designed the characters himself and gave it to the well-known actual creator when he was a kid and the creator pawned them off as his own i asked him when he was born and it's a good 20 years after these characters were actually created i ask him to explain this and he pivots and says he also created some other well-known famous characters and brands characters and brands that are not owned by my company i kindly ask that if he wants to pursue anything to send us something in writing and hang up i figured if he wasn't going to do some really basic research on his own claim he wasn't going to spend any time to write it up never heard from him again this sounds like a guy i know that tried to claim that he created toothless as a character two years after the first htty movie came out he also tried to tell me that he was an alien i'm talking he 100 believe that himself and went on and on about how he was waiting for them to take him home my dad had a client who was on trial for being a felon in possession of firearms possession of stolen property burglary and distribution of narcotics a guy had multiple pictures of himself on facebook holding guns drugs and cash and had videos of himself both breaking into someone's house and stealing a gun as well as selling crack on several occasions despite my dad basically telling the genius he was going to prison either way and to plead out for a reduced sentence dude still pleaded not guilty we still occasionally joke that the guy clearly wasn't competent to stand trial by virtue of being so dumb i don't understand people's fascination for posting their crimes on facebook morons my client bid my dad at the hospital he worked at was sued by a gentleman after he saved his wife's life details patient is pregnant with eighth child and miscarries the fetus is removed but the patient starts bleeding uncontrollably the only option available is a hysterectomy it was either that or she dies right there on the table my dad gets called in to do the surgery performs it successfully hooray the patient's husband is quite devout and beyond p that his wife can't have any more kids so he sued the hospital no firm would represent him and he ended up bringing proceedings himself went all the way to trial and he lost hard probably my client charged with statutory rape multiple counts who impregnated his high school sweetheart's daughter after having sex with said daughter from the ages of 13 15. he was 35 at the time of the birth dna in the form of a baby is strong evidence for the state she lived on a large riverfront block she had a jetty for a boat a large tree fell over in storm and landed mostly in the water and making it difficult to moor her boat she wanted to sue the government for not taking away her fallen tree not a lawyer i was a jailer and used to pull double duty as a baliff a guy stole a pickup truck and was later captured passed out behind the wheel parked on a sidewalk surrounded by a ludicrous amount of drugs and guns his legal defense he elected to represent himself because he wasn't done being stupid double jeopardy you can't charge me for theft drugs and felon in possession of a weapon because i've already been convicted all of those charges before in short during his jury trial he admitted to doing it but explained with a smug grin that since he had already done time for the same charges from another case before that he could not be prosecuted for them ever again this is not how double jeopardy works folks he's in prison for 20 years now if he'd taken legal counsel he could have easily cut a deal for five i represented a tree trimming company that went to the wrong address and cut down all the mature trees in that yard the right address was 100 north xxx street and the company went to 100 south xxx street and just went straight at it hacking away i still have no idea why the insurance company didn't just settle that one presuit arla galadvis is salivating not me but my dad's lawyer my dad's ex-wife decided that they weren't getting on with divorce proceedings fast enough and decided to make a move while my dad was at work and we were all at school so she locked my little brother in my room the only one they didn't touch and called over 40 plus people to take whatever she thought was hers so pretty much everything including furniture old music and pictures from before she was even around i show up to the house to pick up my little brother and it's empty i don't know what she thought was gonna happen when she possessed many things that were obviously my dad's like pictures of just me and him or the computer that he bought through his job at dell my dad sued her three times and won every time she just got caught laundering money from the summer camp she worked at and my old boy scout troop that her son is was now in frick her interestingly enough my dad just remarried to her district attorney dead in his 60s hadn't been paying child support for decades and he owed more than 60 k for two kids who were adults now he was basically living at a farm in the middle of nowhere so no one could find him he worked for cash so the money could not be garnished from anywhere he then came into an inheritance which was deposited in his bank account and promptly confiscated by family maintenance he wanted it back yes well we all have once simon a lady was sacked by a large company they had caught her embezzling money to fund a gambling habit they had clear evidence the embezzling had occurred and she did not deny it she sued the company for 300 000 for unfair dismissal my sister's firm represented the company against this woman the case was so easy the firm gave it to my sister as her first ever solo attempt my sister screwed it up badly not only did she lose the court awarded the woman five hundred thousand dollars instead of the three hundred thousand dollars she asked for in the end it was a good career move the partners all knew her name and dropped into her office one by one to offer their sympathy worked in family law in california for like two years before deciding i'd hang myself if i didn't change career paths in ca the obligation to pay spousal support alimony ends when the recipient begins cohabitation with a new romantic partner a guy who was positively getting fricked in half in his monthly payments came to the office and said he was aware of the rule about cohabitation and wanted me to argue his point in court you see his ex was a narcissist she was in love with and had begun cohabitation with herself her presence in her apartment should count the same as if there were a romantic partner there he was bordering on begging me to take his money i refused not a lawyer but i feel bad for ynw mellie's lawyer dude wrote three songs about murdering someone murdered two people in his vehicle drove them to the hospital and said it was a drive-by the shell casings of the bullets were in his car cell phone gps pings him at the murder scene he said he'd murder them in text messages and the dude pleads not guilty i imagine that if you take a job like that you probably have to disconnect emotionally and just play the part as if it were a speech and debate exercise then after your client of course loses you go cash your paycheck a lady didn't pay her general contractor upwards of 20 k after the job was finished because of a dozen or so minor complaints like he was slow told her she should pay and we could help her with her complaints else he will probably be successful getting a lin on her home she didn't pay he got a lian on her home even offered to help her stash the funds in escrow pending their dispute and would prevent alien in the meantime nope my best guess is that she didn't have the money and was attempting a tantrum to get out of it this was my 1l internship literally the first person to ever approach me in a legal capacity later that fall she showed up to my school and was demanding my info from the front office who handled it well and i never saw her she blames me for losing her home i told you to pay or you'd lose your home you didn't pay and lost your home surprise pick at your face my brother's a lawyer his client took a backhoe dug up a standalone atm and scooped it onto a flatbed truck then and only then noticed a security camera nearby filming everything he got some black spray paint out of his truck went up two inches away really nice view of his face and sprayed the camera lens he insisted on pleading not guilty this demonstrates the importance of coming up with a complete project plan at the start rather than winging it it's much easier to fix these things in powerpoint than it is later on i read a patent and told my bosses it was both invalid and infringed by no one it had 10 means for elements in each patent claim that no one would practice all that weren't supported in the written description partners my bosses new to patent litigation sued on the patent anyway using young inexperienced unseasoned attorneys in the firm three years later after billing the client millions of dollars every defendant won by proving each claim either not infringed or invalid then my employer appealed and billed the client another a slowed off money with a young attorney in charge of the appeal that didn't understand the underlying issues on any level because he was a former teacher instead of patent attorney it was such a bad patent no one would settle at any point in the case my bosses were bloodsucking trolls i quit for these and similar parallel reasons the firm finally imploded not a lawyer but i am a trades union representative at the last company i worked we had a great set of workers my colleague was the head representative for the union at the time whereas i was still learning to be a representative anyway we had this electrician who'd worked at the company for 25 plus years really well respected but his views are a little out there my colleague had just got him back to work after a case of inappropriate workplace behavior kissing an office member of staff on the cheek where he was suspended for six months whilst investigations went ahead he came back with a final written warning meaning one more incident and he was sacked all his pension benefits gone two days after he came back me and my colleague got asked to come into a beating regarding this employee got in the meeting senior hr and the boss of the company are sat inside they lay out new allegations so we have had a report that when working in a property you went into the house when there was only a 14 year old girl and then proceeded to talk to her about sex condoms and other obscene matters we won't mention so we're just like whoa whoa wait what the heck we need to talk to our colleague and find out what's happened here and give him advice nope before we even had a chance to do that the guy spoke up and went yeah i did nothing wrong with that she's 14 she knows how to use a condom she's from the area that's all they know how to do they have sex and get pregnant by 16. so i'm just talking to her about what she knows dude was in his late 50s he should know better both me and my colleague just stunned like why the frick did he just say that anyway he got suspended and asked us to defend him because he says he did nothing wrong we got the case file and evidence through realized that there was actually frick all we could do he dug his grave dug it a day after he returned to work he lost everything his house pension everything