TalesFromTheLaw Rules of Civil Procedure

My boss tossed me a personal injury file on short notice in order to do cross examination at the videotaped trial testimony of plaintiff's medical expert. This was a couple of weeks prior to trial, but opposing counsel wanted the testimony in the can in case his doctor was unavailable to appear live. I'd done one or two depositions in the case so I was generally familiar with the facts and claimed injuries.

It was held at a large multi-physician orthopedics practice, so I did some last minute prep in the busy waiting area while I figured plaintiff's counsel was meeting with the doctor to prepare him. At one point I looked up and saw plaintiff's counsel walking out the office area with someone in street clothes. Counsel put his arm on the guy's shoulder as he walked him out to the parking lot. He retuned alone in a few minutes and went back into the office area for another 20 minutes, then came out and ushered me, the court reporter and the videographer in to start the trial testimony.

The man in street clothes was not the plaintiff (I met him at his deposition), and definitely not a doctor.

The direct was uneventful, all the magic words were said, and the doctor did a decent job. I started in with the standard questions on cross, the typical credibility stuff: You're not a treating doctor, you're being paid for your testimony, you often serve as an expert in litigation, how many times for plaintiffs v. defendants, etc.

I asked him if he'd ever performed medical exams for this particular plaintiff attorney on other litigation matters. He responded that he "believed" he may have at some point in the past, but could not possibly say when, how much he'd charged, how many times he'd been hired, what his opinions were, without reviewing all of his files which would take hours.

"So you can't even give me an estimate of the last time you examined one of plaintiff counsel's other clients for purposes of rendering expert testimony without a full review of all your patient files; whether it was a month, a year, three years?" "I'm afraid so".

There's that saying about missing all the shots you don't take..

"How about 45 minutes ago?" Confused look from the witness, and opposing counsel perks up. "To clarify, did you examine one of Mr. X's clients about 45 minutes ago for the purpose of rendering an expert medical opinion in a litigation matter". I'd describe the color of the doctor's face as bright crimson (he should have that looked at). Plaintiff's counsel erupted with a series of angry objections, but the damage was done. No judge was going to later carve that question, or the doctor's reaction, out of the cross. The doctor suddenly recalled that, why yes, he had in fact done such a medical exam less than an hour earlier. His excuses for the lapse of memory were completely lame and entirely unconvincing.

The case was settled for nuisance value/peanuts, as liability was poor and the case only had legs because of multiple disc herniations (which of course our expert opined were pre-existing). In the exchange of letters finalizing settlement the plaintiff's attorney called my boss "a senile old fool" (misdirected anger at me I'm sure). My boss had that letter framed and hung it on the wall just outside his office where it stayed for years until he retired.

I was pushing forty when Mrs. Bristle’s file hit my desk, some estate litigation where a mother’s last will and testament left my clients next to nothing, and gave their sister, Mrs. Bristle, pretty well the entire estate.  When I saw the defendant’s name it looked familiar, and after a bit of Googling, I confirmed what I suspected:  the defendant, Mrs. Bristle, was my former grade nine English teacher.

I remembered Mrs. Bristle very well.  She was supposed to be teaching us the wonders of English literature, but what she really taught us were her rules, by which she meant her arbitrary whims, expressed in vague language, backed up by petty punishments for non-compliance. There was an art to getting along with Mrs. Bristle, and while most of the other kids learned it easily enough, somehow I did not.  I have trouble learning unwritten rules, and in Mrs. Bristle’s class where unwritten and constantly changing rules were the order of the day, I didn’t stand a chance.  Mrs. Bristle admonished me almost daily for ‘not paying attention’.  I did detentions, re-wrote assignments, and made visits to the principal’s office, all because I apparently wasn’t listening, wasn’t doing what I was told. 

Mrs. Bristle often took me to task for missing some obvious but unstated part of an assignment.  One time I handed  in a sonnet, and received an “F” because the rhyming pattern was Petrarchan, not Shakespearean.   But she would be nice to me, Mrs. Bristle would always say when she tossed my work back at me.  She would give me another chance to hand the assignment in with the arbitrary changes she required, in the end giving me a good mark, but then heavily downgraded for being late.

Mrs. Bristle's case worked its way through the early stages, and every time I exchanged an email with her (she didn't need a lawyer, she claimed) I thought about the unpleasant time I’d spent in her class.  I had a rough time in high school, and I always resent anything that makes me dwell on it. 

After a few months, the case was ready for the next stage.  It was time to examine Mrs. Bristle, to find out why she thought her mother wanted to disinherit most of the family and enrich Mrs. Bristle alone.  I showed up at the court reporter’s office early as usual, to get set up.

“What’s up?” Adam asked. He was a lawyer colleague, about my vintage, and we were sitting in the court reporter's lounge.

“I’m going to examine my grade nine English teacher today,” I said, “and it's going to be fun.”   I explained how she’d hated me back in the day, and had done her best to make my life hell.

“What’s the case about?” Adam said.  Adam had been around the block, same as me, and it took only a few words for me to summarize everything that mattered in the file.  “Estate fight, one sibling against four, undue influence, holograph will cutting out most of the siblings, competing with an older will, a formal one, where the shares are equal.” 

Adam nodded appreciatively.  “Nice fees, if the estate’s got the cash.”

“It does,” I said.  We chatted for a bit, and then sat there in silence as we each did the last bit of prep for the cases we had that day, making notes, reading documents and drinking coffee.  My alarm dinged just before ten, and I made my way to the examination room, and Mrs. Bristle, the teacher who’d greatly disliked the grade nine version of Calledinthe90s.  I was curious to see if she would like the older version any better.

* * * 

The examination started, and Mrs. Bristle and I sparred for a while, me tossing vague questions her way, and criticizing her when she did not understand.  I kept her on the defensive for close to three hours, until it was getting on to one p.m.

“Aren’t you in a conflict or something?” she said to me just before the lunch break,  when she’d finally made the connection, and understood that the lawyer asking her questions was a former student.

“No conflict,” I said, dismissing her concerns with a wave of my hand.  “During the lunch break, there’s something I need you to do.”

“I don’t want to answer questions during lunch.  I need a break.”  The examination had been rough on Mrs. Bristle.  She was not used to being asked questions, to being held to account, to being constantly challenged, and even having her grammar corrected now and again.

“You’ll get your lunch break. But while you’re eating a sandwich or whatever, keep this copy of the holograph will next to you.” The will on which Mrs. Bristle’s case relied was a holograph will, meaning that Mrs. Bristle’s mother had written the will entirely in hand from start to finish. The mother, or more likely, Mrs. Bristle herself, had downloaded a will form from the web, and had completed it in accordance with the website’s instructions.  

Holograph wills are special.  You can do a holograph will without a witness, without a lawyer, without anything at all, so long as you did it right.  But if you got anything wrong, if you messed up in any way, it was invalid.

“You want me to read the will again over lunch?” Mrs. Bristle said.

“No.  Instead, I want you to make a handwritten copy of it.”

“You want me to write it out?  Whatever for?”

“There’s an allegation that the will wasn’t written by your mother, and that you wrote it up instead.”  An allegation that I’d made up myself, that morning, while I was sitting in the lawyer's lounge, drinking coffee and munching on a muffin. My clients had not challenged the will’s handwriting; it was obviously their mother’s, totally different from Mrs. Bristle’s own writing. But I had decided otherwise.

Mrs. Bristle was appropriately outraged at being unjustly accused of forgery.  Said she could prove it wasn’t her handwriting, could absolutely prove it.

“Then let’s settle the forgery issue once and for all,” I said, “write out the will in your own hand, so that our document experts can examine it, compare it with the original, and make a determination.”

“I don’t need the entire lunch break for that,” Mrs. Bristle said, “and I’d rather eat lunch at the restaurant downstairs.”  The will was barely a page long, at most three hundred words, that being all it took for the mother to allegedly disinherit most of her children, and inexplicably leave everything to Mrs. Bristle.  The mother had written up the will herself, but she’d been ninety at the time, while living in Mrs. Bristle’s house, and very much under her influence.  

“I’ve retained five different experts,” I said, “and each of them will need copies.”

“Five experts?  Why so many experts?”

“Each expert needs ten samples, for comparison purposes.  It’s going to take you a while, Mrs. Bristle.  I suggest you get started.”  I overrode her protests and once she started to write, I left her in the room, and went to the lawyer’s lounge to eat their small sandwiches and drink more of the excellent coffee.  After a while I stopped by the examination room to look in on Mrs. Bristle.  I wanted to check in on her progress.

Mrs. Bristle asked for more time, complained of writer’s cramp, and asked me again if it was really necessary for her to write out the holograph will fifty times in her own hand, and I assured her that there was nothing for it, that it was absolutely necessary.  I returned to the lounge to check my emails, leaving her hard at the homework I’d given her.

After a while my colleague, Adam, popped into the lounge.  He asked me how it was going, the examination with the teacher, the teacher who had treated me so badly.

“I’m making her write lines.”  Adam laughed, and laughed harder when I explained that I wasn’t kidding, that I really was making Mrs. Bristle write lines, and how I was doing it.  His laughter attracted attention, and a few other lawyers asked what was up.  “He’s making his teacher witness write lines,” Adam said, and the lounge hooted with laughter when I told everyone what was up.  

It was one of the pettiest things I’ve ever done to anyone, making my grade nine teacher write lines.  But the writing lines thing was just a warmup.  The real revenge had yet to come.  I returned to the examination room after a while, to check up on Mrs. Bristle, see how she was doing.

“This is taking forever,” she said, “and I really don’t get why you need it.”  She had writer’s cramp, and was shaking her hand to get the kinks out.  I picked up the stack of holograph wills she’d created, and flipped through it.  She was nowhere near finished.

“On second thought,” I said, “maybe it isn’t necessary. I think you’re right.  I don’t need any handwriting samples from you.”

“Why not?” she said.

“The will is invalid,” I explained, adding that because her mother had used a pre-printed form off the web, the law would not recognize the will.  “A holograph will has to be entirely in the testator's handwriting,” I explained, “every single word entirely in handwriting from start to finish.  This will doesn’t qualify, because your mother used a standard form, a form printed off the web, with instructions and boxes and questions and so on, and when you do that,  then the will is no longer a holograph will. It’s a regular will, and regular wills need to be properly witnessed.  This one isn’t witnessed, and that means it’s not a will.  It’s just a piece of paper.”

“Are you trying to tell me you only figured that out now? What kind of lawyer are you, anyways?”

“What kind of lawyer am I?  I’m a lawyer who makes a witness skip lunch, and sit in a small room all alone, and write lines.  Sound familiar, Mrs. Bristle?”  She said nothing, and just stared at me.  I closed the door on her, leaving her alone once more, and left for the Middle Temple Tavern where the lawyers all hung out. It was time to hoist a Guinness and enjoy my petty triumph.

One of my favorite stories in my legal career is the chicken story. I’m a paralegal that works for a law firm in a rural community. I got to sit in on an arbitration in my first couple months working in the legal field. It involved a case where a chicken coupe was an issue of contention. At one point, opposing counsel who seemed to be stumbling through and grasping at straws asked our client to “describe the chickens in the chicken coupe”. It was very hard to not dramatically object on the basis of irrelevance for comedic sake because the whole thing seemed like a bit at that point.

Edit: It is unfortunately a chicken “coop”. These chickens are not operating compact vehicles.

It was a tough time for lawyers back in the early nineties. Money was tight and paying clients were scarce. I was renting space in a small law office from a guy named Aaron, and his practice wasn’t doing great. He had an associate, a young guy named Dimitris, and although Dimitris was a talented rainmaker, he was also accepting cash retainers under the table (which was pretty bad) and not telling Aaron about it (which was even worse).

Aaron was chronically short of money, and I was barely surviving, with a young family to support. A year or so after I joined him, Aaron called me into his office. “I gotta problem,” he said, “I got this fifty thousand in my trust account, just enough to cover what the client owes me.” Aaron worked for real estate developers, and before the real estate market collapsed in ‘89, he’d done great. But now he was hurting. “Doesn’t sound like a problem to me,” I said, “just take the money.” I was a bit jealous; I could not imagine having $50k in my trust account.

“Yeah, but then I got this,” he said, passing over an application record to me. I didn’t know much about civil procedure; I’d been defending criminals since I was called, but the document was clear enough. Aaron’s client claimed that she didn’t owe Aaron a penny and that the money was hers. She wanted it back.

“How’d the money wind up in your trust account?” I asked. “That’s a long story,” Aaron said. I found that kind of weird, but on the other hand, his moral compass was on the fritz and, as I later learned, he also had a cocaine addiction. He was ten years away from disbarment at this point, and desperate for cash.

“So what are you going to do?” I asked. “I’m not doing anything,” he said, “because you’re going to deal with it.”

“Why don’t you get Dimitris to do it?” Dimitris had civil experience; I had almost none, other than the little I’d gained from fixing Dimitris’s fuckups. Dimitris was a great rainmaker, but a terrible lawyer. His career ended the same way as Aaron’s, a nasty crash and burn at a Law Society disciplinary hearing.

