The settlement call came less than thirty minutes after opposing counsel sent the video. I had just finished taking my client’s deposition, a slip-and-fall case in a pharmacy, and in my state we are not allowed to see any surveillance footage until after testimony is given. The rule exists to keep us from coaching our clients based on what the camera shows. So I sat in the conference room, hit play, and watched my elderly client go down hard on a wet floor.
She fell, passed out, and lost control of her bladder right there in the aisle. The store manager had seen it all happen. Instead of calling 911, he had an employee put out wet floor signs and mop up around her while she lay unconscious. Minutes went by.
The woman was badly hurt. The manager finally called for help, but the damage was done. Opposing counsel offered policy limits before I even had a chance to say hello. We settled it right there.
People can be absolute animals. I cannot say I am proud of that case. It was not a happy one. But it was a sure winner.
There is another one that still sits heavy with me. I represented a man who had gone through a brutal divorce years earlier. The marriage had been a string of tragedies. A child drowned.
There were miscarriages. His wife developed postpartum depression after one pregnancy, and it aggravated a preexisting mental illness. It was an incredibly sad story from start to finish. By the time I came into it, the ex-wife had been in jail for several years.
She had started by stalking her ex-husband, but she was still being held because she had been found incompetent to stand trial. My client just wanted authorization to sell the marital home. It was a small matter, barely worth the courtroom time, but it had stalled for years. Her probate filings made it look like she wanted to relitigate the divorce itself, full of allegations about the marriage.
She already had mental health problems, and it was clear that prison had made things worse. She had picked up some odd tendencies during her time locked up. When she finally came to trial and was brought into the courtroom, you could tell she was not well. She was having a conversation with herself while my client sat on the stand explaining his side of things.
We had no real witnesses. It was not that kind of case. So it was her turn. And that is when everything fell apart.
She rambled exactly the way her filings had, going on about the divorce, claiming my client had committed adultery and that she was therefore entitled to every asset. She tossed in other delusions and general babbling. The judge, a genuinely kind man I will always be grateful for, was patient. He reminded her gently that the original divorce was not the issue before the court.
He let her speak her peace for a few minutes. Then, softly, he shut her down. He had the bailiff and guards lead her away. We got our authorization.
My client got his sale. It was not a happy win. Just a sad situation that finally got resolved. Some wins come easy because the other side makes it impossible to lose.
I once defended a small claims case where the plaintiff showed up drunk. He was suing a company for kicking him out of their establishment for being intoxicated, which was the entire problem. He could barely stand during his opening statement. He knocked over his shopping bag full of evidence.
The judge, who was lenient on process and liked to adjudicate on the merits, took one look at the wreckage and ruled in my client’s favor. The only words I spoke the whole time were putting my name on the record. That is peak small claims court. My second favorite version of that involved a woman suing her sister for stealing her ruby bracelet.
She showed up to court wearing the bracelet. The judge noticed. The case did not last long. There was a custody matter where the mom had alienated the kids and claimed they wanted nothing to do with their father.
While the justice was speaking, the mom stood up and interrupted, saying she could not force her children to do something they did not want to do. Her own attorney, who clearly had not anticipated that move, lowered her head and closed her eyes. I stood and said, if mom cannot control her children, perhaps she should not be the primary parent. The justice told me he would hear that application whenever I made it.
I already knew I had it when the mom stood up earlier and questioned the qualifications of a psychologist she herself had suggested, all because the psychologist came back with a report recommending that dad get parenting time. Weed cases can be entertaining too. I represented a rental company that needed to prove tenants had used a house for an illegal grow operation. They admitted the weed was there but claimed it was strictly for personal recreational use.
I found a weed expert. That is apparently a real profession. He testified about how much weed goes into a typical joint and how many joints a regular user smokes a day. I did the math and presented it in my closing statement.
Even if the couple smoked eighteen heavy joints a day, each of them, every single day, they had enough weed on hand to last over ten years. The bailiff snorted when I read the numbers. That is not recreational, folks. A woman once sued my client, a private shuttle company contracted to pick up elderly and disabled customers on a reservation system.
She claimed she called and was never picked up, which was true. The problem was that she never made a reservation. She treated the service like a taxi and called whenever she wanted a ride. When they did not come, she hitchhiked into town and spent the night in a shelter.
While there, someone bit a chunk out of her arm. She sued for twenty-five thousand dollars, the small claims maximum. I brought a motion to dismiss on remoteness grounds. At the hearing, the woman wore short sleeves.
Her arms were perfectly intact. That was signal one. She then argued that the case was not really about the money or the missing chunk of arm, but that she wanted the judge to order my client to pick her up whenever she called. Signal two: admitting your claim is bogus in front of a judge is not a winning strategy.
The judge told her she was inclined to agree with my argument and asked how she would respond. The woman lost it entirely. She called the judge a racist, swore at her, shouted that her human rights were being violated. The judge, visibly furious, dismissed the case.
I decided to push it further. I asked for an order barring her from filing any other action against my client without first getting court permission, a remedy usually reserved for serial, baseless litigants. This was her first suit, but she was still swearing at both of us the entire time. The judge granted it on the spot.
My dad once saw a video that became famous at his firm. It was a workers comp claim for a back injury that seemed suspicious, so they hired a private investigator, which is common. The video came back showing the guy at batting practice, twisting his back over and over, exactly what he claimed he could not do. People get caught like that all the time.
But then the camera panned to the outfield, and who was shagging balls? Opposing counsel himself. The case dropped. The judge reported the lawyer to the bar.
I tried a civil case in New Hampshire in front of a down-to-earth jury. In the back row sat four women. My witness was an assistant town clerk, there voluntarily while on maternity leave. She was lovely, well-spoken, and credible.