no one would employ him as he was deemed too risky to take on knowing they could have a potential sex scandal should he do it again i'm a paralegal local guy in his 20s decides to go rob his dealer he got the wrong apartment when the college girl opened the door he shot her in the face and fled she laid there for hours just out of reach of her cell phone and listened to it ring while her mom called she lived a neighbor found her now she's paralyzed from the neck down and her face is very deformed this is a small town during the trial the jury was shown just how strung out on drugs he was and how he even bragged to a few friends that he shot someone that's pretty dang hard to defend he got 40-something years the girl that drove him to and from the apartment was also given jail time that poor freaking woman i can't help but think about the fact that she has to live with knowing that her life has been completely destroyed because of something that she had nothing at all to do with i would be bitter as all heck it's like a hundred way tie for first place spoiler alert they had the drugs on them less frequently it was a gun and yeah let's just say the i have a permit defense for the latter was not something we had to worry about around those parts you'd be surprised how quickly cases become at least theoretically defensible as soon as you establish any distance whatsoever between the client and the contraband though in fact i'd say there's a systematic bias in juries and lots of inconsistency in the relevant case law about how difficult it is and or ought to be to prove possession beyond a reasonable doubt peters of course in favor of the prosecution guy wanted me to sue the city because the city took too long to bust his neighbor's illegal garbage disposal business guy claimed his neighbor's house had mice because of the garbage truck that was parked there when it wasn't hauling garbage he said the neighbor's mice were causing his house to have mice reducing the value of his house so he couldn't sell it i asked him how long he had been trying to sell his house he said he wasn't trying to sell it yet i asked him what he had done about the mice so far he said he called the city to have them get rid of the mice but the city refused i asked when he reported the neighbor's illegal garbage disposal business he told me he never reported it the city just towed the garbage truck after the neighbor was arrested for some unrelated crime dui i asked the guy how he knew all this and he said the neighbor and him were partners in the illegal garbage disposal business and his neighbor's old lady told him about the arrest in the towed garbage truck an independent mortgage broker from a small town on the east coast one day he just up and left without notifying his clients fast forward a few months later and one of his former clients discover significant mistakes in her residential mortgage paperwork that cause massive issues with the bank costing thousands in legal fees to rectify naturally she wants to recover damages only the broker can't be found office is boarded up for non-payment of rent his house is up for sale and nobody knows where he went the only indication of his whereabouts was his facebook profile he was swimming with dolphin somewhere sunny with his teenage daughter which infuriated the plaintiff fortunately he paid his insurance up front and it hadn't expired so he would be defended by us through the insurer when i finally got in touch with him after two months he explained that he'd lost all interest in the profession about a year ago since then he took on clients or helped existing ones but with basically zero financial background checks and absolutely no regard for the structural timing of the transaction he was rubber stamping everyone and everything his work was so shoddy and his file management so poor that we had basically nothing to go on he was dead to rights and he didn't care at all then one day he declared bankruptcy signed the house over to a trustee and got a short-term visa to live in australia where his daughter was studying we settled that one quickly as he had no intention of returning for trial and we'd probably never be paid we once had a client skip bail and run i looked him up on fb and he had posted a photo of the bond paperwork and a bunch of twenty dollar bills the post read something like man frick the law and my bondsman can't nobody tell me crap blah blah typical hood crap we live in bfe texas dude is not a gangster anyways he didn't realize that the only reason we bonded him was because we were going to represent him withdrew on the bond in the case in the motion to withdraw we quoted his fb post and attached a copy of it as exhibit a when we filed it not a lawyer but i was a witness to an assault a few years back had to get up in the box and be questioned terrifying anyway it was on a night out hanging around outside a club a female friend of mine took exception to some dude grabbing her butt both start slinging insults at each other until the guy decides to sling his fist at her face instead right in the presence of three police officers who witness the whole thing and arrested him immediately the guy for some reason denied it all despite being caught literally red-handed by the popo and it had to be resolved in court how would you even argue on his behalf i have a relative who's a lawyer she worked for a hospital on a wrongful life case that was pretty miserable plaintiff had given birth to a baby with very severe congenital deformities plaintiffs sued every health professional she saw while pregnant claiming that if they had told her about the deformities she would have aborted a quick look at medical records shows that the plaintiff never really pursued prenatal care she went to a local emergency room very early in her pregnancy to get a pregnancy test apparently common in impoverished communities kanji returned to that same media a month later with abdominal pain the ed doc did an ultrasound on her belly and determined the fetus was not in distress but he did not do a thorough exam because he wanted to figure out where the belly pain was coming from not do an organ scan like an ob would but she sued that hospital then she was arrested for check fraud and saw a physician in jail but she didn't tell that doc about her pregnancy so he didn't do an ultrasound at all but she sued whoever provides that health care the jail maybe just a sad sad case at the hospital one-handedly the real loser is that poor kid colon i represent condo and homeowners associations one of my condo association clients wanted to evict some tenants because they were fat i am not even joking now the law does in some cases allow the association to evict non-owner tenants this is very fact specific however i spent a long time trying to elicit from my client exactly what these tenants were doing that warranted eviction client well they are just disgusting people they are fat 1028 exasperated you can't evict someone because they're fat we did not end up filing suit i got sued for 50 000 by a man who claimed his arm was broken when he sideswiped my car at 2 am we both got a dui and he was also cited for going the wrong way on the freeway my attorney determined that the guy had been to the doctor the day before the accident and had received treatments to his broken arm he was charged with filing a false police report and some other charges ended up doing 90 days in county lock-up i paid my fine did the required procedure to get my license back and learned my lesson obligatory not a lawyer but my dad was my dad was a patent and trademark attorney about 10 years ago and worked for a pharmaceutical company the owner of the company adopted the slogan just do it not knowing that the trademark belonged to nike when the owner found out that the trademark belonged to one of the biggest companies in the world rather than change the slogan and avoid a lawsuit he calls up nike and expresses how funny he thinks it is that they have the same slogan my dad got them to settle the case and the catchphrase was later changed i had a guy want to sue a popular chain restaurant because he had a heart attack there couldn't say what the restaurant did wrong but it was clearly their fault since it happened in their restaurant no thanks luckily i was on the other side of one of these ridiculous cases i live in an area where liquor licenses are extremely extremely valuable commodities or they can be transferred from one person to another which is often easier than convincing a municipality to issue you a new one for your new bar restaurant my client was opening up a new restaurant and found some wackadoo who had a liquor license that he was not using i believe his bar previously folded he agreed to sell his license to my client for about 250 000 the contract had a minor notice provision something like you have to send notice of whatever in seven days my client's former lawyer dropped the ball and sent it in 10 days now the wackadoo received full payment but decided that because this minor notice provision was breached he was entitled to keep both the license and the money there is a doctrine of law called material breach of contract which in a nutshell means you can only sue for breach of contract if the breach materially impacts your contract rights for example if my client had failed to pay for the license that would be a material breach of contract but getting a notice document three days late when full payment had already been made yes it is a technical breach of the contract but no court in the united states of america would deem that to be a material breach and certainly no court will let the whacker do keep the license and the money so we sued the wakkadoo who represented himself he fought okay for a proser but the judge of course ruled against him because his position was crazy wekadu kept the money and my client got the license i'm not a lawyer but my mother was in a lawsuit against her roommate and the roommate lost horribly my mother the nice and kind woman that she was heard a family member's mother was going to be homeless she was a bit crazy which later turns to really crazy and wasn't allowed to be on the premises of her daughter's apartment complex for legal reasons she takes her and gives her the spare room my mother worked as a hospice worker and stayed four nights a week at her client's home she told her new roommate who had nothing but a verbal consent to stay in her home so no legal paperwork no bills under her name nothing but whatever random mail was sent to the roommate was told that she could stay live their rent and bill free as long as she cared for the pets and house while my mom worked this lady had changed locks done hard drugs boo betrayed the house stole items the list goes on but i'll cut it here to save a read well my mother tells her she needs to leave and gives her over a month's notice to vacate her property she did not and after dozens of 9-1-1 calls and a legal notice to the kate after several trips to the local sheriff's office for help as the roommate had squatters rights we managed to get her out and move on to court as she had assaulted several of us between telling her to leave and her leaving she represents herself and my mother myself and my then-girlfriend with my mother's lawyer arrive the lady was offered first speaking and she tried to lay out this massive defense i have a copy of