“The application’s in two weeks, and he’s got another case.” Maybe, but what was more likely was that Aaron seriously needed the fifty grand, and he knew that he could not trust Dimitris to deal with it.

“You know this is going to be tough, right?” I said.

“How tough?”

“Ten grand tough.” I was going to go to show my face in a civil courtroom, I was going to need a pretty big incentive, given how likely it was that I’d fuck up and embarrass myself.

“Ten grand?” he said, shocked. I stuck to my guns, because I needed money at least as bad as Aaron, maybe worse. “Ten,” I said.

“Only if you win,” Aaron said, and I agreed. I took the application record to the county law library (no Quicklaw or Westlaw back in those days, at least not for small firms like ours, a little place that survived on the crumbs that fell from the tables of the big firms), and I spent the day researching. The next day I drafted our responding record, and two weeks later I argued my first civil case. And I won, not because I was good, but because opposing counsel was dreadful.

I was back to the office before noon, and Aaron was ecstatic and even paid for a celebratory lunch. Dimitris was there, too, and he listened to Aaron rhapsodize about the fifty Gs that were coming his way. Or forty, taking my cut into account. But then I gave him the bad news.

“You know there’s this thing called an ‘appeal’, right?” I said.

“I know that,” Aaron said, “but who cares? They can appeal all they want; that won’t stop me taking the money.

Dimitris nodded his head up and down in agreement. “The guy hasn’t appealed, and until he does, there’s no stay. Even if he does appeal, maybe there’s no stay.” For once Dimitris was correct; in a case like this it wasn’t clear to me, an ignorant junior, whether there was an automatic stay in the event of an appeal.

“That’s true,” I said, “but suppose you lose the appeal?”

“Fuck him,” Aaron said, and Dimitris chorused his agreement. “So he gets a judgment, so what?” Aaron added.

“If you take the cash and the court rules against you, it means you’ve committed a breach of trust.”

That got Aaron’s attention. “So what do we do?”

“Nothing, at least for now,” I said. I pointed out that opposing counsel was pretty bad, and maybe he would leave the appeal to the last minute, or fuck it up. Slow lawyers are always at the risk of the facts moving against them. They are exposed to every change of tide, to every misfortune. I suspected that opposing counsel was a last-minute kind of guy, and I had a plan for dealing with him.

“Let’s wait to see if he appeals, and then let’s see what we should do.” Dimitris was all for grabbing the cash on the spot, but Aaron listened to my note of caution and agreed to wait.

But it was a tough wait for Aaron and for me. For the next month, every time the fax machine made its incoming fax noise, our antennae would go up. The receptionist was on standing orders to alert us if anything came in on the $50k file, but nothing did.

By day twenty-nine, Aaron was a wreck, and I too was feeling the pressure. The tension built all day, and by four p.m., Aaron was beside himself. “We just gotta get through one more day,” Aaron said.

“He’s already missed the deadline,” I said.

"But it’s only been twenty-nine days, and you said he had thirty.”

“Correct. But still, he’s missed his chance. He’s too late.” I explained the plan I had in mind, and Aaron looked at me in amazement. He buzzed Dimitris’s extension, and a minute later he walked in.

“Say it again, this plan of yours,” Aaron said, and I repeated it for Dimitris’s benefit.

“We shut the office down for the day and lock the door. Tell the staff they don't need to come in, except for one person to handle the phones. We cancel all appointments and just work quietly on our own.”

“But he can still serve by fax,” Dimitris said. I stepped out of Aaron’s office. A few seconds later I returned. “The fax machine was having issues, so I unplugged it,” I said.

Aaron looked at me closely. “Can we get away with that? Shutting the office for the day? What about the phones?”

I explained that we’d put a clerk on the phones, the most senior staff member, a smart woman with a sense of mischief. “She’ll be on a script, telling people that there is a vague tragedy of some kind, a relative or a friend, something like that.”

“We won’t get away with it,” said Dimitris, but only because it was my idea and he wished he had thought of it. Dimitris got away with all kinds of shit, until he didn’t and got disbarred for fraud.

“We have to try,” I said, and so we did. Aaron told all the staff that the office would be closed the next day because he got some bad personal news, but he let the senior clerk in on what was up.

So the next morning, it’s around ten a.m, and there’s only me and Aaron and the clerk, because Dimitris was in court somewhere. So the phone rang now and again, and whenever the clerk picked up she stuck to the script I’d written for her, an opaque little blurb about why the office was shut down. But then just after ten o’clock, another call came through, and this time the clerk put the caller on hold.

“It’s him,” she said in a harsh whisper, even though the caller was on the other side of town and couldn’t hear a thing. “He wants to know why our fax machine isn’t working.”

“Stick to the script,” I said, and she did. She picked up the phone again and explained how the fax machine was down, but that was ok because the repair guy was going to be there at noon, and they’d have it up and running lickety-split, no problem. The caller hung up, and we all went back to work.

A little past noon, opposing counsel called again, and this time the clerk told him that the fax machine still wasn’t working, but she was going out to get a new one, and when she got back she’d plug it in and all would be good. By three, the fax machine would be up and running, no problem for sure. The caller hung up again, and Aaron and I went out for lunch, making sure that the office door was firmly locked behind us. I had to pay for my own lunch this time.

“Are we gonna get away with it?” Aaron said. I didn’t know for sure, but I told him that it was starting to look pretty good. We headed back to the office to wait it out.

At three-fifteen, the lawyer called again, and I could tell from the look on the clerk’s face that the guy was angry. But she stuck to her script, explaining in considerable detail and at great length about the difficulties with the old machine, but how we had a better one now, a really good one that was working just fine, so far as sending faxes went, but no one had sent any faxes yet, but if he wanted to try he could--

The man’s scream of rage erupted from the headset, audible even though the guy wasn’t on speakerphone. His hang-up was pretty loud, too.

“I’ll bet his process server is on his way over,” I said. We told the clerk to take off, and then Aaron and I got to work to make the place ready for the visit.

By the time we heard the first loud knock on the door, we were seated comfortably in the reception area, with a bottle of scotch on the table and each of us with a glass in our hands. The first knock was loud, and the next one was even louder.

“I know you’re in there,” the visitor said, and I almost started laughing. It was no process server, but the lawyer himself, bearing a last-minute notice of appeal and desperate to serve it. I stayed silent and so did Aaron, but it was tough.

The man knocked again, slamming his knuckles against the door, demanding that we open the office, now, right now, or he’d report us to the Law Society. He’d sue us, he was gonna fuck us up blah blah blah and as he raged Aaron and I were convulsed with silent laughter, which only got worse when we heard the man jiggling the doorknob. It sounded like he was pushing his bulky body against the door, too, from the sound of things.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” the man yelled, “I can still serve you.”

Unfortunately for opposing counsel, I’d foreseen his next move, which was to try to shove the papers under the door. Aaron and I had moved a bunch of boxes of legal-sized paper against the door, so the small space between the door and the floor was shut tight. I heard the crinkling sound of papers pushing up against the barrier of boxes, but nothing was getting under that door. The lawyer huffed and puffed for another ten minutes or so before finally giving up and going away. Aaron and I waited an hour, just to be sure, and then we snuck out, taking the stairs instead of the elevator.

The next morning, Aaron took the funds from trust, applied them to his accounts. Then he gave me a check for ten thousand dollars, the most money I had ever seen in my life. I deposited it that day, and that money carried my wife and me for the next few months. It was a godsend for a young lawyer who was struggling to build his practice.

The moral of the story is don’t do things at the last minute. Don’t wait until the day the limitation period is expiring to sue or appeal or whatever. You never know what can happen on the last day.

I don’t think about my law school transcript very often. I haven’t seen my transcript since the last time I had a résumé, and that was back in eighty-nine. But whenever I get one of my old law school’s fundraising things, before I hit delete I always think of the man I’ll call Professor Golding, and the D he put on my transcript.

I regretted taking Family Law almost from the start. I’d chosen it because it met all my requirements. I wasn’t going to have to write an essay; the final exam was worth one hundred percent, and most important of all, the final exam was closed book. I had no intention of practicing family law, but I loved closed book exams, because that’s how I got my best marks. Rote memorization is what I do best, and closed book exams cater to students who could memorize. Plus I liked the prof. I’d taken Civ Pro with her in first year, and it had been fun, so I thought I’d give family law a try.

But the old prof I liked went on medical leave, and the school found a replacement for the semester. He was maybe forty, and he was the male darling of the feminist movement. I’ll call him Professor Golding. I didn’t learn a lot about family law from Professor Golding, because he spent most of the time telling us about his pet theories. He believed that “all sex was rape,” because consent was a male construct, and as such, not binding on women. That didn’t make any sense to me. I wasn’t on board with his anti-porn diatribes, either. He wanted all porn banned, and the purveyors of it jailed. I wonder what he thought when PornHub came along, but that’s between him and his browser history.

For the first couple of weeks I had the sense to say nothing when Golding rambled on about his pet theories. When he actually taught law, I took notes, and the rest of the time I read materials for other courses while listening to his lectures with half an ear. I kept my head down, determined to stay out of trouble and never to comment about the nonsense he was spouting. But the thing is, I have trouble keeping my mouth shut. My mouth has gotten me into trouble my entire life. When the occasion least calls for it, I will blurt things, and one day during a family law lecture I blurted.

It was a rare occasion in our class, because our prof was teaching us something about Family Law for a change. Professor Golding was talking about custody, and how it was a myth that the mother usually gets custody. “Fifty percent of reported cases result in the father getting custody,” he said, as evidence for his thesis. Pens scratched as students took note of this important fact. But I’d worked in a law firm the previous summer, and I’d learned a little bit, and before I could stop myself, my hand went up. It was the first time I’d raised my hand in Family Law.

“But most cases don’t end in a reported decision,” my mouth said, all by itself with no help from my brain, “just a few lines of an endorsement.” My brain tried to reassert control, but it was too late. “Only the more remarkable cases get reported. Maybe the instances where fathers get custody are overreported because they are unusual and remarkable.” That was my geek brain speaking, my physics and stats brain, the part of my brain that lived in a little corner all by itself. It didn’t get along very well with the common sense part of my brain.

I knew right away that I’d fucked up, when heads turned and looked at me disgustedly. The prof didn’t answer me. Instead, he just continued his lecture. “As I was saying,” he drawled, and I felt his dismissal like a slap in the face. I resolved then and there never to open my mouth again in Family Law.

But the prof wouldn’t let it go. For a month or so, Golding tried to draw me in. He’d make a statement, and then if he wanted an easy laugh, he’d say, “but maybe I’m wrong; Mr. Calledinthe90s might have something to say.” This would draw some sycophantic titters from the students who sat in the front row, but eventually the joke got tired, and he dropped it. I really resented it, because I’m a bit sensitive to being singled out. Or rather, more than a bit sensitive. In fact, I hate it. But when he finally stopped, I was grateful, and I figured that he’d forgotten about me. But I was wrong, as I found out when I wrote the exam.

This was Golding’s first Family Law course, and I didn’t know what kind of exam he was going to set. But I followed my playbook, and I studied for Family Law final like I did for any other closed book exam: I got my hands on the old exam papers from the library, and for each question I memorized an answer. And when I say memorized, I mean exactly that. I memorized the answers that I wrote word-for-word, down to the case citations and passages from leading cases. Like I said, rote memorization is my thing. I may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, but I make use of what I’ve got, and my brain likes to memorize. It likes to be fed. So while prepping for Family Law, I fed my brain reams of case law and statues and doctrines. When it was time for the final, I was all set.

I walked into the final totally confident. It was the last exam of third year, and I was excited to be finishing up. So far as I was concerned, it was the last exam I was ever going to write, because in those days, the bar ads were a joke. Anyone with a pulse could pass a bar exam back then, not at all like it is now. So for me, Family law was truly my final exam, my goodbye to the academic world.

When I glanced at the exam paper, I knew it was going to be a breeze. I had my answers ready for each question, and I wrote them easily and legibly. I wrote the answers in pen, with hardly a mistake or a correction, and with thirty minutes still to go I stood up, handed in my paper and left. I’d written enough exams to know that I’d written an A exam. I headed back to residence, and when my friends finished their exams we went out and got drunk.

I was still on campus a few days later when my phone rang. I picked up, and when the caller identified himself as the Registrar, I was curious, and a bit excited. I knew I’d done well, but I wondered, had I won a prize of some kind? Not the gold medal, of course; I wasn’t in the running for that, but maybe I’d won some other prize, some mark of distinct--

“There’s a question about your family law exam,” the Registrar said.

“What about it?”

“Professor Golding wants to see you in his office.”

“When?” I said.

“Now,” the Registrar said.

That was weird. Really weird. I headed out of the one-bedroom apartment in grad res where I’d lived the last three years, and walked over to the building where Golding and the other profs had their offices. I knocked on the prof’s open door. He looked up at me, a grin on his face.

