Lawyers, What Was Your Most Morally Challenging Case?

lawyers of reddit what is the most morally challenging case that you've worked on ugh well fresh after law school i worked on a case where the people involved were sketchy in every possible way my role was very limited i was just helping with some securities filings the problem was that nothing quite added up and when i brought the discrepancies over to my boss she just told me to put the information in anyway she was very friendly with the client we saw him at our office all the goddamn time as he'd often just dropped by to chat and hang years later the company folded in a manner of speaking and their clients many of whom were quite vulnerable lost hundreds of millions of dollars i was not at all surprised my boss was someone whom i had dreamed of reporting for years for that and other sketchiness but she was slippery enough never to do anything wrong that didn't carry some level of plausible deniability additionally i'd always felt like i had zero idea of what i was doing as a student and then first-year associate there further still i felt powerless against someone who had built herself quite a reputation within the legal community here and who had been known to act vindictively toward anyone who crossed her in the past in any case i do think about that old file often it's not the only one we worked on at that old firm that eventually blew up in a bad way it's also really not great to feel like you may have helped legitimize an entirely and to me obviously fraudulent operation my experience there definitely jaded me quite a bit even compared to other junior lawyers when i was about to start college back in the 90s i took a legal receptionist job in a legal defense firm in my little southern town i would work answering the phones until 1pm and then after that i would tag along with one of the lawyers for a few unpaid hours and watch them do their jobs in court everyone was very nice and did me a huge favor because the experience gave me enough information to learn that being a lawyer wasn't for me it turns out that i can't handle watching people be crushed by the system i could handle the murder trials drug charges and real estate squabbling no problem it was watching poor people get ground up over minor offenses or simple mistakes little things that would haunt them for the rest of their lives one particular case stood out to me there was shooting and the crowd had gathered around the body a detective was asking people in the crowd if they'd seen anything our defendant said yes when he hadn't seen anything really but he just wanted to help he was a simple-minded person but never formally diagnosed with anything largely due to the lack of services in my town and the fact that he dropped out of school early when i met him it was clear that he was a sweet person who really liked people but was dealing with a low iq and some reasoning issues the detective separated our defendant from the crowd and started questioning him after a few minutes it was clear that the defendant was just giving answers that he thought the detective would want to hear he really wanted to make the detective happy instead of just dismissing the guy the detective arrested him for giving false information he had a few minor thefts on his record again he had reasoning issues so he was really looking at serious jail time because he talked to the police again this dude just liked talking to people and didn't know better he had no diagnosis or health records to back up any claim of mental deficiencies and anything resembling that would cost money he didn't have a time in a statemental facility he lived with a relative who was equally broke his lawyer was contemplating a guilty plea because he'd lied directly to a police officer and admitted it i left before the case got resolved but it's the one i still think about this guy was largely harmless and was likely going to spend at least some time in serious jail where the outcome would likely have been very bad for him the thing that stuck with me was how unnecessary it all was it was suffering for literally no purpose putting him in jail was not going to magically give that guy better cognitive skills other than making him distrust people if anything this should make you livid with that detective they did that just to have an easier rest i knew someone who worked on a morally disappointing case basically a woman was physically shamed and assaulted it was obvious that the guy did it the woman was clearly distraught and the guy just acted guilty my friend said from the bottom of his heart he could just tell like the rest of the jury but the case was years old on top of her waiting to press charges in the end the grand jury couldn't send it to court simply not enough evidence it was all hearsay the way my friend told of the jury was extremely distraught lost trust in the system and the likes and they just felt so disgusted like they should send this guide to court and they had the power to do so but they just couldn't mlms are considered pyramid schemes in my country and both are banned in order to protect consumers it's a crime to establish an mlm public prosecution here got wind of an mlm operating and shut it down closing up the premises and everything my firm was hired by the mlm to defend their case and establish to the public prosecution that they should be able to continue to operate i had to prep all the defenses while absolutely despising mlms and thinking that they're run and operated by predatory pieces of crap we had several high up employees from the mlm's head office in the us fly halfway across the world to us multiple times for status update meetings lasting 15 30 minutes or so that could have literally been done over email or conference call nope they just had so much money to burn off the backs of vulnerable people who have zero chance of succeeding in their business that a gang of them would fly over every so often to ask so how's it going i thanked my lucky stars every time the public prosecution rejected one of our arguments and eventually the mlm gave up and cleared out