the lease as well as several other documents making it illegal to remove me from this home as well i want to file charges against them for b and e as well as verbal assault the judge looks to us and we give them our statements as well as all the videos we had recorded of the centering and company fronting the woman on this issue and she was the only one screaming cursing and so on as well my mother and i along with the home's actual owner provide the actual lease i signed on as a co-signer though i did not live in the house and all of which failed to have the roommate's signature on it the charges on us were dropped almost immediately she was charged with squatting forging of legal documents slander and a few others i can't recall off had we were granted restraining orders against her as well she had to pay all the fines of the court and spend just over a year in jail sorry for a long one but i hope someone enjoyed reading this divorce attorneys have predicted what was the most stupid reason two people wanted to divorce kid got one elephant right two men mum and dad agreed before dad took daughter to circus that one elephant ride should be plenty mum later finds out that dad let daughter have two not one as agreed but two elephant writes as mom would describe it he's doubling down again trying to get her to hate me i know it why the heck else is someone letting their kid ride an elephant halfway around the whole dang town everybody knows now not a divorce attorney but there was a case in kuwait where a woman wanted to divorce her husband because he eats hummus with a fork a valid reason she saw a picture of him contra dancing he'd posted on facebook she knew he went contra dancing that part wasn't the surprise in fact i'm still confused about this one maybe she just wanted a divorce but didn't have the guts to actually admit she wanted one so she just blamed some stupid thing he did instead of actually assuming the guilt and fault of initiating a divorce not an attorney but my mom is a paralegal there was one case that kept dragging along because they were fighting over the luggage once that was settled they started arguing over a 25 plastic palm tree that palm tree prompted the case to go into mediation costing both of them around 1 000 each just for the mediation isn't that the point where both attorneys get together and the buy each other's clients a tiny plastic palm tree as a thank you my friend's parents divorced because his mother wanted a horse his father argued that they can't keep a horse in a sixth floor apartment and don't have enough resources or money to rent a stable then she fricked her son's math teacher and became a seekhead i feel sorry for everyone involved i feel like the horse had very little to do with this story i have a friend who used to be a security guard at a courthouse he said one time he had to watch over a divorce proceeding between a 80-year-old man and his 40-year-old vietnam wife she said in broken english she wanted to divorce him because he couldn't satisfy her anymore during the beginning of the case she would yell mean things about this guy and the judge had to constantly tell her to be quiet the old man never said a word evenly the judge said we will have to continue on a future date she immediately said then forget it got up and walked out of the courtroom there really should be no reason required for a divorce pay a fee split up the assets and be on your way obligatory not a lawyer but a lawyer i know got a case because the husband didn't change his facebook status to married quickly enough after the wedding it was like two weeks the judge laughed at the lady and made them get marriage counselling lawyer pocketed north of one thousand dollars for that my ex's boyfriend never married mom told me that at his wedding to his now ex-wife he didn't introduce her immediately as his wife so she flipped the heck out and started berating him in front of their guests marriage lasted less than one year don't get me wrong he is in a shot but yikes maybe not be hateful to the person you just pledged to spend your life with a much older woman who had been married for a very long time told me that one morning over breakfast out of the blue she had a burning desire to pick up her butt a knife and stab her husband to death she took that as a sign that maybe their relationship was toxic pretty solid reason for ending it now but my dad stated in court that he was divorcing my mom because she was always asking him to take out the trash or mow the lawn or calling him at work to ask him to pick up milk you know adult stuff like maintaining a home and family a lawyer turned to her and just said you're dodging a bullet here someday you'll be glad he left turned out he was cheating on her my mom made a very good life for herself at 71 years old she can afford a house cleaning service and pays someone to maintain her lawn a karma is a b row so back in the pre-iphone era there was a newly married couple in my apartment building maybe three four months in i come home and hear them fighting about what the exact time is like one was saying it's 8 15 and the other was like no it's 8 13 so the next day the guy just walked out and i never saw him again later i found out they got divorced over some silly fight silly the clock reads 8 13 that two minutes is the difference of getting a coffee before work or not yes not a lawyer but my own personal experience i was married for 11 years and my ex-husband wanted the divorce he said i don't want to lower my standards for you he didn't want to do anything legal so i would be forced to stay at home and continue to do things normally he just wanted to see other women and still have a stay-at-home mom i had to file for divorce and he fought everything because he didn't want to pay up he wanted the divorce and even though i was filing for it he didn't want to give up what he was ordered to give he wanted me to agree that i didn't have any rights to the assets and money because i was a samoan for six years it's been about a year and a half now i am in school full time work two jobs i'm a single mum yet somehow life is easier without him here he gave me a blessing i didn't even know i wanted sounds like my parents divorce except my father was gay but he still wanted rsahw for show and to do all his errands and cooking and cleaning and child care for him when they finally divorced because she was over it he was greedy and tried to cheat her out of her fair share i know this isn't the reason for the divorce sorry but it made me wonder what precipitated the divorce since it was so paranoid my sister worked for a divorce attorney and she had to field a couple of phone calls from a guy in the midst of a messy divorce he insisted that his ex was putting rocks on his lawn to mess with the lawnmower and he was trying to somehow add that to the divorce proceedings when i was younger my parents dumped rocks on the lawn to kill the grass it didn't work i was expected to mow the lawn i'm not a divorce attorney but my former subordinate got divorced over pokemon cards at one point during the separation she came to work to accuse him of stealing some of her heirs it got near physical and we had to have security forces remove the spouse so we could get back to work they were a hot mess been married for four years finally had the big talk with one another you know the one where we realize it is forbidden to combine our card collections not a divorce attorney or anything but when i was kid a 15 year old girl wanted to get married to a 20 year old guy because of her age she needed her parents so she begged and pleaded with her parents who eventually allowed it for when she turned 16 but the guy divorced her after four years because she refused to have sex or even kiss like it never occurred to her sex was involved i suppose this is more of a reflection of the sex education she received wonder why the parents just didn't file a restraining order against him a guy i used to work with said his wife divorced him because she claimed god spoke to her and told her he wanted her to move the french rivera to be wined and dined by wealthy men because apparently god encourages casual hookups and wealthy men in the river era are lining up to sleep with 40-something mothers of four not a divorce or a lawyer but my ex years ago left me because i wanted chickens in the front yard the conversation was something along the lines of how our futures just didn't line up turns out he was cheating did you know blame it on the dang free range hence it became a cherished phrase almost immediately i'm not a divorce attorney but i once worked with this dude that was like 19 years old seemed a bit young to be married then he said she was his second wife he said he divorced his first wife because she kept grinding the gears in his car maybe the most reasonable divorce ever my grandmother was stepping down into their fishing boat my grandfather was already in the boat he was holding the pier to stabilize the boat a rogue wave came pushed the boat violently away from the pier and grandma nearly fell into the water but she accused him of intentionally trying to embarrass her they barely spoke for three months my grandfather refused to divorce because we're catholic but offered to live apart i was about 10 years old living with them during this time talk about a crash course in small talk in italy apparently you can save on taxes when buying first house for your own living if you married it counts as one for the couple some people are getting divorced when buying another house to save on taxes again if it was true it wouldn't be a stupid reason if you could save thousands on taxes this way i was cohabitating with and engaged to a guy and we broke up after a week long beach house vacation with my family because i beat him in front of everyone else playing scrabble he was a doctor with a huge ego and said that i was supposed to let him win to make him look good after a week of the silent treatment when we got home he moved out that's okay he was a gambling addict as well and that was bothering me so i was sort of pushing his buttons i think he wasn't as angry when i confronted him about his gambling problem so it's funny to me that the last straw was scrabble i knew a couple who married super early in divorced so he could join the naval academy apparently you can't enter if you're married they stayed together and remarried after he graduated this seems like one of the least stupid reasons for a divorce good on them for having such a strong and understanding relationship and thank you for sharing such an interesting tale the wife got tired of being married to a transplant surgeon and wanted to be an s and mh and yes it turns out she had mental problems surgeon in residency here nero but still surgeon lifestyle is really prone to divorce you either marry somebody who's really invested in your career or you out of luck dealing with somebody so absent is not easy an elderly friend of mine divorced his wife so she would qualify for medicaid and could afford her treatment for a terminal illness they'd been married 40 years and he had strong religious values about the sanctity of marriage the state caseworker even visited the house to make sure he wasn't living there in her last difficult days our stupid greedy medical system was forcing them apart he died broken-hearted and penniless not long after she passed every