“That was quite an exam you wrote,” he said, gesturing at me to close the door behind me. I closed it.

“Thanks,” I said, taking a seat opposite his desk. There was malice behind the man’s grin, but I sometimes, or rather, most times, have trouble reading people and situations, and I didn’t realize right away what was up.

“You really nailed it.”

“I worked pretty hard,” I admitted, still clueless.

“Really,” he said. I noticed that his voice was dripping with sarcasm. I’m not good at verbal games, and so I asked him why he’d asked the Registrar to summon me to his office.

“This was a closed book exam,” he said.

“That’s why I picked it,” I said, still not getting it. But he only laughed. “I’ll bet,” he said, and he laughed some more, and it was only then that it hit me. But I wanted to make him say it. I asked again why he’d summoned me to his office. He tried to spar a bit with me, draw me out, but I kept asking him, why did you call me down? I persisted, until he came out and said what he’d been implying, that he thought that I’d cheated.

“I still have all my notes back at my place,” I said, “I’ll go get them.” I started to rise, but he stopped me.

“No need for notes. I think you’ve had enough help from notes. I don’t know how you got your notes into the exam room, but I’m not giving you a chance to get notes this time.” He passed me a single piece of paper that had three Family Law questions on it. I recognized two of them right away; they’d been on the exam. The third hadn’t been, but I’d prepped for that question, too, and knew the answer cold.

“Why don’t you try answering these questions now,” he said, and the malicious smile was all over his face.

I think Professor Golding might have had his own issues reading people. If he thought I was scared, he was very much mistaken. I wasn’t scared. I was angry, and heading quickly for one of my uncontrollable rages, for one of my furious meltdowns that have at times marred my life. If he’d been some other prof, someone who hadn’t taunted me for half a semester, maybe I would have been gentler with him. But I hated Professor Golding. I knew him for what he was: a bully. I had problems with bullies starting in grade school, and I knew bullies in all their varieties. Professor Golding was a truly cowardly bully, the kind that pushes you from behind, and then melts into the crowd so that he can’t be identified.

“Sure,” I said, “I’ll answer your questions. But first, you have to give me something in writing, something that says you think I was cheating.” Cowardly bullies like camouflage, and the best way to deal with them is to expose them.

“I will do no such thing,” he said primly. That’s when I really started to get mad. I got up, and opened his office door.

“If you’re going to accuse me of cheating, then do it openly,” I said. I was not speaking quietly. The prof’s office opened up onto a common area. There was a secretary or two, and a lot of other prof’s offices, most of them with open doors.. He ordered me to close the door, but I refused. I stood in the doorway, speaking loudly, saying that if he wanted to accuse me of cheating, I wouldn't let him do it behind a closed door. He raised his voice, I raised mine, and then next thing I knew the Dean was standing there. He asked what was going on.

“Professor Golding says I cheated on the final,” I said, “but he won’t put the accusation in writing.” The Dean looked at Golding. “Is that true?”

“I was giving him another chance,” Golding said, “because his exam was too good for a closed book.”

The Dean looked at me. “I’d take that chance he’s giving you, if I were you,” he said, so I went back into Golding’s office, and sat at the desk opposite the prof. When I’d walked in, he had the look of a mall cop that had caught a shoplifter. That look was gone now, replaced by a glare of pure hatred.

“I need a pen, if you want me to write some answers,” I said. He picked up a pen and tossed it at me. I let it fall on the table in front of me. “Paper,” I said, “I’m going to need paper.” He sullenly passed me a pad. I picked it up, and tackled the first of the questions, one of the ones from the final. The answer came to me easily. I knew that my answer wasn't quite as good as what I wrote before, because my memory can hold only so much for so long. Give it another week or two, and much of it would have been lost, but the final had been only a few days ago, and almost everything was still there. I wrote quickly, not trying to make my writing neat and tidy. I finished my answer in half the time that it had taken me when I wrote the exam. When I finished, I tossed the paper back at him, and then started on the next. While I scribbled the answer to the second question, I could see from the corner of my eye that he had my exam paper in one hand, and the recent effort in the other. He was comparing them. And as he compared them, he was very still. The only sound in the room was the scratching of my pen on the paper. He hadn’t finished his review before I tossed the next answer at him, and then started on the final question.

The last question was one not included in the exam. But it was easy, really easy, a simple question on the doctrine of constructive trust. I scribbled out an answer in ten minutes, with a mostly accurate quote from Pettkus v. Becker. He was just finishing my answer to the second question when I passed over the answer to the third. He looked up at me.

“You can go now,” he said. He was dismissing me, the way he had in class, like I was of no account.

“What did you say?” My voice was tight. I was only just barely in control of myself.

“I said you can go.”

I got up and opened the door to his office. I stood there in the doorway for the second time.

“So did I cheat, Professor Golding? Am I a cheater, a big fucking cheater? Did I bring notes into the exam, Professor Golding? Are you going to call for an academic hearing? Are you gonna back up your accusation?” He told me to keep my voice down, but that only made me raise it. Then the Dean was at my elbow again.

“I never said he was cheating,” Golding said, addressing the Dean, and ignoring me.

“You are a coward. A fucking coward,” I said to him, and then I walked away, and I didn’t hear from Golding again, until I saw my transcript, with an A each in Trusts, Administrative Law and Commercial Law, and then a D, a big fat fucking D in Family Law. Like I said, Golding was a coward.

Professor Golding was hired only to teach only the one semester, and so far as I’m aware, he wasn’t invited back, probably because I wasn’t the only one who thought he was a wanker.

Maybe he gave me that D because I had a meltdown in his office and screamed the fuck word at him more than a few times. But I suspect that the D was coming my way regardless, and I’m glad that I paid for it in advance.

I've spent the last several years working with law firms as a computer forensics expert. I've helped lawyers with a great many cases over the years, analyzing evidence for their clients on computers, phones, drives, the works, and even presenting/explaining it all as an expert witness in court. One case in particular sticks out.

During a particularly contentious divorce case, out of nowhere, the wife was making allegations of physical abuse. And she was being very specific, right down to the date & time, location, everything. The husband, who was very wealthy, was also undergoing radiation & chemotherapy treatment for late stage cancer, and from his physical condition, it was obvious to everyone, even to non-medical personnel, he couldn't win a fight with a dried leaf, let alone raise a hand to his wife, who was several inches taller, probably 20 pounds heavier, and a betting man would say she was probably stronger than him as well.

He countered by saying he had photos on his phone proving he was far away from the incident and couldn't have touched his wife. This is where I come in. His lawyer brings the phone over to my office. I find the photos in question, verified the metadata wasn't doctored/altered after the fact on any of the photos, and determined if there was anything else that was worth testifying to about the court. Luckily for him, the location service was enabled on his phone when the photos were taken, so the phone embedded the location's GPS coordinates into the photos. I emailed the info to the lawyer and he replied, asking me to determine the exact location of the GPS coordinates on a map, the distance from where she alleged it took place, and what my schedule looked like to come testify on the matter.

When it came time for me to take the stand, the lawyer for our side calls me up, and with large posterboards of the photos, along with the metadata listed, I showed the court all the methods I used to determine the photos & the metadata they contained were original and undoctored, and then showed the GPS coordinates embedded in the photos, and their location on a map. I showed that the location of the photos I extracted from his phone (which were selfies he took documenting fall injuries he sustained prior to going to the ER) were taken 45 miles from where his wife stated, under oath, the assault took place, and the timestamp was within three minutes of her allegation. I also verified that the only recent change in the phone's time was the phone automatically changing to Daylight Savings Time.

The judge then turns to the wife, who was representing herself (and most definitely fit the cliche of a fool for a client), rather pointedly asked "Are you sure you wish to continue with this case?" and then asked the wife if she had any questions for me. All the wife said was that all the things I said were stupid and had nothing to ask me. As I passed by the wife's desk, she muttered several choice four-letter words to me. The judge clearly heard her, and was NOT happy. I left the courtroom prior to hearing anything else, but from what the lawyer told me afterwards, not only did the wife come dangerously close to being thrown in jail for contempt & perjury chargers that they already had her dead to rights on, the husband ended up getting everything he was asking for in the divorce, and she got nothing.

Law students in Canada have to complete a one-year apprenticeship before they are called to bar. The process is called “articling”. As the end of the articling year draws near, students always wonder whether the firm will keep them on, or give them the heave-ho. This is how I got the heave-ho.

I saw my uncle at Christmas, when we were over at his house for dinner. He ask how my articles were going. The short answer was ‘not good’, but I told him that things were ok.

“If you decide to stay on there, let me know the lay of the land. Maybe I can send some work there.” My uncle was a VP in Giant Corp., a large institution embedded in Canada's financial system, and my uncle was in charge of adding or removing firms from the company’s list of approved counsel. My uncle was the star of his side of the family, the one that had risen up high. His brothers, including my dad, had done well enough, but my financial institution uncle had really hit it out of the park, career-wise.

I didn’t see my uncle all that much; once or twice a year was about it, but he always interested in what I was up to, how I was doing. He’d offered to pave the way into Downtown Big Law for me, that being a trivial task for him. All he had to do was drop a word into the ear of the managing partner of this firm or that, and I would be in. But me being me, I refused. “I want to do this without any help,” I said, and while my uncle understood my decision, he let me know that he was there to help.

Over the next six months I suffered in the strange hell that was my articling year, and as June approached I sometimes asked myself what exactly had motivated me to refuse my uncle’s help. Looking back, it was exactly the kind of help I needed. Other people in the Firm had gotten their jobs through family influence, the junior lawyer that I worked for being a prime example. But I had been focused on ‘doing it on my own’, and that’s probably how the Firm saw me, as a young guy doing it on his own, without influence, a nobody.

The month of May was torture for me, and then June came and with it, the end of my articles. At the beginning of June, it was time for a meeting with the Partner who had been overseeing my articles. It was the exit interview, marking the end of my time at the Firm.

“I shoulda listened to my uncle,” I said to myself as I walked down the hall on my last trip to the corner office of the Partner that was overseeing me. If I’d listened to my uncle, let him help me, maybe I’d have landed at another firm, a firm that might have respected me. Instead, I was walking down a hall to an office where a man was waiting to fire me.

The Partner was supposed to be overseeing my articles, but he hadn’t been overseeing me, not really; he only summoned me to his office when something went wrong, and unsupervised me went wrong a lot, because the Partner had handed me over to a three-year junior for training. The junior had used me to do his legal research, write his legal argument and appear on his motions, taking credit for the things that went well, and throwing me under the bus when things went wrong. Usually the Partner yelled at me when I came to see him, his office windows rattling with the sound of his rage. But today he was all affability, for this was the last time he’d ever have to see me. It was the day of my exit interview, and the Partner was going to tell me that my ass was going out the firm’s front door, never to return.

“I suppose you know that you aren’t being hired back,” the Partner said, not unkindly, after I closed the door behind me. I sat across from him, and saw his face adopt a rather forced ‘gee, that’s too bad’ expression, which I appreciated, because I could tell that he was trying really hard to be civil.

I’d decided to act the same way at the exit interview. I knew going in that I’d be fired, and there was no point using the exit interview as a place to bitch and whine about my year at the firm. I’d done enough of that in the Partner’s office. It was time to leave, and I was going to leave civilly, like a grown up.

“I kinda figured that out,” I said. The Partner had loads of reasons for firing me. At a court appearance I'd cost them an important client by winning a case. A few times I’d deliberately fucked over the Junior that supervised me, and in the entire month of May, I handed in zero dockets.

But I’d been able to cover my tracks on the big things that went wrong, including ruining the wedding of the Partner’s daughter, (a truly sad tale that I will tell one day, when I get the courage, maybe after I’ve had a few drinks). It wasn’t the big mistakes that got me fired. It was the little things that did me in, and one of those little things was that I had no friends in the firm.

“What did you like best about your time here?” the Partner said. He was reading from an exit interview form, a bunch of pro forma questions to ask and boxes to tick, one of those thousands of forms that someone says must be filled out, but which no one ever reads. “I was just glad of the opportunity,” I said. That seemed to satisfy the Partner. He scribbled an entry and moved down the form.

“Is there anything that the Firm could have done better?”he asked. Now he was stiff, on guard, because he was handing me the opportunity to complain about the Firm, and he’d been hearing me complain since day one.

“Not really,” I said.

The Partner smiled, and ticked off the box, recording that the Firm had done everything just great.

No one at the firm knew anything about me, because during my year there I had not connected with anyone. For an entire year, I’d showed up at the office at 6:15, worked twelve to fourteen hour days six days a week, pumped out a ton of work and gone to court almost every day. But in a big law firm, working hard simply isn’t enough, not for most of us. If you want to stick around at a firm, you need to form real, human connections with people, and introverted me was not the kind of person to form human connections. If I’d had an ally in the firm, someone to back me up, the firm would have found reasons to keep me on. But with no one in my corner, no friend to make note of the good things I did, my balance ledger had only negative entries.