of the country never been so happy that my arguments were unsuccessful i want to go to there a close relative was a judge in a pretty small town in the 80s there was a case drug deal gone bad i guess one guy went to his dealer's trailer guy planned to rob dealer not only take his drugs but his money as well dealer picked up on that plan quickly and pulled out a gun at first guy pulled out his gun as well both died suicide by stupidity really the families ended up suing each other for wrongful death relatives spent a couple of days going over the law before they arrived in court each wanting to get rid of the other for money relative while on the bench no less said something to the effect of they both did society a favor by removing themselves from our society early eight is not a chance for that statement to go viral the way it would now but you can bet the week following the letters to the editor in the local paper blew up i only include this because the prosecutor was laughing so hard he had to excuse himself from the room when the judge made the comment i was born and raised catholic married into a very prominent catholic family i joined the firm that was representing physical shaming victims i initially stayed out because the bishop who was in charge of the bad priest married my wife and me but the more i observed the case and his lying i couldn't sit by when the case was dismissed at the trial level the partner asked me to write the appellate briefs because that was my forte i did and the dismissal was reversed and the church quickly settled highlight of my career and spiritual life jesus had the harshest condemnations for people who harm children i used to do a lot of enforcement court cases where we would use lines in properties to cover loses on loans on behalf of our clients banks and such had one case where the debtor was very eager to talk about the debt and how he really wanted to repay our client according to the agreed repayment plan how he was trying to come up with a way to get the money etc etc the meeting dragged on for an hour these cases usually took less than 10 minutes since the debtor very rarely had any other way of repaying the loan and he seemed very eager to tell me about why he was in debt in the first place i finally asked him out of curiosity why he had taken out the debt and it turned out his son who was around my age had terminal cancer and he and his wife had sold everything they owned and took out huge loans with their house as security to provide him with the best possible treatment and eventually hospice and as he said it now my son is gone but the debt is not all i could do was warn him about the planned foreclosure four weeks later if he did not find a way to repay as promised turned out he did find a way to come up with the money but i still think a lot about that case the professor of a business law class told my class this story at one time he was the attorney that represented my hometown government on legal matters there was once a case where police officers from my hometown were chasing a suspect the suspect opened fire and they returned fire after it was all said and done they realized that one of the bullets from the cops gun had inadvertently killed an innocent bystander the family of the bystander sued apparently she was transient and a drug addict and had been in the area to try and score drugs or the family's attorney was asking for millions in restitution my professor said he was scared shitless about having to go before a jury and state that the family of the woman did not deserve such a high amount of restitution because being a drug addict the woman's life really had no monetary value to begin with thankfully the city and the family settled out of court i can only imagine how crappy my professor would have felt if he had actually been compelled to make that argument to the jury who wants to say to a jury and to family in the court gallery that someone's life had no value in some areas of law you get a bit of everything i'm in one of those areas i do not do family law but i had one case where an ex-husband and ex-wife were against each other both were completely fraudulent both were trying to use their young daughter against the other one was a chronic cheater opportunist and the other was constantly high or drunk and constantly trying to access his former wife's financials she was quite well off when they got together this was not a divorce case but due to the nature of the case all attorneys involved were privy to the entire record of their divorce i feel like our client edged out our opposition very minutely in being a slightly better person but it was a hollow victory como i do not do family law best decision you've made since the disastrous choice to become an attorney i defended a man accused of abusing his gf and it was the third time he'd been charged in the same relationship it was obvious he was guilty but the gf essentially was under his spell and stopped cooperating obvious pattern of some pretty serious abuse eonal but i have enough experience with dv victims to know that that textbook abuse victim behavior it makes my blood boil that our legal system hasn't been changed to account for that because it's virtually impossible for a victim to get out of the situation without testifying in the presence of their abuser who most likely is very good at manipulating them i worked seven months at a criminal defense firm while i was at university two cases stayed with me and are reasons i will never practice in criminal law the first was a teenage boy who egged on by his friends forced his five-year-old brother while filming to give him failatio the client came in with his parents and showed zero remorse he didn't care he was asked how he felt about it and he said he didn't know the real kicker to me was the five-year-old was in the lobby outside while they interviewed and they were all still in the same house the client was given some offender classes and let go mitigating factors were considered in his sentencing that meant he was barely punished the next was what i feel to be a huge miscarriage of