Lawyers, What's the Weirdest You've Used and Won? | Professionals Stories #59

lawyer selectors what is the strangest or oddest law that's won a case for you the weirdest case i have ever dealt with was jolie v palita 1999 oj number 1728 scj i did some research for this case when i was a law student some background this was at a time when the ontario court of appeal had held that if there were any factual matters in dispute a case could not be dismissed on summary judgment if that is not the case today it was discovered that this position basically ruined summary judgment as a useful process but it was at the time in such a motion all fact alleged by he plaintiff would be assumed to be true what happened was this a man sued among others the college of dental surgeons for persecuting him and interfering in his ability to live as a generic martian the plaintiff claimed he had been cloned from space debris nasa found in the 1960s he claimed he had a genetic test to prove this but it had been falsified by the cia as part of the conspiracy against him well naturally this claim raises the concern that the plaintiff was bonkers but there was no evidence aside from his bizarre claims of that in court the case was decided on two alternate grounds first on the boring grounds that the case was patently frivolous and vexatious because it was absurd however it was also decided on the more entertaining basis of standing justice epstein held that only a person could commence an action in ontario the rules of civil procedure define a person to be either a human being or a corporation the plaintiff's whole case was based on him being a martian if he was not a martian his case had no merit if he was a martian he lacked standing to commence a lawsuit in ontario in short we now have precedent that martians cannot see you in ontario that's hilarious i love when actual legal precedent sounds like a hypothetical from a grade school mock trial i had a case where a guy was charged for running a red light the thing is he had been sitting at the lights for five minutes and it hadn't changed the wording of the specific section under which he was charged related to stop signs and traffic lights and referred to them as traffic regulation devices i successfully argued that as the traffic light wasn't changing it wasn't regulating traffic and he got off i couldn't believe it when the judge ruled in my favor neither could a police prosecutor i got a pro bono client's removal bios is cancelled he had a low-level drug possession conviction from the early 1980s during that brief period the active ingredient of imodium was illegal under state law but not federal law so i successfully argued that they couldn't prove it wasn't a conviction for possession of a substance that was federally legal at the time and as such was not subject to removal the argument worked and my guy went back to his business and his family 47 usc 220 b restrictions on use of automated telephone equipment law student working at law firm we have a fax machine that gets tons of spam faxes our chief partner has a vendetta against spam and he uses it to give us practice in researching and writing petitions so we catalog each fax send replies to take us off the list document everything and wait for them to fax us again then we follow up with our fcc complaint and demand letter a couple times this has ended up with the person getting mad and sending us retaliatory faxes black sheets of paper if they stop sending we don't do anything but we've gone to small claims a couple time and gotten 500 per page a couple times but we also got someone trying to sell drugs through facts but we just turned that over to the police imagine sending a spam fax about drugs to a law firm the canadian interest act specifies that all interest must be specified in a per annum percentage if it is not it's struck down to five percent simple interest per year the number of lenders and creditors who try to pull off a four percent monthly compound interest but aren't familiar with that provision of federal law i for one would like to hear a great bit more detail about this i won a case where the defendant new york city tried to exploit the really stupid law which i was able to use to win the case this was a slip and full case where my client had tripped on a piece of broken sidewalk outside of the natural history museum and shattered her arm and wrist the law is that a property owner is responsible for the sidewalk directly outside of their property the theory being even if they can't fix it they have a duty to warn people about hazards and mark the area off the museum was owned by the city there's another concept called sovereign immunity which is that governments can't be sued without their consent so the city had passed a very very stupid law that they would be exempted from the rule that they can't be sued for sidewalk injuries unless you can show they were on notice of hazard meaning you would have to show that you informed the secretary of state governor mayor etc of the exact specific crack in the sidewalk before the injury occurs and you had to do so in writing with ample time for the city to remedy it 180 days in advance if i recall correctly under normal circumstances this is impossible because no one anticipates tripping on the sidewalk 180 days in advance with the foresight to write a letter to the mayor about that specific crack luckily someone did have that foresight and there was a non-profit