Lawyers, What's a Case you REGRET Winning? - Reddit Podcast

lawyers what's a case you regretted winning I'm a work comp attorney now represent injured people but used to work on other side Insurance defense there was an applicant with a serious injury fell off a ladder busted back with Fusion shoulders screwed years of treatment internal issues psych issues really just messed up 50% plus permanent disability we were 5 years in and finally getting to settlement time if we bought out his future medical settlement pretty far into six figures this guy was the Sole Provider for wife and two kids then we found out he had aggressive brain cancer expected only a couple of years to live at best thus we wouldn't buy out future medical anymore still got permanent disability for 60 Kish but can't give medical buyout based on 25 plus year life expectancy anymore I felt terrible for the guy and his family me and the adjuster tried to get insurance to agree to some sort of amount like 5year buyout but the Bean Counter said hell no the attorney knew it wasn't me making the decision even though he worked on that guy's file for five plus years he decided to take $0 in fees I have so much respect for that attorney turning down 10K Plus in fees to help his client in a very crappy situation yeah I can't lie if I were a lawyer on the other side of that I'd probably be laying awake at night thinking about that guy and his family and clearly this guy does I do family law and I represented a father who had lost most of his custody from illegal substance used and imprisonment as a result he came to me saying he was clean and doing good and had his life together in it checked out he had been clean for almost 9 months not counting jail time and seemed sincere in wanting to resume a full relationship with his son the other side fought viciously to keep him in extremely little custody and supervised at that but we prevailed and got an order restoring family frequent unsupervised partial custody not long afterwards only about 3 months after the case he was back to doing illegal substances sold most of his furniture and for me the most Soul crushing is that he set a fake Go fundme stuff for his child's cancer his child didn't have cancer and has never had cancer so you know where that money was going I withdrew my appearance at this point so I don't know what happened afterwards but I imagine and hope his custody was taken away basically the net result of winning that case was that the poor boy had to witness his father relapse onto illegal substances and was exploited for money worst case I ever won I work in medical malpractice defense once I had an obstetrician or gynecologist who burned a patient during a procedure when I met with the doctor he lied to me throughout the representation over 16 months saying he had no idea how it happened there is a Doctrine in law called res ipsa meaning absent some sort of negligence this accident could not have occurred woman came in without a burn and after the procedure the woman left with a burn there's no way this doctor didn't know what had happened the area of the burn was where he was operating on it wasn't until I brought up settlement because this was not a case we could win did he say oh maybe I do know what happened we ultimately settled that case which is considered a favorable outcome considering the potential High monetary verdict sometimes I think this doctor really ought to have lost that case and their license I wouldn't say I regret this so much as to this day it amazes me as a first year associate I was given a terrible Pi case where my client received a flu shot and thereafter felt pain in his shoulder he went to another Doctor Who performed an MRI and determined he had a torn rotator cuff which was undoubtedly not related my job was to allege the flu shock caused the rotator cuff tear our author actually correlated the two which is the more regrettable position and the case paid out being the bottom of the totem pole I had no choice but to take the case which was handed down by a partner but at the same time just overwhelmingly made me feel like the worst stereotyp attorney and just hated having to walk into court on it and feel my reputation being destroyed I'm just picturing this dude walking in call me like your honor I feel offended because this is just so stereotypical evil lawyer I don't want to be that guy is it fair that I go through years of school and training to get to this specific job only to be stereotype so callously I do juvenile work criminal law and family law I represented this client first when he was a juvenile charged with disorderly conduct at school and fighting then when he became an adult it was for simple things like possession of the devil's less as he got older it became easier and easier to figure out what part of his life hasn't gone as well as it could and I tried to cancel him and push him to better himself he got his GED he started going to na he started classes at a community college and found a part-time job on the night of his 21st birthday he was charged with a DWI of course I'll take care of that too about 6 months later we are due in for court for a trial on a Monday and he doesn't show up which at this point in in his life is highly unusual