“What was the best thing about your experience here?” The Partner asked.

“That’s a tough question,” I said, and it was. My articling year took a wrong turn starting on day one, and the unpleasantness had never let up, not for a minute.

I resisted the temptation to give him a smartass answer, because it would have been really easy to say that I’d enjoyed watching my junior lawyer boss publicly take credit for my work at a meeting, just before he hit the links or headed out to the squash club. I might have said that I loved being deprived of a secretary for half my articles because the office manager was mad at me, and maybe a sarcastic answer might have slipped out, but then my brain fastened on to the one truly happy memory I had of my articles. The one thing for which I was truly grateful.

“You know why I picked you guys to article at?” I said.

The Partner adopted a polite little smile and shook his head ‘no’, as if he cared.

“Every other downtown firm I interviewed, all they wanted to talk about was my uncle. But you guys never mentioned my uncle.’

‘Your uncle?’ the Partner said.

“Yeah, my uncle at Giant Corp.”

“Giant Corp’s not exactly in my wheelhouse,” the Partner said. The Partner’s clients were all big, but not financial institution big.

“Yeah. The other big firms I applied to, they all made a big fuss, asking me if I was related to him, because they recognized the last name right away.” My surname is rare and unusual. In the larger world, the world of normal people, my uncle was just some guy that nobody ever heard of, but in certain subsets of the financial sector, my surname was instantly recognizable, and when I’d been applying for articling positions at the Big Law firms, my surname always attracted questions.

“But you guys didn’t do that,” I continued, “and I really respected that. I appreciated that you were hiring me just for me, like my uncle didn’t even exist.”

“Really? What’s his name?” I gave him my uncle’s first name. He had to write it down, because his first name was as rare and as unusual as our surname. “What does your Uncle do?” This was just idle chit chat, the partner still being civil before he gave me the heave ho.

“He’s the executive vice-president,” I said.

The Partner’s mask of civility slipped, and for the first time that morning I saw his genuine, unmasked expressions. I saw flashes of puzzlement, of irritation. I felt his gaze wash over me, taking into account my one-hundred and forty-nine dollar suit and the cheap tie. “That’s very interesting,” he said, in a tone that said otherwise. “Let me make a quick call,” and while I sat there, he dialed an extension, leaving the phone on speaker. A woman answered, and he spoke the name of the firm’s managing partner. There was a pause, and then I heard a man’s voice ask the Partner what was up.

“Yeah, so today’s the exit day for one of our students, Calledinthe90s,” he said.

“Say that again,” the man said, his voice sounding clipped, urgent.

“Today’s the exit interview for—“

“Say his name again. His name,” the managing partner said.

“Calledinthe90s,” I called out helpfully.

“What, is he in your office on speakerphone?” the managing partner said, “Pick up right now.”

I hadn’t heard anyone speak to the Partner that way, ever. But the Partner picked up, and I could no longer make out what was being said on the other end. I could only hear the tone, and what I heard sounded like an angry inquiry.

“Yes, he says he’s his uncle,” the Partner said.

“He for sure is my uncle,” I said, “I was at his house last Christmas.”

I heard another loud question, and then the Partner repeated my answer into the phone. I heard more questions, louder now, the tone angry, imperative. The guy the Partner was speaking to went on for a while, and then there was a loud click as he hung up.

“Your uncle’s a pretty important guy, so I hear,” the Partner said.

He was still forcing a mask of politeness onto his face, but underneath was something else, an expression I’d never seen before. It was an expression of fear.

“The Firm had no idea who my uncle was when you guys interviewed me, right?”

The Partner hemmed and hawed and bullshitted, but his pen was still on his desk, and the exit interview form was forgotten.

“Hey, I appreciate you doing this exit interview and all that, but I have a lunch date, so I’m gonna need to wrap this up.” A lunch date with Angela. We’d started dating the previous December, and my lunch with her mattered more than the exit interview.

“No one ever said this was an exit interview,” the Partner said. No one except the Partner, at the start of the interview fifteen minutes earlier. I pointed this out to him. “That’s in the past,” he said, all forced affability, “you might have a future at this firm.”

“I might have a future at the firm?” I repeated the phrase back to him, parroting it, parsing it, letting each word bounce around inside my head.

“Of course,” the Partner said, and I asked him what that actually meant.

He laid it out for me. They’d hire me back. Move me to the department that serviced the subsection of the financial sector that my uncle’s company occupied.

I asked what kind of starting salary, and he told me.

“So what did you mean, when you said that I might have a future at the firm? What’s the contingency? What’s the reservation?” The Partner gave me some more hemming and hawing, but I interrupted him. I interrupted the Partner that I had been reporting to for the last year.

“The Firm knows how hard I work,” I said, pointing out that in addition to my own work, I’d done a big chunk of the work of the junior who was supposed to be showing the ropes.

“There’s never been an issue with your work ethic,” he admitted, and I was glad to see how readily he admitted this. That made me feel good.

“Ok, and how about my results?” I reminded him that I was the only articling student in the Firm that already had a case in the DLRs. Sure, I lost a few motions here and there, but it was my wins that had caused more trouble for the firm than my losses. The Partner had to admit that my results were excellent. Way above average.

Yet the Partner was saying that I might have a future, and it was that one little word that my mind was stuck on, might.

“But suppose my uncle doesn’t send any work to the Firm? Suppose he doesn't want to add you guys to Giant Corp’s list?” Sure, I got along fine with my uncle, but I had zero influence on him. He was just a relative that I saw once or twice a year. I could not ask my uncle to send my law firm work; we didn’t have the sort of relationship.

The Partner said more words, made assurances, talked about opportunities, things that could be done, but I heard none of those words. The talk of benefits and an office of my own, of the partners I’d work with and the files that I’d be assigned, all that slipped by, because after I heard that I might have a future at the Firm, my brain stopped processing all the rest, and focused on the unspoken contingency, the condition that the offer included by implication.

“I don’t want a future that hangs on whether my uncle likes me or not, and sends me work or not, “ I said. “I see him a couple of times a year, and I don’t want to talk shop with him.”

“You wouldn’t have to do that,” the Partner said, “the Managing Partner’s part of the unit you’re going to, and he is great at schmoozing. All you need to do, is make the introduction to your uncle, and the Firm will take care out the rest.”

“I’ll think about that,” I said.

“Do you have another offer? Because we’ll match it.”

I had no other offer. But I had an acceptance, because Angela had said yes, and we already had set a wedding date.

The Partner wanted to keep talking, but now it was me making polite noises, little sounds of affirmation as I made my excuses and headed out for lunch with my fiancée.

I walked down the hall back to the area where the students all worked out of their shitty cubicles. It was close to lunch time and the place was empty, but for one other student dictating away a few cubicles down from me. I reached my desk, and started to pick up my personal effects and put them in my briefcase. My phone rang, but I ignored it, and continued packing.

The phone at another student’s desk started to ring, and then another. I was just snapping my brief case shut when the phone rang at the desk of the only other articling student who hadn’t left early for lunch. I heard her pick up the phone, sounding bored and tense and bugged all at the same time. But then her tone changed.

“Calledinthe90s”, she whispered to me, with her hand held over the headset, “it’s the Managing Partner.”

“What does he want to talk about?” My briefcase was in my hand and I headed for the elevator.

“Calledinthe90s,” the student said again, louder this time, when I pushed the down button on the elevator. She looked at me like I was nuts, but when she saw that I would not take the phone, she relayed my question to the Managing Partner, as if she were my secretary, and the Managing Partner was just some guy trying to take up my time.

“He wants to speak to you about the offer.”

I pushed the down button, and while I waited for the elevator, I stared out into space, considering the offer that I’d heard from the Partner’s lips a few minutes before, and which the Managing Partner wanted to repeat to me, maybe even amplify. I thought about that offer, and what it promised. I also thought about the promises the Firm had made already. They promised me a lot of things, and they had broken those promises. The Firm had spent a year beating the psychological shit out of me, and the thought of spending another minute inside their walls was simply too painful. The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.

“Tell him that the offer has too many conditions attached,” I said to the student who was holding up the phone, waving at me, trying to get me to come back. She was still trying to get my attention as the elevator doors closed on me for the last time

I sometimes wonder what would have happened, if I’d taken the Managing Partner’s call. Out from under the horrible Junior that ruined my articles, and the abusive Partner who didn’t give a shit, maybe I would have blossomed. With a decent salary, proper secretarial support, maybe even some mentoring, things would have gone great, so long as my uncle sent work to the firm. But without my uncle, I was nothing to the Firm, a nobody.

“So did you get fired?” Angela said when I met her for lunch.

“Yes,” I said, because it was the easy thing to say, and strictly speaking, it wasn’t a lie, because the Partner had fired me at the start of the interview. It was years before I told Angela what actually happened.

“I’m sorry,” Angela said.

“I’m not,” I said.

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’ll figure it out,” I said, and in the end I did, more or less. But among the many, many bad memories I have of the firm where I articled, one of the worst, is being so damaged by the end of the year, that it was impossible for me to consider their offer. I simply had to turn it down.

I run across sovereign citizens now and again, the kind that like to file bogus legal documents, filled with Latin phrases, and notarized with a red seal to make everything official. These guys think legal terms are like incantations or spells; if you just say the right thing in a document, your legal problem magically disappears. Lawyers and judges hate these guys. They are super annoying.

Years ago I took on a case for a friend. It was a family estate squabble, and my client’s brother owed him money. The Sov Cit brother got his greedy hands on his father’s money outside of the estate process by getting himself made joint with his elderly father on some bank accounts. Pulling that stunt is a no-no in Canada. Definitely frowned upon by the courts. But so far as Sov Cit man was concerned, it was finders keepers all the way, and his father’s will be damned.

I sent Sov Cit man a letter demanding that he pay, and he stuck to the Sov Cit playbook: he “paid” my client with a “check”. The “check” was not your normal check, drawn on an actual bank account. Instead, it was some weird bullshitty thing that he got off the web. The bank the check was drawn on didn’t exist, and the check had all kinds of strange wording in fine print on the back.
The thing about these Sov Cit guys, is that they have no notion of the consequences of the bogus documents and bad advice that they get off the web. Sov Cit man made a huge mistake by sending me the bogus check.

“Can I cash this?” my client said when I showed him the check.

“Go for it, but tell the bank in advance that you know it won’t clear, so that they won’t think you’re pulling a scam.” So my client cashes the check, and of course it bounces with extreme prejudice.

After the check bounced, we sued the brother for the money he stole from the estate. It was a short, simple lawsuit, just a few pages long. We served the brother at the house he owned, free and clear thanks to the money he stole from the estate. The guy had thirty days to defend, and on day thirty, I got his defence, filled with the usual Sov Cit nonsense. The defence also had a huge mistake in it, one of the biggest I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been doing this a long time.

Sov Cit man started harassing me and my staff. He sent emails. He sent letters. He left voicemail messages. He came by the office uninvited, demanding to see me and making threats. He kept it up until the cops said they’d arrest him if he came by again, but by then, it was time for his court date.

So I’m in court, asking for judgment, and the Sov Cit genius is there, talking his legal babble, saying words he doesn’t understand. The judge shut him down after about ten seconds, and gave my client judgment. Sov Cit man has a meltdown, and is escorted out of the courthouse. Of course he appeals, but I don’t care, because of the mistake the guy had made right out of the gate.

His mistake was serious and fatal. I don’t know about other countries, but in Canada if e someone gives you a check and it fails to clear, you can sue for that. All you have to do is prove that a check written to you bounced, and that’s all you need. The court will give you judgment. So when Sov Cit man sent my client the bogus check, he handed my client an airtight cause of action, and easy win of a lawsuit. And of course I pounced on it.

When Sov Cit man’s check bounced, my client sued him for that, too, in a separate legal proceeding that we started on the same day as the estate case. The two claims looked almost identical, at least on the front page. My client’s name was the same, the defendant’s name was the same, and the court file number was identical but for the final digit. When we served Sov Cit man with claim one, the estate claim, we also sued him on claim two, the bad check claim.

I think he thought that the second claim was just a copy of the first, because he only defended the estate action; on the bad check case, he didn’t defend, and I had default judgment after thirty days.

So a few months later Sov Cit man wants to negotiate. He’s feeling magnanimous, he says, and even though the estate case is under appeal, an appeal he said he was sure to win, he was willing to throw his brother a bone. He’d pay, but nowhere near the amount of the judgment.
It was then that I let him know that we’d sued twice, and that I had a judgment in the second action as well as the first, and that now the man’s home was totally tied up with the writs I filed.

“You better hope you win that appeal,” I said to him, “because you’re literally betting your house on it.”

Sov Cit man did his usual meltdown thing, but once he was finished with the screaming and the threats, he had a bit of a come to Jesus moment. We “settled” with him, sort of. He paid back all the money he stole from the estate, plus all my client’s legal fees, plus some more, just for being a bit of a dick and a sovereign citizen to boot.

Later that year he was at my client’s house for Christmas dinner. Go figure. Families can be pretty weird.