called big apple maps which would go around the city and with maps of government property and record with insane specificity each and every crack in the sidewalk pothole protrusion and other hazard and then publish these maps while serving copies on the government with the express with the express with the express with the express with the express with the express with the express with the i got a hold of one of these maps and visited the site and i was able to take pictures of the section of the sidewalk where my client fell and you could see newly placed concrete over the area in the exact position indicated on the map showing where the sidewalk had been repaired after my client slipped basically the government's attorney brought up the sovereign immunity defense and outlined all of the stupid steps i would have needed to go through to overcome their motion to dismiss my response was oh you mean this and gave them the map immediate settlement had a friend trip over a huge crack on a sidewalk the city tried saying they didn't know i had submitted pictures and a complaint about the crack almost a year prior he was very thankful i did so as it basically won his case there was a case here in hawaii that got thrown out like this someone got pulled over because the police saw she had way too many passengers in the car then they noticed she was drunk open and shut case well apparently in hawaii there's no law defining the maximum number of passengers in a private vehicle so the issue was that all the extra passengers weren't wearing seat belts well this failed also because the law only says that every available seat belt needs to be in use if you have six passengers and only five seat belts there's nothing at all illegal about the sixth being unrestrained so since there was no probable cause to pull her over in the first place even though she was indefensibly drunk the whole thing got thrown out hawaii has some very counterintuitive laws if your truck has seats installed in the bed your passengers must be buckled up if not they can just party back there while anyone in the cab unbuckled will get you a major ticket people regularly ride down the freeway in truck beds while sitting in lawn chairs not a lawyer but i did enough floor research to get myself out of a parking ticket one time when i was in college i was in the marching band we had a storage room in the basement of one of the dorms i was going to get something out of the storage room and parked in the loading dock behind the dorm there was just enough room next to a dumpster to fit my car i didn't want to spend five dollars on a loading zone pass and parking services because i was a broke college student so i just parked i was only going to be two minutes anyway i finished picking up what i need to sure enough i come back out to my car to her parking ticket except it isn't the 25 ticket for parking in a loading zone it's a 75 ticket for parking in a fire lane wtf there was a single sign at the very front of the side road leading up to the loading zone but no curb paint no indication of where the fire lane started and where it stopped i called parking enforcement telling them this and they wouldn't budge fine i took pictures of the loading dock and i submitted an information request to obtain the evidence pictures i got the pictures and started researching fire lane requirements in the state what i found clearly indicated that curb stripes were mandatory i called parking enforcement and told them what i found and they still wouldn't budge frustratingly i looked at the law again the party cited me for said that nothing could obstruct a fire lane at any time i looked back at the evidence photos and saw the dumpster next to my car if this was a fire lane then the dumpster was blocking the fire lane too the same state law they cited me with said that non-vehicle obstruction of a fire lane was subject to a fine of day i found satellite imagery from four years prior showing that the dumpster had been there for at least four years so i argued to university parking enforcement that if this was a fire lane then the university had been obstructing it for at least four years and would overstate 2.2 million dollars in fines if i reported it the parking ticket disappeared immediately when i sent the appeals committee their own evidence photos sat imagery and the same state law they sighted me with i drove by a week later and the dumpster was gone the curb painted and two brand new fire lane signs were up should have sent your evidence off anyway once the ticket was gone lol i have one where we won but didn't quite go as planned i had a client a while ago who was incarcerated at the state prison farm inmates had to spend 40 60 hours a week preparing slop for the hogs from expired restaurant food and cleaning the hog barns he wreaked every time i met with him even after showering he said it was miserable well he found out that some muslim inmates who couldn't work with pigs were offered to be able to work at a police horse stable instead five minutes down the road he wanted to sue saying that stable work is much less revolting than hog work and that this amounted to unequal punishment on the basis of religion i thought he had a point well the case didn't get thrown out and actually got some traction but then the prison changed their policies in response inmates who couldn't work around pigs or didn't want to would instead be transported to a factory chicken barn the next county