as I'm trying to figure out where he is the court starts going over arraignments first appearances and then lo and behold three people are up for murder charges the prosecution starts to tell the judge what the facts and circumstances of the case are and mentions a few victims names apparently my client was at a party when these three individuals decided to allegedly do a driveby my client suffered from multiple wounds and didn't make it to the hospital so by default as you can't prosecute a dead person the state has to take a dismissal I guess technically a win either way it was crushing to me as I thought he had really turned his life around as a personal injury attorney I've seen a few clients with the blue collar Lotto or getting more money than they reasonably know how to deal with I do my best to educate them but my job is to try and maximize their recovery not to teach them finance and I have definitely contributed to a few illegal substance habits in one of my first cases after passing the bar exam a young man retained me on a drunk driving charge no one was hurt but he total his car during trial the arresting police officer testified that my client was clearly drunk at the accident scene and that my client was loudly blaming the accident on a freaking butthole who stole his car crashed it and then fled before the cops arrived however according to the two other witness statements tendered into evidence it was my client's friend the passenger who was screaming about the butthole who stole the car not my client the driver the cop must have confused the two men during his testimony this discrepancy raised a reasonable doubt in the judge's mind so she acquitted my client at the time the acquittal was somewhat unexpected for me in my personal view my client was clearly drunk and responsible for the accident regardless of who was blaming the mystery but hole to the cops but I was happy my client got off no one was hurt and lessons were learned and I was quite euphoric to have won my first criminal case the the regret about a month after the acquit my young client called me at 3:00 a.m. from the police station saying it's me again the police arrested me for drunk driving again can you help me not only did I answer no I instantly regretted getting the earlier acquittal my client apparently didn't learn any lessons you can't save everybody some people just can't learn a freaking lesson to save their life I got a spoiled brat of a teenager cleared of a shoplifting charge when he absolutely had done it his Rich parents hired me to repres present him I did that to the best of my ability and we went to trial and won but I can't say I felt good about it this kid needed to be taught some accountability for his actions and his parents just wanted to buy their way out of any trouble he got into had this happened to me twice got my client out on bail only to thereafter have him up and killed first time he was in a building supposedly selling got chased by the police and a struggle ensued where he was smoked point blank in the head mother told me that it was my fault that he was killed and that I was working with with the da and the police second time a young man no more than 16 gets released while waiting trial on robbery one of the conditions of release was that he was to maintain a curfew that very night he breaks curfew goes over to somebody else's house and was killed in a illegal substance related robbery mother blamed me and said that the devil was working through me that we were all demons criminal defense is a hard business did a divorce where the husband who I was representing wanted to trade custody of his children for a set of bedroom furniture the bedroom furniture was not even like a family heirloom it was furniture that you could probably get at a Rooms To Go or something H still makes me ill that's why I got out of family law and picturing that father looking up at the judge and saying your honor I love my children with all my heart truly but that furniture means the world to me I want a summary judgment motion that my firm filed not expecting to win we had a decent argument but odds were way worse than a coin flip and judges don't like granting summary judgment because it's an extreme remedy the client initially was thrilled case is over we tried to break the news gently nope 3 years later we're back in the same spot we were before we won our motion the other side appealed it up to the state supreme court and one because the Supreme Court said the trial judge should have denied our motion so we're back at square one north of $100,000 in illegal bills with no resolution maybe it'll settle maybe it will go to trial I'll find out in the next 3 to 4 months the one I particularly hated happened at my first LW job this woman was a long-term client of my boss in the past 10 years or so she has been caught driving under the influences eight times violated home incarceration countless times being caught with Controlled Substances a few times and stabbed two people on home incarceration my boss at the time was the master of getting people off for DUIs so she she had only been convicted of a DUI third and always managed to stay on home incarceration with whatever releases she desired I always regretted her cases