This one got resolved literally hours ago.

My client has easement on the neighbouring property to evacuate waste water to the nearest sewer connection. Both properties are farmland.

The pipe runs close to the border between the servient property and a third one for about a hundred meters and is used to dispose of the waste water from cleaning a desalination plant. Mostly dirty water and a low enough concentration of some sort of bleach that they're allowed to pour it into the public sewer.

Neighbour files lawsuit against my client for damages because the pipe leaked and flooded his property causing him to lose half his production but he denies access to repair the pipe and instead files for a provisional measure to forbid my client to keep using the pipe. This is obviously a big problem because if the desalination plant can't be cleaned it has to be shut down and my client can't keep watering his fields.

The court granted the provisional measure but at the same time ordered the claimant to inmediately grant access to his property to my client for repairs. Turns out the neighbour had cut about 25 meters of my client's pipe starting where it connects to the sewer and apparently used it to repair a pipe of his own. The surface affected by the leak allegedly was negligible.

Yesterday the neighbour's lawyer offered us that his client would withdraw the lawsuit, pay my client's court fees and repair the pipe if my client abstained from filing criminal charges againts him. My client accepted with the condition that the pipe must be repaired by monday. He called me today to tell me that he surveyed the pipe and it's completely repaired.

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TL;DR Plaintiff cut and stole waste water pipe passing through his property, causing it to be slightly flooded, then demands compensation from his neighbour.

Hi all, so I'm a criminal defence lawyer in the UK. A lot of my work is done directly in the police station advising clients before they are interviewed by the police, checking the police are doing everything lawfully etc. So I get the call and go down to the Cop Shop for a case of Robber, Possession with intent to supply drugs and Possession of a knife. Client is a regular, we'll call him Adam, but usually represented by my direct supervisor so I l've never met them before.

I take in disclosure for the case from the officers and its immediately apparent that one is a senior uniform officer and one has only just started and is being trained up. The junior one is doing his best but ultimately doesn't know the procedure for interviews beyond the actual questioning (like how to set up the machine, when to book them out for interview, stuff like that.) But for the purposes of his training, the junior one is in charge just being given some assistance. The case itself is about 3 guys who go to buy some Coke and the dealer takes their cash and then holds them up at knife point, takes their phones and tells them to go without giving said drugs. They get police, and they find my client about 20 minutes later not too far from the scene. No knife on him, no phones, no cash, but they do find a knife a bit further down the street in a bush, to be later forensically analysed, as well as a small amount of coccaine in his pocket. He's identified by police as being known in the area for drug dealing in the past, but weapons have never been his M.O.

So we go to get my client out his cell for our consultation. About 10 minutes later the older officer comes back in

Officer: Right so Adam's being a dickhead

Me: Refusing to leave his cell?

Officer: Yep

Me: right. I'll go speak to him at his cell and see if he'll come out

We head over to the cells. Poor junior officer stumbling his way round the corners of the custody suite being lead by me and the senior officer.

Me: Hey Adam i'm u/Pasta_is_quite_nice from Spaghetti Law and Partners. I work with Mike your usual lawyer but he's busy today so he sent me down. Do you want to come and have a chat with me in private?

But its pretty clear he won't leave his cell. Because he's rolled up in his blanket in his cell and made a lovely looking blanket fort. He doesn't say a word to me or even aknowledge me for a while. Eventually he waves his hand out his blanket and does a sort of shoo-ing motion at me. I can't go into actual legal advice because we're not in private and I clearly have no instructions. So i give basic advice and explanation of what is going to happen and that the police will attempt to interview him whether he comes out his cell or not but i'll be here taking notes and he can come and speak to me at any time. All that jazz.

Junior officer then takes over to do the interview and is reading the whole thing from a pro-forma script.

Officer: We're here at Reddit Central Police Station today in interview room 3 to sp-

Me: No we're not in an interview room, we're stood by the cells.

Officer: oh right yep we're outside cell number 6. I'm PC Plum also with PC Jones. We're interviewing please state your name -

(Silence)

Me: My client is Adam xyz. I'm Mr Pasta.

Officer: thanks. Adam you've had time for consultation with your lawyer and had a private consultation can you confirm you had enough time?

Me (looking at the officer bizzarely): You know full well we haven't had a consultation

Officer: but it says I need to say that here (points to script)

Me: clearly that doesn't apply does it.

Officer: so what am i supposed to do?

Senior officer: just move it along. Adam we've given you time to speak to your lawyer but you refused. If you want more time thats not a problem its an ongoing right just tell us and we can pause and you can go to a private room

Officer: so you've seen me put 3 discs into the interview room and i'll seal them up later

Me: there arent any discs though. There is no machine. You're just recording it on your phone

Officer: but the script says i should say that

Me: yeah in a normal interview. But this isn't so adapt it.

Senior officer: Alright so because we're not in an intervirw room we're just recording this digitally. A copy can be made available to you through your lawyer.

Most of the interview proceeds blandly with some pre set questions that recieve no answer from the man cosied up in multiple blankets. But this clanger still went ahead

Officer: we found a knife in your posses-

Me: no you didn't. It was on the floor down the street

Officer: but we did find it

Me: yes but not on him

Officer: Adam i've got a photo of the knife. Is this the knife we found on you?

Me: stop saying you found it on him. Thats completely untrue.

Officer: sorry okay then is the knife that the witness describes

Me: he's not looking. He's wrapped up in a blanket so he won't answer...

Officer: oh yeah i'll just conclude then

Case ended up being dropped beyond the possession of drugs because there was no evidence linking him to the robbery. This case is nothing to shout home about, but the whole situation was just ridiculous dealing with some poor sod of an officer who just had no idea what he was doing. Its all a mess, and thats the grand old state of the criminal justice system here.

I graduated law school right in the middle of the recession. I wasn't in the top 10 percent of my tier 1 school, and I developed crippling depression and anxiety during law school, so I struggled to find work. I ended up doing document review for a frustrating number of years. Now that I've been away from it long enough, I can find the humor in it, but lord was it stressful at the time.

Generally, I found there were three kinds of people who did doc review: 1) lawyers who didn't need to work, either they were retired and just needed something to do and occupy their time, or they had no debts or desire to continue to work, so they just did it whenever they needed some extra money; 2) people who were generally toxic who could not function in a normal work environment; and 3) people who just struggled to get their foot in the door elsewhere. I considered myself in the third group, although maybe I'm delusional. But the third group generally either eventually moved on, or became entrenched and became part of the establishment, project managers, and recruiters for doc review agencies. But group two, wow, group two was always the source of endless frustration and stress, but they provided for great stories as well. So I thought I'd share some of the more memorable characters I encountered. The stories are real, the names are made up, mostly because I've forgotten their real name.

Leslie. Leslie kept to herself, never talked with anyone else, but people nonetheless stayed away from her. She frequently napped in her chair, which good for her, the work sucked. But what made her peculiar was that she would get to work, take off her shoes, cross her legs, and interlock her fingers with her bare toes. To make matters worse, she would microwave fish everyday for lunch (which should be punishable with jail time alone), eat it with her fingers, loudly smacking her lips and licking her fingers with each bite, and then go back to touching her bare feet, while touching everything and anything around her without washing her hands.

A lot of doc review agencies are located in older office buildings where there is no central air or heating, and instead had individual units in front of each window. These were always a huge source of drama. No matter how often management would try and intervene, people would get into daily fights about it being too hot or too cold in the room, and people would compete to make sure they sat next to the heaters so they could control the temperature.

Bob. Bob was insecure, paranoid, and incredibly competitive. He wanted to be recognized by management, and wanted to be rewarded for his work. Whenever somebody was put in a special project, he would get openly angry and would vent at how nobody acknowledged how smart he was. He was also a misogynist, so he especially got upset if it was a woman who was recognized over him. Bob made sure to sit right next to the heater, and everyday would turn the a/c on full blast. With him in control, the room was literally 50 degrees. People knew how sensitive he was, so we were all cautious around him, and eventually somebody would build up the courage to ask him to turn the a/c down, and he would always agree, but acted like he was doing them a huge favor. He'd turn the a/c down, and then 15 minutes later, he'd turn the a/c back up again. He was also a huge sweater, and kept a towel to mop up his sweat, which he would then lay on the a/c vent, which was nasty.

Erica. I was working on one project that grew in size a few weeks in, meaning we had to move to a new office to accommodate everyone. I got there at my usual time of 8am, and picked a spot by the window. I was chatting with the project manager (PM), when this strange woman entered the room. The PM asked if he could help her, and she said her name was Erica and she was there for the project. He said that new people weren't expected until 10am, but that she could pick a seat. She grabbed the other window seat by me. Odd, but whatever. Immediately though, she started pulling out all of these things out of her bag, and laying them on top of the a/c vents. I asked her about it, and she started ranting, saying, "I don't like the feeling of air blowing on the back of my neck." I suggested she move away from the a/c vents, and she said that she liked to sit by the window. Okay. A few days later, she started talking about how one other doc reviewer Zach was a spy, and that we needed to be careful about what we said around him. We asked why she thought that, she said it was because he didn't have a name tag. When he found out, he laughed and said he threw his out because he thought it was stupid. A few other people threw their name tags out too. When Erica returned to the room, she noticed the lack of nametags, and froze. After that she became increasingly combative with Zach. I don't remember what started it, but they started bickering one day, and she yelled at him saying she was going to sue him for workplace discrimination. I don't know what happened because I left the room to go hide in the bathroom to get away from the drama, but later that day management came to the room saying that they were putting the project on hold, and might still need help, so we might hear back from them. We all went home, and I got an email asking me to come back the next day. I returned the next day, and they had invited everyone back, except for Erica. Turned out that they had finally googled Erica, and found out that she had a history of starting new jobs, suing them for workplace discrimination, and then getting big cash payouts and not working for a couple of years.

Brian. Erica was replaced by Brian. Brian seemed like a nice enough guy, but after he started, we realized that the room started to smell a little funny. He was also always putting his head under his desk. Finally one day the woman next to him exclaimed, "Are you vaping at your desk?!" Turns out he would periodically stick his head under his desk to vape inside his bookbag, thinking if he inhaled and exhaled within it, nobody would notice. Management sent out an email saying that smoking and vaping was not permitted in the office. He started to vape in the hallway instead.

Thandi. Thandi had a habit of microwaving a whole fish, head, tail, fins, and scales for lunch everyday. She'd then bring it back to the review room to eat. When people complained, she lost her shit, yelling at everyone, "HOW FUCKING DARE YOU TALK ABOUT MY FOOD." For weeks after she'd just constantly mutter under her breath, "how fucking dare them, how dare them talk about my food."

Bruce. Bruce seemed like a nice guy, but he loved his sunflower seeds. He'd eat an entire bag each day, which fine. But he'd spit the shells out on the floor. At the end of the day, there would be a circle of sunflower seed shells and spit around his chair.

Susan. I joined a project midway through, and was seated next to Susan. I asked her a question about the case, and got no response. I asked her again thinking she didn't hear me, and she tensed up immediately saying, "Do not talk to me, people get fired all the time for talking on these projects. Ask the project manager." Okay. Then I noticed that she had a bucket of cleaning supplies and a mop with her. When she took her lunch break, I noticed that she took the mop and bucket, filled the bucket with soap and water, and proceed to mop the floor around the table where she was going to eat. At the end of the day, she completely wiped down her desk, and packed up all of her supplies and mop, and took them home. She'd come back in the morning with all of her supplies, and again wipe down her desk before she would begin work. I thought it was weird at first, but I realized that this must bring a lot of turmoil for her and felt bad. As long as you didn't look her in the eye, or talk to her, she was fine, and I eventually came to appreciate that about her.

Adele. Adele actually wasn't a doc reviewer, but rather a staff attorney at the firm running the review. She went to law school late in life, so she felt she had a lot to prove. She was evidently very upset that she was tasked with running this doc review, and made it clear everyday. This was a complicated project, so we regularly had meetings with the trial team training us on how they wanted things done. We'd spend an hour or two with them, asking questions, before they went back upstairs. Immediately Adele would tell us to ignore everything they said, and to do it a different way. Then a few days later she'd tell us that the trial team was complaining that we were messing everything up, and would tell us to do things the way the trial team told us to do it in the first place. Every Friday she'd hold a meeting telling us how terrible we all were, how we were only there because we had nowhere better to be, and that we needed to be grateful for the work. Then she'd end each meeting telling us how we're a family, and she loved us all. She'd regularly complain about people getting up too much for water or going to the bathroom, and suggested we should clock out every time we did. I've never had a project with such high turnover rate, to the point where the agency reached out to us to ask what was going on. Eventually we had a new training with the trial team, and per usual, the second they left, she told us to ignore everything they said, and to do it a different way. Only she didn't realize that one of the trial team members stayed behind, and heard everything she said. When she was done speaking, he told everyone to ignore what she had said, do it the way we had just been trained, and called her into his office. Two hours later they came back out, and he announced that Adele would no longer be involved with the project, and that he would be managing us directly. The projected lasted a couple of years, so whenever he was out of the office, Adele was tasked again to manage us, but never left her office or bothered anyone again.