over for work each day he asked that i dropped the lawsuit and the muslim inmates were not happy with him in my native country thailand there used to be a punishment called kakikai for political prisoners there was a two-story prison bottom floor housed the prisoners and the top floor was just a massive chicken cooperative but the floor of the coop was grated so inmates got pooped on by chickens i had a client with a serious medical problem that cost her her job and she was preparing to file bankruptcy on the medical bills and credit card debts thing was she had like fifteen thousand dollars socked away and didn't tell me it was all that was left of her life savings before we filed her case she gave it to her mom for safe keeping what she didn't know is that she could have kept the money through the bankruptcy but giving it away beforehand is a no-no i had to tell the court when i found out and when this happens the court gets the right to sue the mom for the 15 000 the thing is the mom's debt to her daughter's bankruptcy court also dischargeable in bankruptcy so the mom filed bankruptcy too and they got to keep the money after all over 10 years ago i had been at fault for rearranging someone else i had no insurance and my license had expired i don't think i need to mention that i was in a very destitute low place in life struggling with almost every conceivable aspect of living the cop was very kind as we talked but wrote me a ticket for it all one was kind of a fix-it ticket about my suspended license i sorted that out in the days after and nothing came of that ticket the cop had mentioned that he had to write the insurance ticket but to take it into court and get it lowered i was desperate to try and get my 800 insurance ticket lower because i couldn't afford something like that so i took the cops advice i went into traffic court weeks later and when it was my time to chat with the judge in front of everyone there the judge looked at the ticket stopped me and said i would like to use mr south seattle's case as an example to the gallery i almost died he went on this is a court of law but it is also a court of fairness it seems as if the officer didn't write the date of the incident in the ticket i can't hold mr south seattle accountable to this my jaw dropped i stood there the judge told me i was free to go twice before it registered i'm pretty sure that cop deliberately didn't write the date on that ticket thanks officer a guy got drunk and decided to ride his horse through town this was a small town in north carolina well he would stop at each intersection and fire his pistol in the air like some wild west cowboy anyway the guy was charged with a dui and discharging a firearm within city limits which was a felony so as one would soon find it is not just mandatory but a law that you must fire your firearm into the air at an intersection when coming through town on your horse an old blue law that never got erased he still got the dui and his horse got impounded but the dumb founder judge dropped the other charges i find the mental image of the police impounding a horse quite hilarious had a case where my defendant opponent filed an appeal from an administrative agency to the local circuit court the requirements for filing the appeal are very strict and the filing must include an appeal bond executed by the individual defendant or a corporate officer when my opponent s assistant electronically filed the appeal she attached a dart pdf of the bond without the corporate signature there's no question in my mind they had the bond with the requisite signature and simply attached the wrong version of the documents to the filing wish i could say there was a huge court fight over this and i got to slam my opponent but that's not how this works among professionals i waited until after the time to correct this era had passed i then politely called my opponent told him that i was holding the i win button and that i'd be filing a motion to that effect in a week but my opponent came to me with very favorable settlement terms within days to this day i don't know for sure if my opponent ever disclosed his mistake to his client but i doubt it typically you know but the first and only time i ever used the subway station's emergency door to get to the train the ticket gate wasn't working it was 3am i was a drunk college kid trying to catch the last train home i got caught by two subway officers and given a ticket with a huge attempted fair avoidance fine i showed up to the hearing and desperation and they ended up having to drop the fine as they were reviewing the case with me because one cop had recorded that i entered through the right hand emergency door and the other wrote that i entered through the left-hand emergency door never been so grateful in my life i'm just picturing two angry nypd officers yelling at each other in a comedic fashion damn it tony my left not your left and so on oh and of course one of the cops has to throw down his hat in anger once won a case that forbade the possession or transport of human urine in order to adulterate a urine screen it wasn't human urine it was fake lab made urine from a website another one grandpa tell me about cornhole board guy happened to me when i was a teenager my friends and i bought some beer and then went to a high school football game the first week of my senior year we obviously got caught and all six of us got tickets for underage possession of alcohol i was the dd and