justice an adult male committed horrific domestic violence strangling his partner throwing her through a shower screen beating her and the woman's child heard this and called police because she was in no state to do anything turns out this is the second woman he had done the exact same thing too the first time he received court ordered anger management and domestic violence classes this time he received the same and a suspended sentence the client was so blase about it he was advised he might go to jail and should get his affairs in order he ignored that and laughed in his solicitor's face while his father who was paying his legal fees just hung his head and didn't know what to do i don't know why the client didn't go to jail an act of god meant the female prosecutor didn't ask for a custodial sentence defended a guy charged with child physical shaming not the challenging part he clearly did not do it he was however an admitted and convicted diddler from an earlier case yuck but everyone is entitled to a defense and this guy clearly didn't do this one so why challenging he so clearly didn't do this one that as the case developed the prosecutor realized he didn't do it but this was in the last two months or so before the prosecutor's re-election in a roundabout didn't say it big clearly conveyed it manner prosecutor communicated in effect leave it alone until after the election and it will go away client was in jail and couldn't make bail we let the case delay election passed and a couple of days later charges were dismissed it sucked bill had we tried to fight it client might well have been convicted by a jury since he had a previous conviction and he could have went away for over 10 years for something he didn't do eonal but the guy who got the crap end of the stick on this a couple of years ago my grandpa passed and transfer on death deed at his house to my mom a couple of months ago my mom died and todd the home to me yay me right well problem is that medicaid has what's called a state recovery which applies for any medical costs incurred between the ages of 55 and 65 or nursing homes at any age estate recovery takes whatever property you own and my mom was diagnosed with cancer when she was 60 grandpa died when my mom was 63 since she was dying soon she didn't want the house had no need for it all the means to upkeep it but medicaid also has rules against declining gifts and transferring assets because she had cancer she was left with no choice except to accept the house which she didn't want because she had cancer while i agree with the morality of both estate recovery and transfer rules in her case they literally took away her right to choose because she had cancer which seems more than immoral to me now because my mom had brain cancer i have to deal with the legal ramifications of the situation i did nothing much less nothing wrong yet i have to navigate a legal tightrope which has the potential to end very poorly for me and my family and will at the least cost me thousands all because my mom had cancer at the wrong age and my grandpa died at the wrong time video editor not a lawyer i make lots of tapes for lawyers harsh depositions evidentiary stuff getting to the good stuff in a 12-hour surveillance tape i have even had to pixel at everyone's face but the suspects in hospital surveillance tape due to hipper sometimes the state will ask me to recover very bad audio from criminal investigations or see if i can see fraudulent editing on a tape debunker james o'keefe copycat i don't see the whole case and never know the outcomes i just get a ton of raw input video can lion soak in mine a thing i felt bad about was working for the defense in a civil suit new worker had his legs crushed at a loading dock we get our cameras and are working for the company to show how the loading dock is supposed to be done and all their safety equipment working they have their best guide to demo the stuff the old salt employee you can't make the safety latches work out two of the three loading docks the one that does work doesn't work reliably it is obvious they never use this stuff but the video is edited and it looks like the company and safety equipment are slick and functional run by the most seasoned bros i worked defense before becoming a prosecutor two years ago the hardest case was a guy who was accused of physically shaming his family friends daughters who were five at the time he hired us he didn't want to register as a diddler and didn't want to do any jail time we knew he did it we heard his interview with the police yet we had to defend him to the best of our ability we trawled through the family friends facebook accounts finding options and suggestive photos to show that the kids learned this on their own we said they were coached by their vindictive grandmother it felt disgusting and repugnant it was our job but dang it left a bad taste in my mouth i left and became a domestic violence and physical shaming and assault prosecutor which i still do my answer is a bit different since i've thankfully never had a truly morally challenging case that is representing someone or something absolutely reprehensible sure there's been some injury defense cases or cases where someone got screwed by a deal but we always recommended the client or their insurance pay up and not drag it out the most challenging was this case where man was sick with cancer and sued every possible product he encountered this is very typical in product liability cases plaintiffs will cast a wide net and then over the course of discovery you narrow down to a list of a handful of likely suspects my client thankfully was highly unlikely for reasons i won't elaborate upon for obvious reasons the morally challenging moment came when i was chatting with my boss one afternoon about scheduling depositions discussing how plaintiff clearly lied about this because of abc and joking around about something unrelated when our phones both buzz at the same time we both got an email plaintiff has died and his attorney and family were going to refile as a wrongful death case there was a beat where we just stood