Nicole. Nicole was a friendly outgoing person who seemed like a delight at first. I soon realized though that she was overly flirty with all of her male coworkers, and was cold and hostile to her female coworkers. I'm a gay man, and I realized that she was perplexed that her flirting didn't work on me, and she grew pretty hostile towards me as a result. She had a poor work ethic, which good for her, the work sucked. But she would disappear for hours on end, apparently to go nap in her car. She was also very paranoid. She was convinced that management was spying on us, and that they had listening devices in the room to hear our conversations. She even called a meeting with a member of the trial team running the project to talk about how she knew that they were reading all of her text messages and that she did not appreciate it. She eventually got a job working for the trump white house and left the project.

Mike. Mike was a seemingly nice guy, but a bit odd. We were working on a project where for whatever reason the company work culture involved employees sending a lot of porn and photos of mutilated bodies to each other. The firm eventually decided to create a separate workflow where for all images, and asked someone to volunteer. Mike was the only person to offer up his services, and he'd constantly chuckle at the fucked up stuff he was saying. He'd frequently tag various images as HOT, which meant they were priority viewing for the quality review team. Eventually he got fired after he made the news for being arrested for soliciting a minor.

Allison. Allison started a project, and for some reason started working from the computers in the hallway meant to be used so people could check their email on break and the sort. This was obviously a breach of privilege, since anyone could view what she was working on. Management asked her about it, and she said that she had issues sitting at a desk, and liked that she could stand to work at the computers in the hallway. Turned out, management had a standing desk she could use, and wheeled it into the review room, replacing her desk. She used it, but sat in her chair at normal height, meaning she had to look up to view her screen. Odd woman.

Monica. Monica had a small puppy. Monica brought the puppy in her purse to the office. Monica was found out by management because they were always finding the puppy's piles of shit in the hallway.

I don't miss doc review.

Hello everyone I decided to write this one in a bit different style, hope you like it (Or at least don't hate it too much). I took a few more liberties in order to tell the story. Also, sorry for not posting for so long. As always, any constructive feedback is welcome.

Be me.

A circus principal.

Pretty good job, travel a lot, see the world, make people laugh.

The beast-tamer comes to my "office" (read: trailer that is a little less trashed than the rest).

He says our bear is getting old, he can't do most of his his tricks and working with him is getting dangerous. He also started vomiting during the last show.

Call the local vet, he checks the bear out and orders him to be put down, but the vets boss had a better idea.

"In a few days a bigwig from Germany is supposed to come for a hunting trip to hunt boars, what if we made a bear get into his shot instead of a boar? We could get much more money out of him that way." He said.

And so the training started. Every night we took a bear near the hunting spot and hid some honey in a way that would take him right past it. The bear had no trouble sniffing it out.

ItsAllComingTogether.png

Eventually hunter came and then things became weird…

Be me.

A bear.

Not sure what the people are doing, but if all they want is for me to find honey and even keep it, I am not complaining.

Today is different, I am not going during the night. Whatever, honey is honey!

As I am walking towards my meal, a human on a moped suddenly appears.

He falls and runs away, leaving the moped behind.

Was he supposed to be a clown?

Well, I have a ride now, hehe…

I pick up the moped and use my circus training to get going.

JustLikeTheSimulations.png

I could get used to this.

Be me

A guy from Germany that enjoys hunting.

Go to this place regularly because cheap and people trip over one another to kiss my boots.

Life is good.

Waiting on my usual hunting spot right now, the weather is nice.

Suddenly I hear a roar.

A very weird roar though.

I was warned there was a bear spotted recently, but this does not sound like a bear.

But it is coming closer.

I shoulder my rifle and turn safety off.

There it issssss…

?WTF?

A bear on a moped, just came out of the bushes?!

Am I dreaming? I did drink a shot before but I am not that light… Oh shit!

My rifle falls out of my hands and goes off.

FUCK

The shot ricochets.

FUCKFUCK

It hits me.

FUCKFUCKFUCK

The resulting lawsuit became a huge scandal for the entire area.

Note: Author mentions that the hunter was hit by a ricocheted casing, but that does not really make sense because casing cant really hurt you even if it hits you directly, so I assume it was just lawyer being a lawyer and not a gun enthusiast.

-Cheaters regrets 5 Story 5

-Bear trouble [Story 8] - THIS

-Bloody love 4

-Bike maintenance 5 Story 4

-The superdog 1

-Militarised karma 3 Story 2

-Human cannonball 2

-Skiing and boars don't mix 4 Story 3

-Hunger games 3 Story 6

-Toilets and broken bones 2 Story 7

-OSHA ministory 2 Story 3

-Playful cat 4 Story 1

-Glasses save lives 3

-The walking dead 4

-City transport horror story 2

EDIT: Original text link - https://www.karaoketexty.cz/texty-pisni/jahelka-ivo/balada-o-mezinarodni-ostude-mysliveckeho-sdruzeni-v-brode-15550

we were working on getting a case thrown out. The defendant was a 20 something black man in Chicago who was pulled over due to a “smell of drugs” but was only charged with traffic violations. The entire case was dependent on this cop having been able to smell the drugs from outside the car. I should note, the search only turned up an old roach on the back floor. The lawyer on the case stuffed melted chocolates in her pocket before questioning the cop. She approached the witness and said something along the lines of “so you pulled him over because of the smell, how were you able to tell?” His response was “I just have an incredible sense of smell”. After about a minute the judge commented on the chocolate smell, but the trial continued. Eventually the lawyer asked the cop, “do you smell anything now”. When he said no, the whole case got thrown out on the basis of he shouldn’t have been pulled over in the first place.

Former paralegal in an insurance defense firm. Lots of funny stories. One of my faves.... A lady (prison guard) got off duty from her overnight shift at 6:00 a.m. It was still dark and we live in a pretty rural area with lots of farm land. She is driving down this country road right before sunup (there are no street lights so her headlights were all she had it was a foggy morning) and as she tops a hill she sees a cow in the middle of the road. Cow is just standing there and she is the only car on the road so, instead of slamming on brakes, she slows down and pulls over to the right shoulder of the road a little bit to just go around the cow. Well, unfortunately for her, there were TWO other cows standing on the side of the road and she hit both of them. Car was totaled and cows had to be put down. The one that was in the middle of the road saw the whole thing and just turned around and wandered back into the field through the hole in the fence they had all gotten out of.

Something that came up in the news recently made me think of some lawyers I knew more than 20 years ago.

At that time I had worked in the mail rooms of law firms for about 3 years; insurance defense for all of the firms. I learned over time to always treat the attorneys with respect no matter the situation. Any of them could have gotten me fired merely by asking, and some of them where the most egocentric narcissistic thin skinned people I've ever come across before or since. You never knew what might set them off. I would routinely come across secretaries or paralegals that were on the verge of tears based their attorney screaming at them about something or other.

Except for a very select three I met over that time. They were genuinely nice people that I gradually let my hair down for over the years. They treated the people around them like human beings.

Then one day I was doing a copy job for one of "my" attorneys. It was a deposition that they took of the plaintiff in a sexual harassment case. At this point I had been doing copies for years and didn't any attention to the contents, just wanted to make sure I copied all pages, both sides, got any notes in the margins, etc. I was QC'ing the results real quick when a passage jumped out at me and engaged me to the point where I actually read a couple pages.

The below is not verbatim, but it's close.

My Attorney: What did he say next?
Plaintiff: He asked me if I had a nice ass.
My Attorney: A nice ass?
Plaintiff: Yes.
My Attorney: What was your response?
Plaintiff: I didn't say anything, I just walked away.
My Attorney: So you didn't verbally answer his question?
Plaintiff: No.
My Attorney: Well, do you have a nice ass?
Plaintiff: What?
My Attorney: Do you have a nice ass?
Plaintiff: What?
My Attorney: It's a simple question, do you think you have a nice ass?
Plaintiff: What is that question? I don't get that question.

The exchange went on for a few more pages, where the attorney insisted that the plaintiff appraise the beauty of their buttocks, and the plaintiff refusing.

To this day I cannot reconcile the gentle and nice disposition of that man versus what I read in the copy job. He had graduated summa cum laude from one of the top law schools in the country, which normally was an indicator of a true asshole, but not him. He always came across as a sweet caring guy, even a little shy. Everybody liked him. But that deposition was like a horror show of indifference and subtle aggression.

The next year I heard how another one of my attorneys more or less bullied a plaintiff into describing, in great detail, all sorts of garden variety mental health concerns she'd had over her life. The plaintiff still "won" a settlement, but I was told the amount was for such a pittance the firm marked it as a clear win our books.

A few months after that I heard how the last of "my" attorneys dismantled a mentally challenged plaintiff on the stand. She did it nicely and gently, but the plaintiff's case was destroyed while the plaintiff was emotionally devastated and completely confused about what had just happened. Then the plaintiff's attorney, infuriated at how the plaintiff had just more or less lost their case, began beating her up on the stand. Towards the end the plaintiff asked if she could switch attorneys to "mine," the opposing counsel, which broke my attorney's heart. But she still kept aggressively arguing on behalf of our client.

I just checked upon "my" attorneys almost 30 years after the fact.

• The first guy I mentioned above is still doing insurance defense. He's now a partner at a fairly prominent local firm.
• The second guy I mentioned got cancer while I was working at the firm. He recovered into an even nicer and sweeter person and continued doing insurance defense for another 20 years before retiring.
• The last one confided to me shortly after the event I mentioned that she couldn't do this sort of thing anymore. She quit the firm (she had just made partner) and left insurance defense. She works in local government now.

My first real law job was at a small law firm. While we called ourselves a boutique firm, we'd also do simple tasks for friends of the owner.

One of the friends was a gruff man I'll call Gary.

Gary reminded people that he had a bunch of businesses involved in commercial real estate. Gary thought that anything he didn't understand was a scam. Most of Gary's businesses seemed to revolve around a large parking lot with mobile equipment. Gary had a snowplwo business and another replacing HPS (High Pressure Sodium) bulbs in office park and mall parking lots.

Up until now, he'd just walk to the owner's office and they'd deal with one another. One day, my boss emailed me and asked me to handle Gary's problem. I agreed to help where I could.

Gary showed up and dropped into one of the two chairs in front of my desk. To prevent people from hanging out, I had purchased unpadded, pressed wood seats from Ikea for my client seats. Think the seats you had in high schools, but in un-yielding plywood.

Gary was angry about something.

me:"so, what can I help you about?"

Gary:"Ok. I got divorced about a year and a half ago. Because I didn't want my bitch wife to get my businesses, I quick-claimed them to my buddy. Now that the divorce is over, he won't give me it back"

me:"Let me see if I got this right. You were getting divorced and you sold property to your friend with a quit-claim deed"

Gary:"It's called a quick-claim, because it's fast"

I keep my mouth shut. I got a B+ in Property, but I'll leave Gary to his opinions.

me:"I see. What property did you transfer to your friend?"

Gary:"All of it. My lot, my trucks and my employees"

Me:" Ok. So let me get this straight. Your ex filed for divorce and you transferred your lot and equipment to you friend."

Gary:"Yeah. And now that the divorce is final, he won't give it back"

me:"And the giving back part was a handshake deal, right"

Gary (Realizing that I'm not on his side, either):"So you're on his side?"

me:"Um. No. I'm on your side, but I hate to tell you, you fucked up. You sold all your property to prevent your ex-wife from getting any of it, but now it's gone. Sorry"

Gary did not take this well. He stomped out of our offices before I had time to grab the keys to the gun rack in the reception area.

I poured myself an afternoon cup of coffee and went back to work. By the time my coffee was cold, my boss called.

Boss:"So, I understand Gary left unhappy.

me:"Yep. From what I gathered, he transferred all his property to a drinking buddy in a botched asset protection play. Buddy isn't willing to give it back."

Boss:"so anything you can do for him?"

me:"Sorry, no. I think he's broke. His ex may have a claim under a constructuve trust theory"

Boss:"Yeah. well, I guess we'll leave sleeping dogs lie. Fuck that guy, anyway."

A number of years ago, my mother was sitting in her car in a grocery store parking lot when someone ran up, reached in the open window, grabbed her purse, and ran away with it. At the time, my mother was in her late 70s and in the beginning stages of dementia ("now sweetheart, please remember to call collect when you call" every time I called her on my cell phone, that sort of thing).

My mother later identified the robber in a lineup. When she appeared in court, the prosecutor did the usual thing:

Prosecutor: Mrs. —, do you see the person who stole your purse in the courtroom?

Mom: Yes.

Prosecutor: Will you point to the person, please?

(Mom points at defendant)

During cross-examination, the defense tried to establish doubt about the accuracy of her identification. The usual stuff for people her age: how are your eyes, how's your memory, etc. Then:

Defense lawyer: Mrs. —, are you sure that this is the person that stole your purse?