had been driving my dad suburban with our very unique last name on the license plate so it was really easy to figure out whose car it was went to court a few months later the ada presents her case cops testify they even brought the alcohol in as evidence right after she rested her case my attorney steps up and asks the judge to dismiss the case we are all very confused the judge looks at the aider and just kind of shakes her head and agrees my attorney explained later that she forgot to prove that we were under 21 so there wasn't a case anymore i've never been so glad for a technicality in my life and that's why you hire a lawyer well and to negotiate on your behalf when you're clearly guilty my brother is a lawyer he got a dui charge dropped for a client guy gets pulled over cop asks him to step out to perform the sobriety test after he admits to having consumed some amount of alcohol he complies but after stepping out of his car asks the officer if it's okay for him to reposition his vehicle to move it further away from the road because he feels uncomfortable being that close the cop obliges apparently the charge got dropped because the officer willingly let an intoxicated individual operate a motor vehicle i once had a client who woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of someone in his home he retrieved a colt 1911 from a bedside drawer walked into his living room and confronted a figure in the dark the person didn't identify himself but moved towards my client who fired a single shot that went through the person's shoulder turned out it was my client's stepson who had snuck out been drinking underage and stumbled home but the problem with the situation was that my client was a convicted felon several times over that meant that while the shooting itself was legally defensible his possession of the firearm was not we looked into the history of the gun itself as our client had indicated it had belonged to his grandfather who had served in the u.s army in the early 20th century ultimately we were able to bring multiple experts in and establish that the gun had been among the very first batch of firearms distributed from coal to the u.s army at the augusta armory florida statute 790.001 creates an exemption of firearm-related laws including the prohibition for felons to possess a firearm if the firearm in question was an antique meaning it was manufactured prior to 1918 since we could establish the history of the firearm to have been manufactured before 1918 our client couldn't be prosecuted for the offence and got out from underneath a potential mandatory prison sentence that's some beautiful lawyering right there but also your client probably needed a divorce lawyer after this prior to becoming an attorney i worked retail for a few months the way my assistant manager scheduled me i had to work 10 days straight including a couple of 12-hour shifts with no days off and minimal overtime the way they got around the overtime was by scheduling me the last five days of one week and the first five days of the second week so i only worked 40 hours in the work week plus the four hours of overtime for the 12 hour shift that did not seem right to me so i looked up the law in virginia while they could technically do that there was an archaic law at the time in virginia that stated if a non-essential or non-managerial worker wanted sundays off the job had to give the sundays off without penalty this was true even if the worker agreed in accepting the job to work on sundays the worker under the law could change his or her mind and ask for all sundays off as long as the worker was not essential or a manager then the employer had to accommodate i took the law to my manager and said that i was not going to work sundays anymore he said that they wouldn't schedule me that many days in a row anymore but i still had to work sundays i told him that i did not and gave him the statute it caused a big stink and i ultimately found a better job not long after but i never worked to sunday there again ironically a few years later the virginia general assembly accidentally created a law that nullified the essential worker and manager bit of the sunderlor that made the news and suddenly people were aware of this archaic law that they could ask for sundays off i remember the news saying that no one knew about this law because i thought to myself i did the general assembly repealed the entire law about sundays so now workers do have to work sundays that was the only time though that i found an archaic law to help me out man that pisses me off when managers give crappy schedules like that i've known a bunch of friends who've had to work 10 days in a row or something ridiculous really sucks that the law got repealed i heard that virginia is at the bottom when it comes to workers rights not a lawyer but i got to charge drop because of the cops bad handwriting i got a ticket on a monday night for speeding and was given the court date of like two months from then about a week and a half later i get a letter in the mail that i'm being charged with a failure to appear for court i'm in court two days later for that and tell the judge not guilty on the fta and no contest on the speeding after asking him to just look at the date on the ticket and my supposed original court date he sets them down and goes you have a point there not guilty on the failure to appear and how do you plead for the speeding charge i replied no contest i was