time he had worked his lifetime to save either went to her medical bills or the unnecessary expense of keeping two households to get health insurance some people in the u.s choose never to get married for similar reasons they'd lose their health insurance or their disability payments would be reduced stupid that it had to happen but technically a good reason my mom who worked for our state's welfare agency for 35 years convinced her brother and sister-in-law to get divorced they were both my mom's best friends my mom and her bro were irish twins and my aunt and uncle were in love until the day my uncle died but my uncle worked in construction and had no savings and so when he got sick he and my unemployed aunt had no income this was my aunt's second marriage and her first husband a teacher never remarried and eventually passed away in my state even if you divorce your spouse you can take their social security when they die of one you have none and two there are no other legitimate claims she was a stay-at-home parent and never earned income so she had no social security and my uncle put almost nothing into the fund so his monthly checks were pitiful so they divorced she petitioned for her first husband's ss got it and then they got remarried to this day even though my uncle is now deceased we are forbidden from mentioning to her kids that her and my uncle were divorced for a few months how about the most stupid reason not to divorce a good buddy of mine married a woman who almost immediately after the wedding developed back problems back problems that required her to quit her job as a florist for the last no kidding almost 28 years he's lived alone in a studio apartment so she can live in a four-bedroom house the reason he refuses to divorce her is because of her medical condition and his job cop gives her golden level coverage he also mumbles stuff about their two kids but their collage bound now he also forced himself to do the last 10 years he's retiring from his department his spring at 30 years because at 30 years his contract gives him and his spouse 100 medical coverage for life he hates his life i hate it and her for him bonus her boyfriend who makes some nice bucks lives with her in the house my buddy is paying for that is so sad what a nightmare for him i really hope he finds some happiness a couple in australia threatened to divorce if gay marriage became legal the surprise surprise when it eventually became legal they didn't go through with it they clearly had no idea what they were talking about too they wanted to simply end their legal marriage but to get divorce in australia you have to separate for six months live at different addresses etc i know a couple that wanted a divorce after 35 years because one of them were not happy with who their son was dating people man proof that even time can't heal stupidity a friend is dating someone with divorced parents for a similar reason the mum would lay down ridiculously high standards for their kids partners and was driving the kids away the dad wanted a good relationship with his kids soul left her i don't think it's a particularly stupid reason for divorce tbh if the reason told was stupid most likely happened to be the straw that broke the camel's back and there were more serious underlying issues i think you underestimate the ingenuity of stupid not a lawyer but my dad's friend got divorced because they couldn't agree on what kind of house to buy he wanted one with an apartment so they can have extra income and she didn't want some stranger living in her house so they split up over it i don't think that's a stupid reason it's a big enough disagreement that inability to work things out and see the other person's side doesn't bode well the couple had a seven-year-old child in the mom was some crazy antivax crazy vegan the dad gave the child a six-piece mcdonald's chicken nugget for his birthday and the mom went insane she wanted full custody over the kid but didn't get it thankfully weird al yankovic got divorced when his wife joined the columbia record club he couldn't handle that kind of commitment that's just the way things go cher lasted just a bit over a week with greg gorman before she filed for divorce eventually reconciled that in the end they divorced she filed because of his drug addiction something she should have had insight about if she had taken the time to actually get to know who he was before making the decision to marry instead she married him after just over three days of being divorced to sonny bono imagine that rich people led different lives not a lawyer and indirectly the cause my friend and i were competitive and always tried to mess with each other while competing one time while we were drinking i don't remember what we were doing but i said to him i freaked your sister his sister's husband heard me say that and confronted her about it this led to a huge argument and eventually their divorce the guy was in butthole and she is significantly happier now without him my friend's parents got divorced because his mother thought his father had superpowers and was a superhero bit didn't want to help the world not a lawyer but my uncle once got to marriage and old because she got mad at him for getting a sunburn on the honeymoon dude's probably 98 irish with the pastiest skin you've ever seen and she expected him to not get a sunburn not an attorney and not a reason but still a stupid thing involving a divorce when i was volunteering at an animal shelter there was one dog who was there simply because his owners got divorced and couldn't agree on who should get the dog so they abandoned him and the thankfully no kill shelter instead poor dog was so big he barely fit in the small kennel his bedding was just blankets on the floor because he was too big for the usual dog cots beds if he stood with his back to the wall his front almost reached the kennels gate i don't know what ever happened to him but i hope he found a forever home with nice humans and a lot of space not a lawyer here but the stories i've seen of people being forced to consider divorce to afford medical bills even though they still love each other are pretty dang stupid in a very different way than you were thinking when you wrote this question i think not a divorce lawyer or practitioner of law defense of any kind but boy have i got a story to share my cousin well she's got a problem in that she can't seem to be happy being single and has an intense desire for that fairytale happily married life a few years back she starts talking with this mormon bloke and claims to be in love with him has met him lots of times spends hours on video calls with him and the like after a few months he proposes and she sorts out her first passport leaves her son with an ex-boyfriend he was as close as being this kid's dad as possible and swears up and down to the rest of her family that she isn't going to get married first time outside the country possibly first time she ever met this guy she lies to us about this crap a lot and she gets married before this she converts to mormonism and tells us how she feels so connected to them which she hasn't felt for so long she never goes out so kind of hard to feel connected but still drinks wine and smokes she spends a while talking about being happily married and how she imagines her dad would be so happy for her spoiler alert he wouldn't be he hated religion and americans and this guy was super religious and a yank he'd be rolling in his grave about a year later she's in the process of getting the unconsummated marriage annulled straight up an old no divorce just throwing the dang thing away there was also the time she got catfished one of the pictures featured on gay blogs for years and was of a bodybuilder that was actually fairly local and married with a kid she claimed to have seen that guy who was a former soldier firefighter and a model he did have a connection to the fire service but he was far from a sculpted adonis he pretended to be i think she still spoke with him for a while although my brother had stupid reasons my mom almost going to the police takes the cake so long story as short as i can make it goes my bros started cheating with a 20 year old that worked for him he was about 40 at the time she may have been as young as 17 18 sister-in-law catches him not once but twice they separate and he moves out my brother's reasoning for straying was because she was mean to him and yelled at him twice the first instance was like 10 years ago and the second was after he was already cheating so the best part of the story he needed someone to watch the kids on his days and he had to work my sister-in-law had to approve the person he asked my narcissistic mother who is one of those that will not change her routine or life or anything set in hat ways she not only refused but she threatened to go to the police and say sister-in-law was blackmailing her to watch the kids not because they were going to keep her from the kids no because they wanted her to watch them and get paid of all the dumb things my mom thinks this definitely out there i wish we would have pushed her to go to the police just to see and hear their reaction to her blackmail claim there's not really a good answer to your question i've had tons of clients who got divorced over all sorts of freaked up and really good reasons i haven't had one where the reason given was just absolutely petty and pointless it's an expensive very public and drawn out process almost no one gets divorced on a whim not personal but a friend this couple probably about 27 years old each went into his office crying he said it looked like they were crying for hours so he decided to take them in and hear the case and whatever apparently the woman who was still crying had asked the man to buy her cookie dough so they could make cookies for her friends get together the woman said he bought cookies instead from the grocery store bakery and she flipped out on him for not caring about what she wants the man filed for divorce the day of used to work in family law as paralegal during the fifty shades of grey hype she wanted too much sex he wanted out of the marriage the judge literally called the lawyers to the bench and asked if this was real they had been married for 20-plus years very successful couple who were now trying to split millions in assets and business ventures so out of curiosity i binge watched all three movies after the last one came out i wanted that time of my life back but i saw nothing horribly wrong with it it is forever dubbed the fifty shades case my ex-wife i was repairing a pipe in the bathroom sink i tell her please give me a glass i need to drink water from the sink tap she screams are you crazy go to the kitchen fountain the water in the bathroom found and you never have to drink it she believed that all over the world we had two types of water and double pipes that carry two types of water in each house one for the kitchen and one for the bathroom i guess you had your reason to divorce her lawyer mickey you can't divorce minnie for being extremely silly mickey i didn't say she was extremely silly i said she was freaking goofy bro not a divorce attorney but my stepdad loved world of warcraft more than my mom and my brother sister and i he got pretty toxic and then just left after some crazy stuff he did lawyers who read wills to families what is the most interesting bizarre offensive