Mom: Yes, I am.

Defense lawyer: And how are you sure about that?

Mom: Because the man who took my purse had a head shaped like a zucchini.

(Entire courtroom looks at defendant's head, which is one of those long oval heads, and is indeed shaped rather like a zucchini.)

Defense lawyer: No further questions.

The man was found guilty.

My father, also a lawyer, said that during examination, you never ask a question that you don't know the answer to, and that this was.a textbook example of what can happen when you do.

I heard this sub was looking for content, and I have a few stories with a law angle, but I don't work in law. Mostly of them are just run-ins with cops over traffic stops, but a few of them might be appropriate for this sub. If not, it won't hurt my feelings if they're removed.

I'll start with a speeding ticket I got about a decade ago. I live in an unincorporated "rural" neighborhood (typical suburb, but we don't have street lights or sidewalks) outside of a small city. There's basically one main road to town from where I live, and it's the same main road of the actual town, but the first mile and a half of it when you turn off my street, before you reach the nearest gas station, is technically county, so the city police have no jurisdiction there, and I have been consciously aware of this since, oh, forever.

So one quiet Sunday afternoon, I'm heading toward town a little fast during that first stretch of road, maybe 5-10 mph over, but I make sure to engage my cruise control for the speed limit before I reach the gas station. The road is nearly perfectly straight and I can see way ahead of me and behind for a long, long ways, and there are literally no other cars anywhere. There's a bored police officer parked at the gas station facing the road, and I get maybe a mile past it when I see him appear as a very tiny speck on the road in my rearview mirror. I glance down to confirm my cruise control is set at 40mph and continue on my way. He starts gaining on me, and soon after, he flips his lights on, so I pull over for him.

Him: "Do you know why I stopped you?"

Me: "No, sir, I have no idea."

Him: "You were doing 53 in a 40." Even when I was outside of the city limits, I wasn't going that fast.

Me, without missing a beat: "No, sir, I was not."

Him: "Yes, you were, I paced you at 53..."

Me: "What is 'paced'?"

After some back and forth and having him explain it to me, I'm told that "paced" is basically when he guesses my speed by observing how long it takes me to get from one landmark to another while he follows me. I think I understand what he was trying to say, but I also think he misunderstood how it was supposed to work. So as politely as I could, I told him this and explained that I had my cruise control set, and I know I wasn't speeding.

Then he started to get snippy with me. There was some more back and forth, mostly repeating ourselves, but I made sure to remain calm and polite even though he was being a complete asshole. I got him to admit he didn't use radar but he eventually wrote me the ticket anyway, and shoved it in my face to sign. So I asked him, "Signing this is just my acknowledgement of receiving the ticket and not an acknowledgement of guilt, correct?" I even made him confirm the court date out loud for me, too, to which I smugly replied I'd see him there.

I knew I was right, but I also figured it probably wouldn't do any good since it was my word against his, so I didn't really prepare for court any more than reminding myself to stay composed and truthful when I'm there, and at the very least if I still had to pay the ticket, maybe he'd be inconvenienced by having to deal with the whole situation and I could get some satisfaction from that. So I showed up for my day in court, dressed as nicely as possible and reminding myself to breathe. I didn't see the officer there, but there was still time. I just waited while other cases took place before me. And waited. And waited. And finally, my name was called. Without me getting to explain anything about what happened during the traffic stop, the judge said my ticket was dismissed, and that was that. Kinduva shame because at that point I was really looking forward to being a thorn in his side, but it was the best possible outcome I suppose.

Paralegal here with your friendly reminder, on social media, not to talk on social media, at least when you have a case pending.

I worked for a workers’ comp laywer. We had a car mechanic who had injured his hand pretty badly with a pneumatic tool. The company was okay initially with the injury but he also developed an addition to his pain meds and pain compartment syndrome (where you have chronic pain in a different area than the injury itself, usually caused by injured nerves.) Those two things the company didn’t like which is where we came in and the legal fight to get stuff covered and whatnot ensued. After winning most of it, we were in talks for settlement. However, in our state, the company os required to offer employment (and make up the difference in pay) if work is available that falls under the worker’s restrictions. They had him work the desk since he only needed one hand for it and he could stand fine. He didn’t want to do it but had to to keep collecting benefits.

Low and behold he slipped and twisted his knee. Now I saw his medical records. He legit twisted his knee. However, he played it up because he did not want to work the desk and dragged it out. This is not new or unique and would not have been a problem honestly. But then suddenly the company stopped settlement negotiations. Fine, my lawyer was awesome and just wanted to help people so he just continued maintenance on the first case while preparing the kneee in case it went south.

Like I said the guy was playing it up and wanted all of these extra things. The big one was an ice maker. He was suposed to ice the knee a couple of times a day and argued his freezer wouldn’t make enough ice. He may have actually asked for a new freezer. But the company did buy and deliver an ice maker to h apartment.

Then we got discovery on the knee case. Now see, we always send out a standard “don’t talk about your case to anyone and not on social media. Also refrain from doing any physical activities outside the home as you may be observed.” We sent it out to him the first case but not the second and I guess he forgot. They hired a private investigator. He didn’t have to work hard. There was some nothing shots of him doing very light outside work. But his Facebook was a gold mine. Rock climbing vacation. (At least it had no date so we could argue it was before.) But there were several posts of him bragging about thr settlement he was going to get and a nice shot of him under his car working on it “while getting paid by the company” at his home. The kicker? He was selling the ice maker on Facebook marketplace as “never been used!”.

Needless to say, no settlement for him and he lost his job permenently. (He still got the original injury covered since that had already been decided.) We conceeded the second injury was recovered but had a hell of a time getting him to at least return the money he got for the icemaker. Even after we told him if he didn’t, they would go after him criminally for insurance fraud. He is licky they gav him a chance and were patient.

About 20 years ago I worked as a case clerk for an attorney who handled employment law. This was long enough ago that some of the exact details are fuzzy, but I’ll try to tell the story as best as I remember it.

The attorney I worked for had been practicing for something like 25 years. By this point in his career, he was billing a ton of hours to insurance companies who covered big companies against wrongful termination suits. In other words, most of the time we were defending real a*holes: sexual harassers, racists, etc. Our job was to get the people who brought suit for discrimination against their bosses to settle for as little as possible. This often got dragged out into several years of discovery and so on, until finally, the two sides would settle just before going to trial.

We had one very different client though, left over from the attorney’s work years earlier when he used to work for the people bringing suit, rather than the insurance companies. This was a man who had worked a well-paying union job in a factory for a very large corporation. At some point the corporation downsized the plant, and surprise surprise, they laid off all the best-paid (i.e. highest seniority, and thus the oldest) workers. I don’t remember the details, but it was something like everyone over the age of 45 got laid off while all the younger workers stayed.

A bunch of the older workers filed suit for age discrimination. Tons of people had to be deposed - the litigation went on and on. Over time all of the workers settled, but our client refused. He REALLY wanted his day in court - I think more to make a point than because of the money. It had been at least ten years since he was laid off but he was determined not to settle.

So, I was helping out with prep work to go to trial. Getting files ready to go, reviewing stuff for our team, etc. Jurors had been selected. The first day of actual court came and for me it was exciting - I was new, and this was the first time anything we worked on had gone to actual trial. I was asked to be on hand in case anything needed to be fetched last minute.

But when I came in that morning one of the junior attorneys told me that the trial was off ... reason being that our client had died overnight. He had a heart attack. Poor guy had been waiting so long for his day in court only for that to happen - I assume the stress got to him.

I left that position soon afterwards, so I never found out how the case resolved. One of the attorneys told me though that it was unlikely they’d get much compensation for his widow. They thought that without him there to give testimony, it was more likely to be settled for less than what he could have gotten if he had made a deal years earlier. I don’t know if there is a moral to the story other than maybe knowing when continuing to fight in court is not worth the stress, pain and suffering it can cause.

I wrote this in a response to a challenge to describe an example of unrequited love without using the word “love,” or any words or phrases that are within one degree of the word. It of course had to be based on my own experiences, so that’s why there’s the kind of misplaced (from my perspective at least) stuff about childhood in the ‘90s in here. Anyway, I hope this is cool with the mod team. If not, I’d rather take it down myself so please DM me if this doesn’t quite conform to the sub rules.

In the beautiful, ignorant bliss of existence that defined the decade of the 1990s, my father—a skilled attorney who chose life in a small city as a partner of a reputable firm over a 7-figure in-house counsel job for a Fortune 100 company—walked the block and a half from our home to his office every day. I adored the man, but my preoccupation with learning to spell, read, do simple math, and basic science kept me from thinking much of him during the day.

I was born in late 1989, just early enough to be called a child of the ‘80s, but much too late to get into mullets and hair metal (thank God). Though a child birthed in the ‘80s, the person who eventually became me was undeniably a product of ‘90s: Windbreakers, pogs, light up sneakers, early Cartoon Network, Destiny’s Child, Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Spice Girls, Lisa Loeb, Sarah McLachlan, Jewel, Nirvana, Meredith Brooks, Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, Atari (just for a year or so), original Nintendo, Nintendo 64 (1998!), Chris Farley’s death, Tommy Boy, The Titanic, Jim Carrey’s insane rise to fame with three(!) blockbuster comedies in the same year-ish, and something scandalous going on with Bill Clinton. All that and more makes the ‘90s quintessential of my carefree childhood. In other words, I can’t think of my young self without also thinking about the entire decade in which I lived it.

I had no exposure to any of the world’s horrors like war, death, poverty, and suffering. All those things were just vague abstractions at best and superficial conceptualizations at worst formed by quick glimpses of 90s-era action flicks. To put it in perspective if I haven’t already overstated how a child like me felt in that decade: The most notable personal tragedy to befall me was watching Skip die in the Disney film My Dog Skip, starring Frankie Muniz as pretty much himself as a neonate.

That ignorance was our brightness to life, we reveled in it, and if it was all the more detrimental to my generation and I when the light finally did go out, that isn’t the fault of anyone around us, but merely the natural result of the bubble of innocence those ten years afforded to the children of the people who helped in some way make it our reality. People like my father, who was, all at the same time, working overtime as a special prosecutor for the State AG, remodeling our (then) $40k house that was built in 1889 into what became our/their forever home worth eight times as much now (yes, humble brag...none of his carpentry, masonry, and plumbing genes were passed onto me, unfortunately), raising two kids with a third on the way, all while studying for one of the big bar exams AND still managing to find time to dote on my mother. In fact he was doing it so well that none of us kids knew of it. He was a dad who, without hesitation or any appearance of inconvenience, would drop what he was doing to play catch, join our snowball fight outside, take us fishing and sledding, read us a book each and every night, take us outside during the winter and help us identify the planets and constellations, and eventually talk about the history of common law principles like stare decisis to his four, six, and nine year olds at dinner time.

Just like the ‘90s were quintessential of my childhood, my father was quintessential of fatherhood. And after being too preoccupied at school, I’d countdown the minutes until he got home. Sometimes I’d wait outside to watch him make his final half-block walk back home. I could always tell by a subtlety in his gait that he was exhausted. As he’d round the bushes on the corner of the block and looked toward our home, he’d inevitably see me waiting and jumping with anticipation.

And without a hint of reluctance—with a filled briefcase in hand, a loosened tie dancing around his neck, swaddled by his too perfectly tailored suit, embraced underneath it by his sweat soaked button up shirt, and wearing the expensive black dress shoes he would shine every night—that little walk became an exuberant, clunky run.

This happened in the Sunshine Magistrates Court in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It should be noted that each state in Australia has only one police force in it. There is no separate police forces for county, city, town or highway

So it was at the start of the trial. There was an unusual number of police in the courtroom. This one guy was bought up from the holding cells in handcuffs.

The Magistrate directed one of the cops to remove the defendants handcuffs. The cop flat out refused to do so.

The Magistrate sat back and had a think about this. He then apologised to the defendant and had him returned to the cells.

He then returned to Chambers for a while.

What happened was not too long after the Assistant Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland attended that same Magistrates Courtroom and, in open court, read out an apology on behalf of the Victorian Police Chief Commissioner for the intimidatory actions of Police in that courtroom.

First, I want to say I like the majority of our police officers and sheriff deputies here. I’ve know most of them for the majority of my life. It’s one of the pros to living in a small city in rural America.

I was just 16 at the time. I had many friends who I only knew first names of (I didn’t always hang out with the best crowd so we all kept it to first names only). Anyway she and I were out driving around town and I had to stop to get gas. My car stuck out like a sore thumb at the time. What I didn’t know is she had run away from her abusive father so there was a bolo out for her and her dad knew my car.

Cop came out of the 7-11 I was filling up at and gets in his car to move it in front of my car. I was extremely confused about this as at that moment I was doing nothing wrong. He turns his lights on and gets out of the car. I finish fueling as he’s walking over and hang up the nozzle.

Before I can say a word he tells me to keep my hands in front of me and answer his questions or I’m going to jail. Now this was before everyone had cell phones or car phones or anything like that. There was still a pay phone on the side of the building. So I’m 16, scared, have no idea what’s going on and unable to call anyone to help me.