speeding your honor he looks at the ticket sees that the cop had initially put 10 over under the nodes put my actual speed like 20 30 over and goes yes it certainly looks that way lol early in my career i had a fairly minor case in which my client's neighbor cut down a bunch of shrubs and small trees bordering their properties because they blocked his view this really irritated my client as he wanted his privacy now the monetary damages were actually not that much and this was looking like a case that really couldn't be economically litigated for what the client could afford however in researching the issue i found a rather obscure law that provides for attorneys fees to a winning plaintiff when a defendant has willfully damaged the border foliage of a ranch or farm in looking up the definition of these terms i realized that my client's property actually qualified for the statute as he used his land for growing a variety of produce for market once attorney's fees were on the table the other side quickly came and wrote a big check to cover the damages i wasn't the lawyer but a bailiff at the time this wasn't strange so much as funny in a way so an officer pulled over a man for obviously driving while intoxicated also it seemed swerving a bit slower than expected for the flow of traffic which yes that can get you a ticket and blowing through a stop sign soon as the officer pulled the guy over the man stepped out of the vehicle and took a big butt swig from a bottle of whiskey officer arrested him with dui and dude did blow well over the legal limit fast forward to the trial the guy's lawyer argued that while his client may have been impaired driving the fact remains that since he drank a big swig of alcohol as soon as he was stopped and stepped out of the vehicle the officer couldn't be certain if that was what pushed him over the legal limit or not the lawyer counted that the officer couldn't then reasonably charge him with dui as it was entirely possible that he was fine before that last big gulp long story short the judge agreed and had to throw out the dui charge though he didn't want to as he reasoned that while the defendant's reasoning was sound in the law by the same token he feared it might encourage abuse whatever the case the guy got off on the dui charge i later heard that this may not have been the first time the guy has tried that stunt i've heard of this strategy many times over the years in tx he could have been charged with an open container and public intoxication as well as driving while intoxicated if the keys were still in the ignition had a client who was a truck driver he got various penal infractions for issues with his truck several thousand dollars in fines basically anyway the evidence is pretty damning lots of pictures showing defects detailed description by the traffic control officer and so on however to find him guilty the prosecutor technically is to prove that the vehicle he was driving is considered a heavy vehicle the law says three heavy vehicle means a road vehicle or combination of road vehicles within the meaning of the highway safety code having a gross vehicle weight rating or gross combination weight rating of 4 500 kilograms or more b a bus minibus or tow truck within the meaning of that code c a road vehicle subject to a regulation made under section 622 of that code the traffic control officer had not listed the weight of the vehicle in his report there's pictures of it clearly an 18-wheel truck in the report but no weight written anywhere so i told the judge that the prosecution hadn't proven the weight of the vehicle per the definition of heavy vehicle the pictures don't prove the numerical weight just the shape of the vehicle she had no choice but to acquit him because all of the infractions he had received were for a heavy vehicle operator so he can't be guilty if they can't prove he was operating a heavy vehicle statue made it a crime to build structures in the park i.e homeless tents my guy gets picked up with zero prep i get up look at the statute and see there's an exception if they have the governor's mers or parks debt permission i said the ticket didn't say they checked for permission and they won't be able to prove that so it should be dismissed for lack of probable cause judge who hated the criminalization of poverty threw it out obligatory anal disclaimer my mom was getting sued by a debt collection company that was well known for suing people as a means of threatening them i had some time and i looked up the laws on debt collection where we lived at the time you had the right to demand in writing that they provide evidence that they actually hold the debt and they had a certain amount of time to respond under the law or they forfeit any right they had to collect said debt i sent them a certified letter we never heard back from them when we went to court i submitted the receipt for the certified letter and said they had failed to provide the proof within the legal time frame and cited the law case dismissed with prejudice the lawyer for their side didn't even care you can't lose too much sleep over your client's mistakes sometimes a client messes up a case or walks right into a trap it is what it is if i can't fix it no sense wasting more time on it than it's worth i've seen parties waste easily 50 k in legal expenses for the chance to get 30 k it's stupid if it's coming from the client and sleazy if it's coming from the lawyer i had one where a client was