surprising thing you have had to read out loud my grandfather hated his neighbor they lived next to each other for 20 plus years i remember well my grandfather raging at every opportunity about this guy we never saw them speak to each other in grand parkway he left the guy 10 k a car and golf clubs we were dumb struck turns out they were good buddies from the army when they coincidentally bought homes next to each other they decided to play a long scam with both their families they actually played golf together 2-3 x per week and had a monthly poker game for years that's an extremely long con i like your grandpa's style to my daughter anne who created my beautiful granddaughter jane and her dear fourth husband john who laid hands on my jane i leave one dollar you money grubbing bastards to jane i'll leave all of my monetary assets save five thousand dollars and my best gun which i'll leave to my son bill on the condition that he beats john bloody during the time between my funeral and my burial jane bail your uncle out of jail please other than names this is the exact wording of a great uncle's will part of it anyway at age nine jean told her mother that jon had physically shamed her and her mother told her she deserved it for being of s so great uncle took jean in and raised her and his two kids got exactly what it says his son also got a truck and technically a house although he only kept it until jean was a legal adult and could afford the tax on it bill got full custody of jane when his father died and he put every penny of her money into a trust fund to mature when she was 25 because he felt like his sister would try to get the money he was right and in case anyone wondered yes bill got his five grand he didn't get arrested though because jon had a warrant on him so they didn't dare call the cops bill did kindly inform the police of his whereabouts a few weeks later that is beautiful something about revenge from beyond the grave or at least on the way to it not a lawyer but sort of a sad story when my dad's mother died her will stipulated that everything was to be liquidated and the money distributed equally between her children and grandchildren fine but literally everything had to be sold there were family heirlooms jewelry things my grandfather a carpenter had made so many sentimental family things that my father and his siblings badly wanted but it all had to be sold they all went to the auction to try to buy some of the more sentimental items but weren't always successful it was heartbreaking and i'm not sure what made my grandmother think it would be a good idea nobody wanted the money they wanted her wedding ring and the clocks my grandfather had made and all that it was heartbreaking and i'm not sure what made my grandmother think it would be a good idea nobody wanted the money they wanted her wedding ring and the clocks my grandfather had made and all that most likely she didn't want her family fighting over her belongings i used to work for an accountant and we used to make wills as well an old man probably around 70 left all his money to his mistress while his wife only got the goldfish i had to tell him that if his wife contested it she would most definitely win he said he didn't care just to clear up confusion i'm for australia not usa i thought it was in there but it wasn't goldfish the estate that smiles back not me but my friend's father's father died and he said when the guy reviewed the will with his lawyer and his sister it's said to give 100 of the assets to his sister he said he had no idea why his father did that he wasn't on bad terms or anything it was shocking to him the sister didn't share anything with him either and they were on pretty good terms before that when my great uncle died he left his beloved dog to his longtime girlfriend all of his money went into a pet trust for said dog which turned out to be quite a large sum of money his two kids got nothing as far as i know he didn't have a bad relationship with them or anything he just thought the world of his little dog i'm always confounded by stories like that one summer i worked as an administrative assistant to a lawyer who worked in wills and estates most of it was the usual petty arguing about percentages of money but one couple was deeply concerned about which of their children would receive the urn with the ashes of the family's long-deceased cat wouldn't want to play favorites one of my college buddha's dad died from cancer in our second year it wasn't a sudden death he had been battling it for a couple years when my friend came back to school he casually mentioned that his dad left him and his sister seven dollars million each turns out his dad had hit the lottery before my friend was born invested put all the money away to help pay for college high school his mom got a nice chunk of change also he grew up thinking they were just ordinary middle-class family we had a glorious third and fourth year of college thanks to my loaded friend he did know his dad won the lottery but it was never mentioned to him or his sister that it was a lot of money he grew up thinking they were just ordinary middle-class family i think that was his entire motivation wanting nothing but not raising a bunch of entitled little shoots not me but a friend post someone had left an entire golf course that he owned and managed in secret to his son they were avid golfers but always went to another course i still don't know why someone would lie about owning a golf course some people like surprises i'd be thrilled if my dad had been hiding a golf course from me for all these years as a big reveal when he died my will has something unusual story time i sat my wife down to have the talk because i was getting ready to deploy to iraq this was during the incredible sectarian violence and i wanted to make sure she knew everything to do in case i died she's never serious ever but i wanted her to be serious for this discussion because it was damned important i get through telling her all about it and want to know if she has questions yeah so the life insurance how does that work she says i don't really know baby what do you mean she answers well do they just put the money in there when look she's not trying to be in but all right it's not like she's just dying for the money she wants to know the logistics of it i'm sitting here thinking when she says so do they put in my bank account or do they give you one of those big checks when you win the lottery as she holds her hands up like she's holding a huge check laughter ensues i have it written into the wool that if i'm here i want the 400k dollars to be given to her with a gigantic lottery check have base photo bring several folks over shoot like the paparazzi as she stands on a stage and do it lol glad you made it back and it sound like you two have an awesome dynamic not exactly a reading of the war story but in the same realm when i was like 20 my dad told me that when he died i would be getting a chunk of money not millions but enough to do something good with years later he and my mom separated he met a new woman and got married after talking to my brother and sister we were all worried that she would change his will or get him to change it in favor of her kids we agreed that we didn't want money but just wanted any final wishes to be honored the money couldn't hurt though sadly after that he got cancer and died two years ago after he died my siblings and i agreed to just accept however his widow divided anything she made sure things went where he had decided my percentage was smaller because he had added her and her children in the two years since he passed she hasn't talked to this much she calls for holidays and stuff she tries but she is just kinda awkward she's also sent large sums of money on two occasions because she sold some land he owned she has shown me and my siblings that there are still good people sure she might have kept most of the money but she could have kept all of the money and we would never have known you should call her and tell her that she might be distant and awkward but hearing from you that her kindness and honesty is noticeable and appreciated might make her feel pretty dang good about herself and how she's handled things my father's going to read his will to us before he dies presuming he's not taken suddenly imagine christmas but depressing so that's why you hate santa when i was 16 my dad wrote me out of his will and then hung himself in the garage it was few months after my older brother had died in a car wreck funny thing is we always got along i was then kicked out of the house by his wife without a single thing that was mine it was on christmas eve so i went to my mom's for a night and when i came back to my dad's the locks were changed not a single shirt not a shoe not a sock nothing but the cloths on my back and the change in my pocket when i was a clerk in law school at the state court of appeals the adult children of a rich woman tried to invalidate the will basically the woman was worth about eight million dollars and all the children were working professionals earning six or seven figures well the woman had used the same hairdresser for multiple years and left a considerable amount in a trust for the hairdresser's children's education the remainder of the estate was given to different charities basically the kids were mad they didn't get a cut how it turned out truth is i don't know we reminded on some procedural issues and i never followed up on it if it comes up like if you're wealthy leaving 1 000 to each kid will make it a lot more difficult to invalidate leave them nothing and they can create a lot of doubt and questions one of my former bosses was getting up in age and had no children one day we were discussing family history and he mentioned how he still had the old family bible his grandparents brought over from germany with the whole family tree hand written into it which i thought was an amazing thing to have but he went on to lament that when he died he was going to have to go to his ungrateful good full nothing niece since the old rules of inherit and said she should get it even though he knew she didn't care a thing about the family history several of us involved in the discussion tried to convince him that there had to be some other family member that would give it the respect it deserved or barring that a historical society that would know what to do with it but he would have none of it since that just isn't the way it is done years later i thought of this while attending his funeral and tried to figure out who was that niece maybe in hopes of broaching the subjects with her but never could i still wonder about it sometimes and hope for his sake that it ended up in good hands lawyer here not a thing with reading the will just my favorite testator dying guy wanted to leave bequests to pretty much everybody he had known who was still living in three countries one percent to this guy two percent to that lady then he kept changing his mind about one beneficiary or the other which required the development of a spreadsheet to recalculate all the other bequests whenever he would change that guy's gift from one percent to 1.5 percent fortunately for sanity it was a pot of cash if he had changed physical bequests half my spoons to my cousin lydia the other half no 5 8 we would have had to kill him there is one famous device in a wolf from new