because that woman is truly a danger to the public she's undoubtedly going to kill someone someday but I'll be damned if she isn't the luckiest woman alive in getting away with DUI a little late to the party but I've got one I still think about a lot worked in criminal defense represented a guy in a DUI he had prize so another conviction meant time L of license problems long story short he was pulled over by police after they followed him leaving a bar at trial I elicited admission from the arresting officer that during the 2.5 miles he followed him for he did not observe a single moving violation no speeding ertic driving driving over the lines blowing stop signs Running Red Lights didn't even stop Suddenly at red lights also got the DI officer to testify that the accused only spoke Spanish and they couldn't get interpreter officer to the roadside to explain the field sobriety exercises which the officer documented the accused refused to perform jury came back in 15 minutes guy was extremely grateful and his lovely family was very gracious in thanking me and our office feel good about the whole thing a couple months later I'm in County to meet with a client and I see him in one of the pods find out sometime after the trial he violently and asexually assaulted his stepdaughter I think about that one a lot there was this case I saw that involved a claim with free shifting meaning that if the plaintiff won their attorney's fees would get paid by the defendant defendant pushed an aggressive legal position at trial that the judge agreed with and won avoiding a few thousand in liability to the plaintiff and a few thousand in attorney fees so far so good but then the plaintiff appeals all the way to the state's High Court requiring a ton of briefing and time high court agrees with plaintiff reserves and sends back to the trial court which now enters judgment against the defendant for a few thousand in Damages against the plaintiff and tens and tens of thousands of dollars in attorney's fees from the appeal the defense lawyer probably regretted winning at first on that aggressive argument to the trial court this is honestly making me realize that Court Law and Order all this crap is way more complicated than proving your client's innocence or you know the other person's guilt whatever I mean hell I've always known that you can have a bent jury that are just really one-sided in their opinion on basically whatever the heck they want to feel like on any given thing whether it be race politics or anything of the sort sympathy even God I would hate to be a lawyer this probably won't be the best answer but this is a real one after law school I had to turn down a criminal defense job offer because my wife got a better offer somewhere else so basically I followed her along and was desperate to find something after 3 months of fruitless efforts I would take just about any job that required a JD whereas literally the only thing I ever wanted to do was was criminal defense 3 months after moving I got an interview for a real estate litigation job they hired me the next day looking back that was probably red flag number one first day on the job they taught me how to foreclose on a claim line these are two things I had never heard of before turns out it is totally brainless work if you have the right forms mind numbingly boring basically just cutting and pasting new addresses and amounts Ed so anyways it took me about 2 months to realize this when I had my first set of hearings but literally my sole purpose at the firm which represented over a 100 homeowners associations was to take people's houses away for not paying their homeowners association dues after my first set of foreclosures I actually slipped into a pretty legitimate depression I was getting paid peanuts to drive nearly an hour to work every day to do work I despised on behalf of people I literally could not pretend to care about the straw on the camel's back was when I started signing the forclosure and realized I was that guy you know I understand someone has to do the work I guess there certainly is a lot of money to be made but it was not for me I did that job for 3 months came home one Friday and told my wife I'd rather be homeless than go back on Monday by some Stroke of Luck I started a stellar criminal defense job within 2 weeks and all the heartache that has 100% been worth it I've won a lot of cases you have to redefine winning and losing when doing criminal defense because sometimes even a particularly juicy plea is a win in my opinion and never once felt bad about it for example I got a guy's plea deal cut from 60 years to 15 years for a string of robberies where the interrogations and confessions were overwhelmingly unconstitutional like the interrogations were textbook how not to do an interrogation Missouri versus Sebert and stuff like that never lost sleep over someone not going to jail so yeah every case where I took someone's house away probably two dozen times for not paying HOA fees generally $4,000 or less was was the worst case I ever won F HOAs well as for my humble opinion I just think lawyers are kind of scummy overall family law is a little different in that you never really win per se you may get more favorable rulings or better terms but