contesting a will halfway through the case the other side argued that my client was set to inherit less without the will if we won than she would with it if we lost and argued she lacked standing to attack the will the descendant had a very old will that benefited our client's deceased mother but that will had been revoked we found a very old doctrine and a footnote to something else entirely and argued to the judge that the law assumes you'd rather die with an old revoked will than with none at all therefore we argue he should look back to the prior will since our client would inherit her mother's bequest under the prior will he held our client had standing to bring the will contest we ended up settling the case shortly thereafter i never got why people contest will so fiercely it's like even in times of grief money still makes people into terrible persons and can't tear families apart over it in my family an old uncle died and one cousin was named in the wool but wanted her mom to be named too they fought so long over it that the mom died and the money ended up going to paying lawyers court costs not me personally but this was a case we covered in my first year of law school essentially in 1912 the appellate division held that women could not be lawyers in south africa as the relevant statute referred to person and women were less than a person incorporated law society viwoki 14 years later activist-minded judges applied this finding to a pass-law case during apartheid to sum it up they reasoned that because women were not people and only black people were required to carry a pass black women were not required to and could not be arrested or penalized for not having a pass rex v dattady had a guy in use of basic training that should have been a lawyer when pulling dorm guard duty we were supposed to ask anyone requesting entry to show their military it through the window at the door and compare the name shown to an approved entry list failure to confirm it before allowing entry was a security infraction so this one dude is dorm guard when a ti training instructor is going around from dorm to dorm to make sure the airmen on duty are following procedures the ti knocks on the door and demands entry for whatever reason the airman lets the ti in without asking to see it the ti blows a gasket and starts screaming at the m and how much trouble he's going to be in when the ti reports what happened he demands the airman hand over a form 341 which is used to document rules and fractions airmen sir i'll give you a 341 but i think you should know this door is broken a ti wft are you talking about airmen airmen sir we found out if you kick the door on the bottom left corner it opens whether it's locked or not t.i show me what you're talking about the two step out into the hallway and the airman shows the ti where to kick the door airmen sir let me step back inside and lock the door so you can try it yourself the airman steps back inside the door then locks it the ti tries kicking the door but it remains locked ti airmen i thought you said this door is broken airmen huh it worked the last time i tried it ti well it looks like it's working fine now open up and give me a 341 airman sir if you are requesting entry to the dorm i'll have to see your at first i once got out of a parking ticket by refusing to admit i was the driver in the uk parking companies that use automatic number plate recognition can get the contact details of the registered keeper of a car from the dvla our dmv and send them the fine in the post but i did some googling and found out that legally it's not the registered keeper who is liable for the fine it's whoever was driving at the time this isn't always the case there are situations where they can hold the keeper liable but in my specific case this didn't apply they really don't like you knowing this their letters are worded very carefully to give you the impression that you are liable for the finest keeper of the vehicle without ever actually outright saying that and they do the crap where you can either pay a reduced fine now or appeal and pay a bigger fine later i appealed i didn't lie and claim i wasn't the driver instead i just pointed out that they are contacting me as the registered keeper that the registered keeper isn't legally liable to pay the fine and that i am under no obligation to give them any details of who was driving at the time it took months and two appeals but eventually i won and didn't have to pay the 20 pound fine i would have paid but i felt like i hadn't done anything wrong i'd not parked illegally or over time or not paid or anything i'd just forgotten to validate my parking after shopping at tesco if you are new to the channel you can subscribe i publish new videos every day until then check another video so bye for now

Channel: Updoot Studios

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Keywords: lawyers, lawyer stories, weirdest laws in the us, weirdest laws, weirdest laws in the world, #updootst, updoot, updoot reddit, updoot everything, reddit on tap, toadfilms, pewdiepie, reddit, askreddit, funny reddit, reddit stories, top posts, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, /r, r/, r/askreddit, top posts of r/, askreddit reading, best reddit posts, top posts of all time, people of reddit, askreddit question, ask reddit, subreddit, sub, reddit stories 2021

Id: k_CVHTr2oR8

Length: 33min 25sec (2005 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021