york a rich man left everything to his wife provided she remarried the will supposedly had the explanation that the testator put this condition on the will because he wanted to make sure at least one person truly mourned his death i bequeath all my property to my wife on the condition that she remarry immediately then there will be at least one man to regret my death heinrich heiner 1797-1856 german poet journalist and literary critic said on his deathbed not in his will i think title examiner here i once readable where the dissident left his presumably gay son the 12 feet of rope in my tool shed so the f can do us all a favor and hang himself his words not mine there are some truly terrible people in this world what a horrific man an ancestor of mine in the rural uk in the 1700s died and left his farm and everything to his nephew no children with his surviving wife only getting the second best bed and to provision her to receive three pounds of butter per week for the rest of her life we thought this was incredibly mean but we wonder whether this butter was meant as an income i mean who can eat three pounds of butter on behalf of my dad here he one time had a woman leave millions of dollars to three stray cats that she had been feeding and he had to go catch them and put them in crates to be shipped to texas where they live a life of luxury in a cat resort another guy had a safety deposit box that was massive like the size of a small dresser inside it was filled with coins that they had to count turns out it was several hundred thousand dollars worth of coins me and my wife went to a lawyer to have our wills drafted the lawyer told us of a client he had that had a great deal of money his kids were fighting over it before he was dead the man liked the monkey exhibit in the local zoo he liked to just watch them all the time but when he died the lawyer had to tell his family he willed all of his money and estate to the zoo for the monkey exhibits he now has a bench dedicated to his honor at one of the local zoos he said they were livid and tried to fight lesson is don't be petty and greedy love your family unconditionally you know how a bench dead over is to his honor can you please take another shot at this sentence i'm actually really interested in this story and would like to know what he ha no a bench dead of over is in his honor years ago worked in a retirement community older man we knew as gay developed a late-in-life relationship and moved into the community with his gay lover he was a career vet multiple honours a wall of medals he was also a bit of in butthole most days but he had moments over a meal his stories were fantastic his children over three years never once visited him he had a heart attack and knew he was going to die his children showed up but demanded his lover leave for visits in his will he left everything to his lover and his love as one child from a former marriage he wrote a long note about his kids hypocrisy of not visiting and their attitudes toward his lover he left each of his two kids a pale of coal ash to be deducted from his estate had his estate pay for his lover's plot to be next to him and his wife and in his long letter that his kids if they visited him and his death would be reminded of why they didn't visit why he was alive it was frankly awesome hearing his kids blow up about it my sister spent a couple years working for a long-standing organization in philly that's been accepting bequeathement since the late 18th century her job was to help organize the various trusts they had to administer as well as going around advising people not to do things like this and just leave them a lump sum people had a habit of leaving them an annual trust that five dollars a year was a princely sum in 1813 but by now it's just a complete nuisance or of leaving them ridiculously specific things to do every year the worst example i remember i'm a little fuzzy on the details was a woman who left funds to purchase books for school children in liberia the problem is her funds now don't buy more than a couple books and she left instructions for someone to deliver the books not to ship them a delivery driver is someone colon three when my grandparents on my mother's side were dying of cancer my uncle black sheep piece of crap of the family who i've never met thank god wanted to know what he was getting from the inheritance when they died not how's mom and dad or what can i do to help my grandparents being the people they were was still going to give him an inheritance after all the freaked up things he did to them but my mom the power of attorney convinced them that they shouldn't be manipulated by him anymore they ended up writing him an email back telling him that he wouldn't be included in the will anymore he ended up threatening to burn their house down my house down killing me and my family etc for betraying him and you know what my grandparents did they ended up including him in the will and sending him exactly one penny in check form by mail that was the last time i have heard from him since i work for a brokerage firm and i often deal with account beneficiaries we had a client leave his entire account to a stripper after the client died his wife discovered her husband had left his life savings to jean sparkles smith she was p really p lawyer here we normally don't actually do a reading of the will here like they do in the movies it's much more boring we just fire up the probate and send notice to all the heirs the weirdest one i saw was a guy that was worth about two million dollars who left my car jacket and one dollar to my son i hope it keeps him warm when he winds up sleeping under a bridge the kid had a drug issue i also had someone leave an antique commode to one of his kids yes he considered an elderly toilet to be a family heirloom the guy was actually pretty excited to get the toilet it was the last thing they had left to remember their grandma by i crap you not pun intended my parents have started their death cleanup those were my brother's words every time we visit they are asking us if there is something that they have that we want and if so for us to take it they don't call it a death cleanup but i have to applaud my little brother that's what it feels like and he called it on them i'm refusing to participate i always say no and my little brother is the most honest altruistic person you can ever meet so he does too but this christmas i was in the garage with my dad and i saw this wooden model boat that i had never seen before it was a beautiful painted foot and a half boat that my dad had made in carpentry class or whatever you call it in english when he was in school the mast was broken it had been somewhere at our summer house as we say in sweden and i had never seen it it was actually that house he grew up in but that's a different story at least as far as i can remember right now my little brother helps out there a lot i bet they stumbled across it and they saw it and my little brother was as emotional about the thing as i was since it had been something our dad made when he was younger than either of us i understand if he said yes if my dad said why don't you take it the point of my story is that i have a little brother that can't lie has proven to be as altruistic as anyone comes but for a second i turned into surin because of something my dad wanted to give him a friend had two sisters when their father passed away their mom had died in their childhood anyway years go by and the oldest daughter is the only one who keeps in contact with the father for various reasons dude was an abusive dong played favorites all of that crap older sister was obviously the favorite as she got everything the other daughter and son my friend got one dollar a piece oldest sister could have been a dong about it but decided to be pro status they all sat down to dinner on a night and big sister was like listen dad left me all of this it was a pretty sizable amount of money she could have taken it and lived comfortably without working till the day she died maybe definitely if she managed the money proper she sat down with her little brother and sister and was like three ways even deal end of it you all would think that you would do the same for your brother sister best friend whatever you'd be surprised what people are really like when money is involved even a small amount of it fricked up not in this case though i am not a lawyer but i am deputy public administrator and we find wills often we deal with individuals who died without any known family or the family is estranged and we have to locate them one of the wills i read said no freaking lawyers in the text and another one stated i would like crack powder stuffed in my ears and cremated i'm a trust attorney i can't tell you how many times the surviving spouse from a blended marriage cuts out the step kids they always try to justify it to me even though i really don't care i'm not there to judge los angeles residents are especially concerned about their pets i've written trust where the pets inherit more than the kids it's always awkward when i have to tell a child they were disinherited no easy way to tell a person that not a lawyer but an estate planning paralegal for many years i've read drafted or executed thousands of wills and trusts with clients my first nitpicky comment is that the common belief that lawyers actually assemble the whole family and hold a reading of the will is entirely a construct of tv you would never sit there and just read a will to people it's mostly a bunch of legalese about bonds and payment of taxes and the powers of the executor only a very small portion of the will actually pertains to distributions and in many cases it's just a paragraph stating that everything goes to the spouse if living otherwise equally to the kids or to the trust which then says it all goes to spouse then kids believe it or not they are usually pretty mundane when strings are attached it's usually just parents trying to make sure their kids go to college or they get a smaller distribution or just have to wait longer to get their money people who don't have kids usually name about two dozen beneficiaries which is cumbersome and annoying especially since a lot of times they don't even have much money to divide people with kids almost always just leave the money to them equally probably the most freaked out thing i've seen is a couple different clients who included provisions to disinherit kids and grandkids if they married a black person that's their prerogative and we'll serve them professionally but we tended not to get too cozy or chatty at those signings unlike with many of the nice clients with whom we would become friendly just get emin get him out in those cases i'm not a lawyer but my family has an odd story involving a will several generations back a woman along with her brothers and our family inherited a huge sum of money from her father oil money in oklahoma at the time women were allowed to inherit property assets if single but all assets would have been transferred to her husband if she married she wasn't too happy about the situation and in protest never took her husband she had a few friends over the course of her life and lived a very comfortable life until dying of old age at which time her estate was divided amongst all of the female descendants in the family tl dnr my great great great aunt of something was