there in silence before my boss gave me instructions for advising the client while he made phone calls to the other party's council that moment hit me hard over time not because i thought my client had anything to do with the disease i genuinely believe it didn't rather it was a combination of two things first it was the first time someone i actually met a deposition in the course of work died mid case usually in my cases someone would either already be dead or just have injuries they recovered from second it was the fact that by necessity we only had a moment to take in plaintiff's death before treating it like a litigation event to deal with a few months later i left that practice area behind for business dispute litigation instead tl dr incestuous i was fresh out of uni and the office i worked at had this potential client who was getting charged with violating his daughter minor at the time of the alleged fact this man cried in front of us denying it saying that his ex-wife was conspiring against him alienating his daughter into pressing false charges at the time i was dumb i was very very dumb and i had just finished reading codigo davida a biography of one of our ex-minister of justice in which he told a story of a very similar case a mother making false claims of debauchery against the father and ever forcing the kids to lie about it so i voted yes to accept the client and we did we made the defense and claimed not guilty of course the client who was an old man btw assured us that he was innocent and the facts had happened some years prior so no dna no video photo no nothing just witness and the victim court date goes on the victim was called to testify she was 20 yo at the time of this and was testifying without the knowing her father were there outside the room my colleague decided to confront her about it and ask if she would be able to look in her father's eyes who was standing out there and repeat what she was saying this girl started to immediately cry and shake at the mere thought of facing her father repeating frenetically that she wanted nothing with that monster i felt like a monster too i felt wrong and worse mine was the vote that made us accept that man as our client so in a way it was my fault that we were at that situation i know that we are supposed to defend wrong people and as an intern i had my share of scum cargo robbers drug dealers a murderer but that felt worse way worse till this day i've never accepted another crime case involving devatory not that he got many after that if it makes you feel better even if your vote was why he became your client in specific if it wasn't you representing him it would be someone else who cared less or was strapped enough the daughter likely still would have been in that position no matter who was representing him going to get down voted to crap for this because of who we were hired to defend one of my co-workers fellow attorney was hired by a man in possession of child pornography to defend him the guy allegedly used to work for the police be whoever to catch people in possession of child pornography and trace it back to the source to try to catch the people making it however when he retired he decided he wanted to keep doing it as a vigilante allegedly i have no idea if he actually turned anything he found into the police he got caught when he took his computer in for service at a local shop we were all had big bad feels about this case to be honest we all fully believed his story did not add up and thought he was going to jail but he hired us so we had to throw something at the wall at least i don't know how the case ended since i quit the firm before the case went to trial but i came home sick to my stomach every day while i worked on that defense not me but a friend from university who was is and i don't mean this pejoratively a do-gooder looking to make the world a better place a few years after the fact he told me about one of his earlier cases as a public defender his client was a clean-cut good-looking kid from a lower middle-class family up on a public mischief charge vandalism he brought the kid a clean dress shirt and tie for his initial court appearance when the kid took off his t-shirt to change into it big old nazi eagle tattoo on his back according to my friend after helping get the kid community service he had to go into the men's room and vomit warning references to chili p and physical shaming and assault i'm not a lawyer but i was the person who reported the crime and also the primary witness i was subpoenaed and therefore the trial i still struggle from time to time with what happened i worked at a major electronics store a customer brought in a laptop and asked me to back everything up the dvd i did it but the file names looked extremely suspect one video was named payoffly app.mp4 and another was one three-year-old r at pedbeungle.moth so i called the cops they showed up and took my statement and i ended up being subpoenaed as a witness months and months went by and i finally had to show up for court i get there and i have to face the accused the laptop had recently been given to the family's adopted son for his 18th birthday a few weeks later my report ended up getting him tried as an adult and put on a diddler registry he broke the law he was in possession of seriously troubling illegal materials but he was still a kid from time to time i still sit around and think about whether or not i had any other options i don't think i did but i still hate that i was the one that had to make the call 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: On Tap Studios

Views: 29,556

Rating: 4.8854961 out of 5

Keywords: lawyers, lawyer stories, worst case scenario, worst case, lawyers worst clients, worst lawyers in court, challenging, 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 askreddit, reddit funny, askreddit funny, askreddit stories, sub, reddit cringe, memes, comment awards, dankify, toadfilms, updoot everything, updoot reddit, chill, story, stories, reddit on tap

Id: ZjEdIQC1Ww8

Length: 24min 46sec (1486 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020