unless the opposing party did something illegal or mind-bogglingly stupid it's never a decisive win really although I did have a case where my client fought really hard for the dog and then ended up turning him over to a shelter freaking douchebag the ex-wife received an anonymous tip and was able to get him back quickly yeah I feel like any couple that's having a messy divorce is usually like how can I hurt them oh I'll take their pet that they love and adore and then get rid of them immediately or put them down and it's utterly unnecessary in my opinion I know a lawyer who had a divorce file a long time ago where she represented the husband and the husband fought and fought and fought for this painting that the wife's mother had gifted them it wasn't valuable or anything but it was a gift from her deceased mother and he would not settle without it so she acquiesced and delivered the painting to her lawyer who delivered it to the husband's lawyer for him to pick up he never did it's still sitting in the lawyer's office after years unless she's tossed it by now he didn't want the painting he just didn't want her to have it summer of 2018 I get work regarding what seemed from the client's description as a pretty drawn out and messy divorce case the husband was my client and he seemed very adamant that his soon to be ex-wife was after every pen he had given he seemed to have a fairly high-paying job it seemed like a pretty common type of case the city I work in has many instances of this it has a high cost of living and a lot of well-paid working Professionals in Private Industry he was a very well spoken amicable guy in his late 50s and truly seemed like he'd been taken by surprise and betrayed by his soon to be ex-wife when I actually got the case however I was basically flawed his wife was a working professional as well worked in government they'd been married married for over 20 years and had two kids together and a paid-off house before taxes he made almost three times what she did not counting his stock options and yet she'd contributed equally to their mortgage on every home they'd owned over the course of the marriage by all accounts despite a vast difference in income she'd carried her weight raised two kids and worked full-time during the entirety of the marriage I live and work in Canada she could have easily raked him over the coals in the divorce if it had gone to court instead it seemed like she' done everything she possibly could to not have him subjected to that this divorce had been ongoing for 5 years before he hired me and it was basically him looking a gift horse in the mouth over and over with constant renegotiation on the contract they'd both signed initially with him skimping on alimony and then debating on lesser terms he was basically given an inch and tried to take a mile dragging it out for so long that per divorce law it had to go to court I almost suspect he did so as a way to try and drag her through the mud though he may have genuinely been that delusional I consider it a win only because his ex-wife was adamant about only wanting what was somewhat fair and for it to be over because of the strain it was having on the family per the contract he owed her still about 50k in back pay but she was content with 15K which was less than this guy made in a month I did regret the win though she seemed like a very nice woman with the patience of a saint while almost all of his anger towards her seemed to come from wounded ego I should also note that though they had two kids together both were in their 20s by the time I was hired and custody had never been an issue at all even for the one who had been a minor when they'd separated it's like in The Hobbit when the uh I guess I'll call him King dwarf is like I can't remember wait is it Thoren is it Thoren Oak Shield or something like that God I can't remember it's been so long those movies are old now but uh it's like how he's like no the gold is mine I won't share it with anyone or anything and uh ju greed greed man it uh it can ruin you I did some custody work early in my career and won some cases more on the Merit of my trial skills than on the Merit of the parents the thing with family law work in general is that there is essentially no bar to entry anybody with a law degree in a pulse can get a family law practice up and running quickly because there is just an absolute glut of work what that also means is that 75% of the lawyers practicing family law are clueless and awful early in my career I certainly was clueless but at the least I was not awful therefore in a battle between clueless and awful versus just clueless clueless usually one so yeah I can't recall any specific cases except to say that fighting over children in court is a terrible thing and basically everyone loses I regret that entire portion of my career when you subscribe make sure to hit the Bell to turn on notifications put the playlist on in the background to finish listening to all the stories and if you like am I the genius give am I the jerk a shot 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Channel: Am I the Genius?

Views: 15,623

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Id: 2EttvXNuKVA

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024