a bad but feminist bee lawyers who fought cases against people who decided to forego a real lawyer how badly did they blow their case i was doing a fault domestic abuse case and the defendant had a lawyer failed to pay that lawyer and then refused to show for court the judge was tired of the delay so he would not postpone again the defendant attempted to ask himself questions in the third person from the witness stand it was one of the fastest actual trial i ever participated in that went to a verdict ask himself questions in the third person that's the absolute best while i was studying law i was observing at a local magistrate court this guy who was representing himself turned to the other party and opened with so we meet again the other guys was his next-door neighbor it was a hedge dispute the judge postponed the case on the spot and ordered him to come back after he get a legal aid lawyer he the first case i ever tried was a speeding case against a pro se guy who took the stand and accidentally confessed to it he also had a video which he tried to lay the foundation for for 30 minutes before giving up i saw a guy who had a couple duis in his past take a stab at it he sat in on so much court and saw way more trials than i had before my first jury trial but there really isn't a replacement for some of the stuff they teach in law school he lost and was clearly floundering at points despite having a well-polished open i also saw a pro said one time put up nothing no open no evidence no real crosses or close and win i interned with the ability to have all the rights of a municipal prosecutor for my 2l summer internship most people represented themselves because it was small stuff like disorderly conduct or speeding tickets no big deal my favorites were the ones who when making mitigating statements to try to get the judge to lower their fines would mention that i was their lawyer yeah no i was actually the polar opposite of your lawyer my favorites were the ones who when making mitigating statements to try to get the judge to lower their fines would mention that i was their lawyer yeah no i was actually the polar opposite of your lawyer please explain further for law noobs not a lawyer but a rental property manager who goes to court often for work we don't end up in full-blown civil trials that often but when we do it's usually against a defendant who is trying to represent themselves the last two trials ended up with the judge giving the defendants 15 minutes recesses so they could stop sobbing uncontrollably needless to say those cases were blown in comical fashion you have to give us more than that my father was an ada assistant district attorney he once prosecuted a dui case where the defendant was acting as his own counsel his main defense was since he was a chronic alcoholic his baseline back blood alcohol content was already at least o5 all the time so that needed to be subtracted from whatever the breathalyzer had read needless to say he lost the case tl dr my son's mother represented herself during our child custody case my lawyer never even spoke to her it was that bad i have full custody of our son as a result my son's mother was a chronic drug abuser and alcoholic after seeing an empty beacon in her backseat when picking my son up from her one day joint physical custody i decided to ask a few questions my son was 12 at the time although i know it's considered poor form to ask your child about the habits of the other parent i wanted to know about her drinking habits with him being around it turned out she would regularly drink and drive when court came around she thought she had me right where she wanted me she delivered a summons to my lawyer herself which nullifies the summons because it has to be delivered by a third party during discovery we requested her cell phone records facebook password smartphone records think pictures i am etc although it's slightly embarrassing to admit how much i enjoyed watching her squirm after she asked her line of questioning it was great to have my lawyer tell the judge she had no questions to ask my ex-girlfriend you could see the shock and horror on her face at the instant realization that she did so poorly herself that the lawyer didn't need to ask anything bonus moment my son's mother asked if i was the one that called social services on her six times my response was genuine from the stand i shouted jesus christ six times i only knew about twice but no i've never called them i know two people called them on her but i never did lord this is scary i hope your son is okay for what it's worth a story regarding a pro said defendant i was representing a client in a criminal case where she was charged with not sending her kid to school so some case study referenced this one case from about 20 years earlier that case was the case to go to for anyone charged with not sending their kid to school anyway the more i read the case the more familiar it all sounded the father represented himself prosely at trial and lost he files a pro se appeal and it gets reversed the case was styled something like state versus davis and kept referring to the child that didn't go to school as dd i put the timeline together and realize this kid was in my class in grade school i knew him he never attended school the appellate decision wrote about the kid having health problems and constant nose bleeds all sorts of things but he didn't have any of that he always attended the first day halloween christmas and the last day of school those were the days treats and candy were handed out any other day he was gone in this went on for years but in the sixth grade this kid was the guy to go to if you needed bike parts i stopped by his house after school one day looking for some tube forks or something he opens the door to his garage wall-to-wall bikes there must have been over a hundred his deal was that all day long he would just go school to school and steal bikes off the rack i think he eventually dropped out in the eighth grade and i'm not sure how he even made it that far except that his parents seemed very litigious so maybe the schools didn't want to get on their bad side halfway through an unfair dismissal case the employee apparently accepted that his dismissal was fair for the first time in my career i was speechless for about a minute i thought carefully about what he said and what it meant should i rest my case on the spot like in a courtroom drama i'd always wanted to do that and this could be my only chance what he had actually said was i would have fired me too in those circumstances i figured that technically he had some wriggle room there after all he hadn't said that his hypothetical self-dismissal would have been fair but so i pretended like it was a glitch in the matrix and carried on yeah just because he says he would have fired himself too doesn't mean he's saying the dismissal was justified in law definitely some wiggle room really good statement to highlight in your closing though got sued by the property management company i was renting from i declined a lawyer and just read the judge our documented damages sheet from when we moved in explained that the company couldn't have redone the flaws as the new tenants were in the following day and asked the pm company why on earth i would steal the screens to the windows ended up with a full refund on my security deposit and winning the case everyone here has a story about how bad they fail i figure i should give a story of one that hasn't my ex took her landlord to court her landlord was awful she would come in for inspections without actually booking or notifying my ex she was not cleaning or paying to have the black mold cleaned and removed and basically just broke every rule so my ex took her to court when her landlord tried to take her damage deposit for the removal of the mold as well as a pipe that burst which she routinely told her landlord was an issue and could happen so yeah you can win but just be smart about it save everything that might be useful she had every email about the stuff saved every call recorded she had dated pictures of all the stuff she sent her landlord about the pipes and mold and in the end she won if you practice long enough there will be the one pro cell litigant on the other side that wins they won't know jack crap but somehow pull it off i feel like the one who is in the right should win regardless of who they are being represented by then again we are talking about law so right and wrong are ugg dollar signs or something i don't know i represented myself in a family law case and one nobody really wins in family law unless you are a psychopath basically it was a divorce and we had a son ex-wife's mother hated me and decided to fork over a bunch of money for my ex to have a great lawyer i had zero dollars the ex accused me of domestic violence everything she said was a lie complete fiction she wanted to be able to take our son and move to another state deny me visitation and have me pay child support i was having none of that i wanted 50 stroke 50 custody when we went to mediation the mediator did not believe her and wrote a scathing report in my favor i ended up with full custody and she had visitation i didn't seek child support in court i mostly just kept my mouth shut the judge did help me and my ex did everything she could to hurt herself the day the trial was supposed to start i reached an agreement with her lawyer i was prepared but very very nervous about the trial and was glad to avoid it it was very stressful and i do not recommend representing yourself in court but in my case it worked out i really enjoyed your story glad you won collections attorney here the majority of cases i have are against pro se defendants because they don't think they can afford an attorney the vast majority of them don't show up to court or answer the complaint and get defaulted when they actually defend the case many try to research the law online and make arguments that they find on forums problem is that they don't fully understand what they are saying i've had many defendants try to assert the statute of limitations under the ucc rather than the standard breach of contract sold because it's shorter and they think it applies because they bought goods with their loan or credit card sorry but the six-year sol applies in a simple breach of contract action in other situations they have defenses that they could assert but they don't know that and i'm not allowed to give them legal advice the only thing i can say is that i strongly suggest getting an attorney basically if you don't know what you're doing then get an attorney or go to a legal aid services clinic you will not win by googling stuff and reading message boards the legal aid services clinics are a good idea and maybe just buy an actual law book or something a more interesting question for me is qualified lawyers do you represent yourself for civil trials i have my degree i know how to write pleadings i know the legal system why should i pay someone else to do all this work the problem is that you are emotionally invested in the case which makes thinking rational and objective thinking harder a friend of mine successfully defended himself against charges he got for protesting he had no formal legal education just had been on probation for 10 years and been through the system i'm a cop and i sometimes get cross-examined by people acting as their own