He very aggressively comes up to me, gets less than 6” from me and asked sternly who my passenger was. So I gave him her nickname which was just a shorter version of her first name. He wants her last name and I tell him I don’t know it. At this point two more cop cars pull up and surround my car. One comes to the back of my car to stand behind me and one goes to the passenger door to ask my friend to get out. I’m starting to panic as I still have no idea what the hell is going on.

The cops in front of me starts yelling at me that I have to know her last name, who doesn’t know their friends last name and I am interfering with his investigation. I tell him again, this time in the verge of tears, what I call her and that I don’t know her first last name, I know where she lives and goes to school. I add that her full name is Melissa but everyone calls her Lissa for short.

He kept badgering me for what seemed like forever for her last name, bringing me to tears and threatening me with jail, before the cop behind me pulls him aside to talk. When they step back over the first cop is angry but says nothing to me. The second cop asks for my ID and all my info. I have to get it out of the car which he allows and at that point I see my friend in the back of the third cop car.

When I give my ID over he hands it to the first cop who goes to his car to run all my info. I finally ask the second one what is going on and why are they doing this. He tells me that she was a runaway and I could be charged with multiple counts for hiding her identity and driving her around. Now the first cop comes out and brings his ticket book and my ID out with him. He’s pissed off and tells me he could have given me much more in charges but he is ‘only’ citing me with interference with an officer. He has me sign and tells me a court date.

I looked at the second officer and tell ask him what’s going to happen to my friend and he tells me she will be returning to her father. I let him know that her father is abusive and I’ve seen the bruises on her, they need to look into that before they just hand her off. I had at that point regained my composure and was pissed off. While I’m telling the second about her father the third car pulls away with my friend in back. I ask the nicer cop if I can check to see if she got her purse from my car so he could take it to her. He said yes. She had left her purse so I scribbled a note quick saying I was sorry and pushed it down in her purse before giving it to the cop.

After the cops left the gas station attendant came out to see if I was ok and gave me a bottle of water.

Two months later I went into court and plead not guilty. I was assigned an attorney at that time.

A year later I get a call from the court appointed attorney to come in and go over what happened. I hadn’t seen my friend since she was taken away. She never came back to school or called me.

I was also very pregnant at this point. There was a court date set for a month down the road and the attorney wanted to know my side of what happened. He had the cops write up of the event but key points were inconsistent between cop one and cop two. I told the attorney what I have written here and got a very surprised look from him. He was not happy at all with how I had been treated. Other than some earlier speeding tickets and smoking tickets I had a clean record. I had already graduated high school and was set to start college classes while my classmates where still in h.s. I had a full time job and was a ‘role model’ for all young adults starting a family (eye roll).

Anyway he called and left a msg for the DA to pass on the inconsistencies in the two reports and what I had said.

I showed up for the court date and my attorney told me it had just been rescheduled because the DA hadn’t had time to look at everything. It was rescheduled for 5 weeks later and he would keep in touch.

I got a call two days before the next court date telling me the charges where dropped. So I never got my day in court but I gave my respect to my attorney. I don’t know exactly what he said to the D.A. but it all went away.

Stumbled upon this sub randomly and really didn't think I had anything to contribute, but I remembered an embarrassing story from my youth.

Not my finest moment by far. Needless to say, this left me with some egg on my face and some not too kind accusations.

A little background. I was a cop in a major city and was actively getting my butt kicked in SWAT training. This was 6 weeks of grueling non-stop punishment and physical activity in the summer time. Well, as I'm sweating and dying on the firing range, I get a reminder that I have trial that day. This completely skipped my mind as I was mostly trying not to physically keel over and didn't commit my court calendar to memory.

Long and short of it was that it was a felony gun case. Foot pursuit, suspect tossed an illegal firearm, I arrested him. Pretty basic case in the grand scheme of things. So I rush to court which takes me about 45 minutes from the location we were conducting training.

I received no trial prep whatsoever. No pre-trial conference with prosecutors, no reviewing of paperwork, nothing. The attorney is panicking and rushing to get me on the stand. I show up wearing tactical SWAT attire and most definitely not court appropriate.

So one of the first questions they ask is if I can identify the defendant. Now, I was sure I could. But...mental and physical exhaustion, months since arrest, and no preparation can wreak havoc.

Seated in court was the defendant and two defense attorneys. All black males in their 30's, wearing glasses, with short hair, and well dressed in suits.

Well I guess you can see where this is going, but I identified one of the defense attorneys as the defendant and caused quite the debacle.

Maybe this was all a plan by some clever defense counsel, but most likely it was an epic error on behalf of an exhausted and unprepared cop.

First time writer, so be gentle. If the formatting leaves something to be desired, let me know, criticism is always welcome, if not helpful.

I was approached and asked to be a character witness of someone that had committed a rather serious crime and was looking at a lot of jail time. Not sure how he was walking around without chains after I eventually learned the details of what happened.

Kind of surprised to be asked to be a character witness as I didn't know the guy, we lived in the same barracks, ate at the same chow hall, we worked in different sections in entirely separate disciplines. Apparently he had already asked everyone who knew him to be a character witness and they turned him down. I didn't even know his first name.

After some begging I finally agreed to do so with the caveat that I could only tell what I knew and had observed about him which he was fine with.

I was not called, but asked to write a letter on his behalf.

It consisted of "I've seen him at the barracks. He didn't cause trouble." "I've seen him at work, I don't know what he does, he didn't cause trouble." "We don't hangout or interact inside or outside of work and I know nothing of his character."

I think his parents flew out for his court-martial.

He went to prison. Felt kind of bad for the guy, until I found out what he did, then I really didn't.

• Picking a side straight away and sticking with it, even if they happen to be the assholes. Occasionally involves muttering things to myself, like 'Yeah, fuck you too Jeff,' or 'Nooo, Jeffrey, why you gotta break bad like that?! I trusted you! (Disclaimer: Jeff is a pseudonym, please don't sue me if your name happens to be Jeff.)
• Yelling OBJECTION really loud when something someone says sounds like bullshit. Luckily I work from home, so this only annoys the crap out of my boyfriend and not a whole office of people)
• Rating how hot I think everyone is based purely on their voice
• Idly looking up people on LinkedIn in my free time to see if I was right about number 3 (above)
• Every time someone talks about a mandate, imagining it as an actual super-gay date they are going to have once they finish up with this meeting.
• Making up weird definitions of legal terms in my head so that I giggle when I have to type them. Some examples are:

Pari Passu: A kind of gourmet soup

Force Majeure: A WWE wrestler character who comes in the ring wearing only a curly white wig

Ad Hoc: Someone doing a spit-take

Jus Naturale: WAP

• Americans saying the word duty. I can't help it guys, it's just so funny.

I used to work as a Public Defender assistant in Latin America and this just happened.

Two friends of mine were building a summer house and got scammed out of approximately five thousand dollars by their material supplier. Of course the guy was using a fake name and ID, so it took a while for the police to identify his real name.

After we managed to find his true identity, we started to do a background check, looking for past convictions and it was quite a shock when I realized that I had already met the Son of a Bitch.

Three years ago, while still working at the Public Defenders Office, a case of his got assigned to me. Managed to save his sorry ass from jail after he was accused of, guess what, scamming someone out of a few bucks.

This truly sounds like a "Legal Cosmic Prank" and all I have to say is Karma's a Bitch. I'm sure I'll laugh a lot about this in the future.

I'm a courtroom assistant in a south-east asian country, I'd rather not get much further than that on identifying information. We do both security and practical assistance like moving displays, escorting juries, and some ceremonial stuff as well.

This was the sentencing of an evil fuck on several high crime offenses (similar to what a capital offense may be in America - here high crime is the level above criminal offense, or felony for the rest of the world). He stalked, kidnapped, raped, and murdered a locally famous & growing pop artist who was pregnant. He was charged with stalking, high crime kidnapping, high crime rape, high crime murder, high crime fetal homicide, and a bunch of other stuff.

Evil fuck as he will be referred to from here on out was on suicide precautions as he made threats against his own life in prison, so he was in spiffy paper clothes.

We were well into victim impact statements, the victim had a large family and there were something like 35 individuals addressing the court. We're something like 28 statements into it, next up was grandad.

These are always really emotional, families are always really upset for good reason, but this 80+ old guy is the worst I can remember. He was crying, breathing heavily, shaking, the entire sentencing.

He was called to make his statement, starts walking up, about past the council table. He then turns, tackles the attorneys and evil fuck. He didn't get much in on the evil fuck, maybe a kick and 2 punches before 15 of us pileup on him. He was taken into custody, and it quickly became apparent that evil fuck got what was coming.

Evil fuck is screaming and gagging for about 20 seconds, then he starts convulsing, came back in about 2 minutes choking/gagging, really bad. We put him on his side and get an ambulance on the way, the rest of the gallary was evacuated and court went into recess.

By time the ambulance arrives he's not breathing, only twitching and has no pulse. They do CPR, take him out to the hospital, he was revived and died later that day. Coroners report said his brainstem was damaged, his skull was broken, and brain herniated through break in his skull.

The grandad was interviewed by national police who have jurisdiction of courts. He said that he'd been planning that for days, he felt no remorse, said if he had time he would of killed the attorneys too. It also came out that the grandad was in my countries mob back in the day, had 40 years in prison prior for drowning someone in petrol and lighting their corpse on fire. He was suspected but not confirmed to be involved in several other high profile murders.

He was charged with murder, conspiracy, contempt of court, and 2x simple battery for the attorneys. He was found not guilty of everything except contempt of court, to which he was originally sentenced to 4 years but it was reduced to terminal probation with home confinement due to his health.

I'm a layperson aide in an ecclesiastical court + investigative body. Our jurisdiction consists of matters of ecclesiastical law (for those that define ecclesiastical as Christian only, ignore that and substitute with religious. Non-christian here) where the parties involved are either church institutions, clergy, or very specific laypeople like monastics. (For anonymity I won't confirm or deny what religion as it'd narrow me down further). Anyway, this takes place in a regional court, which is our lowest level jurisdiction. I work in the court that covers the entire east coast.

Often we see clergy who are accused of crimes in their respective state (or federal) jurisdiction. The same types of offenses are defined much different then in lay law, so while they lay court finding may influence the way we go, it's far from the only determination.

This trial was happening involving a clergyman who was the assistant minister of the temple involved. He was visiting a young lady who belonged to another temple from his, who was in the emergency department for a psychiatric concern (very common in my religion for clergy to visit hospitalized patients, including clergy from other temples)

She accused him of forcibly pinning her down, groping her, and attempting to rape her. The police investigated and found the rape complaint was unfounded. He was found guilty of misdemeanor simple battery though for pushing her away, he said she attacked him. We aren't catholics, so this isn't something we see much.

Our trial within the ecclesiastical court was for battery, sexual misconduct, sexual battery, and inappropriate conduct in office. (We'd gone through all the preliminary stuff, he agreed to voluntary confinement* in preliminary, everybody was sworn in, this was the big boy trial. We have a jury of 14 (7 clercial officals & 7 laypeople).

(*voluntary confinement is where a person being tried in our court can be confined in a monestary prison. It's an alternative to harsher punishments like excommunication, suspension of benefits/pay, and even total expulsion/suspension of rights to practice. If they refuse voluntary confinement or leave, the alternative is used)

Court chamber was closed/private, jury was settled, we'd been through opening statements, and it was time for testimony. The defendant was sworn in. He testified on what he said happened origjnally which was she attacked him and he pushed her.

The chief investigator (who is kind of like a prosecutor here) went through some questions regarding his career and background on cross, which were answered just like they were in his statement in interrogation. Then the chief investigator asked if everything he stated in the interrogation was truthful.

Defendant said no. Chief investigator asked if the testimony he just gave pror was true. Defendant said no. Chief investigator asked what was untrue. The defendant immediately spilled the entire story and admitted in graphic detail of attempting to rape the woman. His story also perfectly matched the details outlined in the accusations from the victim police report, he had via FOIA.

Now, the mood in these courts are always very serious in nature, testimony or examinations are never relaxed, but the mood shift that occured was probably one of the biggest 180s I've seen in courts. The leading judge dismissed the jury and ordered the building to be secured.

Unlike the catholic system, we don't do coverups and we do cooperate with the police. The judge had security call 911, and told the defendant that he (the judge) was effecting a citizens arrest pernitted under the state law on suspicion of attempted rape, he recommended the defendant cooperate, if he didn't him + security would use physical force to keep him until the police arrived. Very matter of factly.

Police came, we pulled the tapes of the chamber during the trial. We (ancillary chamber staff) were told to leave the room. I have no idea what exactly happened, but other trials that day were cancelled as the judge went to the police department for paperwork. The defendant was arrested.

I know nothing other than he was permanently barred from ministry hours later, excommunicated within the week, found guilty criminally under his states law, and sentenced to prison for 15 years.