attorney in municipal court i once arrested this guy for being drunk in public to the point of being a danger to himself and he decided to fight it the city attorney questioned me and asked if i recognized the accused i said i didn't pointed out the guy that was sitting in the defendant's chair i will call him mr smith we went through my testimony for the city about what i saw and so on then it became time for mr smith to question me he brought up the fact that i said i recognized him from that night which was about six months ago i said yes mr smith so you say you recognize me from that night me yes mr smith is there anything different about me from that night me i don't know what you mean mr smith so you are saying that i'll look exactly the same as that night is that what you are saying here in court under oath me well you aren't drunk right now you are wearing a shirt now and you don't look like you have urinated on yourself mr smith no further questions he ended up stating in his closing arguments that while he doesn't dispute that he is in fact mr smith he thinks i don't remember the case because he had a car wreck a few days after the arrest and now has a scar on his face that i didn't notice since i didn't notice that i can't be telling the truth about the incident guilty this is a counterpoint to the usual stories here my father is a divorce lawyer who represented himself in court because he didn't hire a lawyer and my mother did he was able to file spurious claims get the other side caught up in procedure and use a lot of tricks to force more billable hours on the other side my mother's lawyer said you need to fire me because this guy is trying to bankrupt you that's not your father winning that's him abusing the system and screwing your mother over i'm up against pro politicians all the time in administrative hearings the judges are fairly indulgent the rules of evidence and civil procedure aren't as strictly applied as in the superior court and the judges are willing to grant a continuance for just about anything i have no problem with this the only real criticism my level is that since the complainants are proper they don't have much guidance on the merits of their cases prior to hearing an attorney would have advised the litigant who did not meet the statutory requirement here you have no case and the court will not grant you the exception you want if you waste time and money on this it will not result in any sufficient sympathy from the judge to get the result you would like edited as opposing council i can discuss the case with the pro politician but i'm prohibited from giving legal advice the purposes of my discussions here are typically to make sure of the facts and arguments see if there's any possibility of resolution and avoid wasting time preparing for or arguing irrelevant issues in family law it happens so often that the court is a bit more forgiving overlooking some of the stricter rules of evidence and allowing opposing parties to speak freely and explain points raised by the other side even though it isn't their turn this being said we are always getting shittily written letters directly from the other side in law if you're represented by a lawyer you can't directly communicate with the other side it has to be through your lawyer obviously if you represent yourself you communicate directly not that this law stops tards in family law represented or not calling us directly to abuse and taunt us which serves nothing but to cause us to shake our heads at the idiots and then call their lawyer to complain which hurts their case and can lead to sanctions being placed in a ho so letters from people directly always misspelt and cringy i find if it's a guy they just write from the heart and lay out what they want or are after often pretty defeated if it's a woman they regurgitate every bit of crappy advice from the internet and mother's groups leading to total diarrhea on a page with legal buzzwords thrown about without the right meaning or context everything is in charlie-esque bird law lawyers hara for you with and under we the under sign verily plea that you cease intercourse post haste through reading you can practically see the crap eating grin on their faces when they sent it thinking they showed us and beat us at our own game they also tend to copy our letters verbatim with structure and layout just with the roles reversed you have to call them and try to explain to them how they are totally wrong and none of this makes sense which never goes down well as not only are they extremely hostile they think we're just trying to screw them and lie this transfers to the courtroom all the not done movie tropes are there the walking around the aggressive attacking questions not to mention the sexy street walker approximation of formal court dress they use crap evidence like text messages they made themselves terribly photoshopped printouts of facebook conversations and printouts from websites of law summaries and forum discussions that prove their point and they yell out crap it's all very embarrassing even lawyers don't represent themselves even when they know what they are doing get representation and even if you do represent yourself don't pretend to know what you're doing no specific instances but what usually messes people up is thinking they are smart and arrogant that trick you thought of ice going to work that so-called clever wording isn't going to fool anyone that arrogant attitude isn't going to impress anyone don't try to show off or be clever just present your case with actual evidence and for the most part you should do fine most judges know you don't know the law and will try to make it work with the facts you present a sad but funny one i will mention is a guy representing himself in a custody dispute his wife is claiming that he's violent and has a temper with police reports photos and witnesses backing up her claim but the guy tries to present himself as this overly nice guy who never gets mad and wouldn't hurt a fly saying that she is making everything up huge red flag since he totally oversold it anyway during the proceedings the opposing lawyer starts messing with him and the guy gets p off and blows his top lost pretty much all credibility after that my dad once got an illegal parking ticket and chose to fight it himself in the courtroom he asked the cop where he put the ticket on your front windshield my dad said i ride a motorcycle i don't have a windshield everyone had a laugh and he didn't have to pay the ticket i am an attorney in a government agency investigating and prosecuting violations of an act that has its own unique administrative law history and rules and rulings we don't run into too many pro sir opposing parties but we do occasionally get attorneys who attempt to represent their clients before our agency who are clueless to our subset of law since our initial investigation is not adversarial sometimes attorneys who do not regularly practice before our agency will seek our advice on case law and or rules and regulations that are pertinent to our investigation and we are happy to provide that information to those attorneys who are inclined to do so though once we sue it's adversarial and we do not offer any friendly guidance to opposing parties unfortunately in my experience attorneys attempting to practice in our area of law who are do not regularly practice before our agency do not seek any guidance from us and or do not take heed to any guidance that we offer it usually ends up costing their clients needlessly in time and money when the issues leading to our investigation end up leading to a lawsuit and costly remedies an ill-informed attorney many times is much more costly and damaging to a client than pro ser representation you sound like you work for a regulatory agency like fda or usda get a reckless driving citation six months license suspension just pay the fine and ignore it never turn in license thus never getting credit get caught driving on a suspended license an additional year suspension just pay the fine and ignore it happens a few more times an additional year-long suspension each time never getting credit for the suspension ignore it but then a warrant goes out for mandatory 30 days in jail plus 6.5 years of license suspension if caught driving again another 30 days in jail poor fella very badly to the point that at some time you just have to stop as the cairnage was so bad it made one ill contract dispute on car repairs i represented the garage owner car owner that had skipped on his bill decided to represent himself i was asked why i needed a lawyer to represent me for a case involving the federal government my reply because i want to win is often dismissed by whoever i'm talking to disclaimer i taught law and ethics at the university level additional yes the lawyer i hired did an incredible job i don't really like handling cases against pro select against first of all it's assumed you are going to win no matter what and if you lose your clients think you are an idiot second they are a pain in the butt and they slow down the trial and they all think they are tv lawyers third i feel slightly bad when i eviscerate them and they could have had a good case if they had gotten a real lawyer but they pee me off so they shall feel my wrath i'm dictating this from my dad he got a speeding ticket years ago in detroit at this weird intersection he was pulling out of a gas station onto a high traffic road that goes from 55 to 35 coming into the city the speed limit changes about 500 feet down the road in the direction he was going so he was waiting to pull out for a while given the traffic and finally finds an opening so he pulls out but since it's 55 he hits the gas kinda hard to avoid getting rear-ended he hit 51 miles per hour 500 feet later where a cop had a speed trap set up and he wrote him a ticket for speeding my dad goes to traffic court and the judge is tearing into these people for having bad excuses for speeding and other traffic violations especially the guy right before him which made my dad nervous so when it was his turn he went up and the officer presented his statement the judge looked at my dad expectantly like he thought it was cut and dry and waiting for my dad to cave he slowly started explaining what happened when the judge interrupted him and asked where exactly the gas station was as soon as the judge recognized it he said something like i hate that spot it takes like five minutes to pull out into traffic from the bottleneck that speed change makes yeah i see what you're saying now and he found my dad not guilty on the spot so my dad avoided the 65 ticket and just had to pay 53 court fees cause you know logic 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 Everything

Views: 63,322

Rating: 4.7897253 out of 5

Keywords: accident lawyer, attorney at law, legal help, reddit professionals, divorce, lawyers, court, #updootst, updoot, reddit, r/askreddit, askreddit, ask reddit, r/, \r, r\, best of reddit, reddit stories, reddit story, top posts, funniest posts, funny, funny posts, funny reddit stories, funny askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, reddit stories 2021, people of reddit, sub, reddit cringe, memes, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, story, stories, rslash, comedy, fresh

Id: 3Iry0caQ8_M

Length: 161min 47sec (9707 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021