Her evidence was useful but not supposed to be fatal to the other side. The opposing lawyer decided to tear into her with rude, largely irrelevant questions. After one particularly nasty exchange, I watched the four women in the back row roll their eyes at each other as if to say, do you believe this garbage? That was the moment I knew we had won.
Hit and run case. My client was the pedestrian who got hit. The defendant claimed the car was stolen and that he was not behind the wheel. During my client’s testimony, I asked what she was doing at the time of the accident.
She said she was waiting for the pedestrian light to turn green so she could cross at the zebra crossing. I asked if she waited for it to turn green. She said yes, and that she even waited a few extra seconds before stepping off the curb. The defendant jumped up, roared across the courtroom, and screamed that his light was green to go, and that this lying woman dashed right out in front of him.
I have security cameras all over my property, including a ring doorbell. A woman once put human waste in my mailbox. I had full documentation of everything. Having good cameras is a godsend.
If anything ever happens on your property, you want the proof in hand. Plenty of my family are personal injury lawyers. Most of the time when people fake injuries, they post pictures on social media that give them away. One guy claimed severe neck and back pain from a car crash and then posted photos of himself skiing.
My sister worked a case where a man sued for permanent disability and simultaneously started a roofing company under his own name. The investigator filmed him hauling shingles all day, day after day, and then the guy posted photos of himself on the roofs on the company’s Facebook page. If you claim you cannot do something, make sure there is no photographic proof of you doing exactly that. A private account will not save you.
They will subpoena everything anyway. I once saw opposing counsel get a call on his cell phone mid-closing argument. He told the judge, just a second, and took the call. I had a landlord-tenant nightmare myself once.
The property manager was a slumlord. Everything looked fine at move-in, but there was a leak in the ceiling that they kept painting over. Half the house had no air conditioning, and some windows were nailed shut. After a year, my daughter developed asthma.
My son had chronic sinus infections. My husband and I had headaches and got sick every month. We had constant bug issues no matter what we tried. I sent the kids to their father’s house, and my husband and I tore the place apart.
The mold was everywhere. None of it was in visible places because I cleaned constantly, but once we pulled back furniture and mattresses, it was all over. I documented everything, over a hundred photos and thirty pages of records. We broke our lease and moved out with the landlord’s approval.
We threw away incredible amounts of belongings, all of it documented. They tried to bill me three thousand dollars, claiming we ripped doors off hinges. I had photos of the doors full of mold on the inside. They tried to claim we trashed the place.
My lawyer sent them a few images and some email transcripts. I had my security deposit back within a week. My lawyer later told me the only reason he took the case was because of the documentation I provided. A truck driver changed his story on the stand about how the accident happened, completely contradicting everything he had said for months.
Next up was the police officer who responded to the scene, and he gave the exact same new version. On cross, I asked the officer when he had first heard this new version of events. He said, in the hallway just before I came in. There was a custody case in my family where my aunt wanted full custody of the kids.
She had it initially, but her ex got supervised visits every other weekend. He was abusive, nasty even with supervision. Social services filed report after report. He was rude and arrogant to the judge, refused to listen, and walked out on multiple hearings.
Even his own barrister thought he was awful. He and his mother declared repeatedly that the kids were the result of incest between their mother and her own father. He dug his own grave. The judge ruled that normally a father receives at least some custody, but he was making an exception.
He banned the man from coming anywhere near the kids until they turned eighteen. My aunt got full custody. My brother once had a case where someone accidentally told the truth after years of lying, realized what they had done, and asked the court reporter to strike it from the record. That is not how it works.
I once had to get a restraining order against my ex-girlfriend. She was stalking me after I broke things off. In retaliation, she filed one against me, claiming I attacked her with an ax, which was completely absurd. At the hearing, the judge asked me directly if I attacked her with an ax.
I said no. The judge looked at both of us and suggested we just forgo the orders entirely and agree to leave each other alone. My ex agreed instantly. I told the judge I still wanted my restraining order.
I got it. She violated it so many times I might as well not have had it, but I got it. Police body camera footage once showed officers trying to trick a guy off his property for two hours to make an arrest. They finally did it and charged him with evading arrest.
Then they stood around talking and one senior officer made a hand gesture, and every mic went dead except one officer who had not gotten the memo. He walked up and asked what the deputy said about the evading charge. The other officer laughed and said the deputy did not like it and asked what defense counsel would say if a jury saw their video. That footage got sent to the district attorney.
The charge was dropped. I had a judge call all counsel into chambers mid-trial just to tell opposing counsel, the jury hates you. Really, really hates you. I work criminal appeals.
I take cases after conviction and sentencing and try to convince an appellate court that my client deserves relief. A few weeks ago I had a case that was a total travesty of justice. My client was a Black man tried by an all-white jury, with no minority in the entire venire. His trial attorney was incompetent and did absolutely nothing for him.
He was convicted on all counts and received an extremely high sentence for a relatively small fraud, higher than Manafort got. I raised five separate issues on appeal, which is a lot. I usually stick to one, maybe two. At oral argument, the panel seemed sympathetic during my presentation, though the questions were tough.
When the government lawyer stood up to speak, the judge’s first words before she even got a sentence out were, this is like a law school exam. There are so many issues here. I felt pretty good about that one. They ended up reversing every conviction.
My client is a free man now. A respondent witness once blurted out, yeah, I bet you do, when I moved to admit a photograph into evidence. I worked as a prosecutor handling involuntary commitment hearings. Those happen when a mentally ill person is a danger to themselves or others, and a family member files a petition for treatment.
The judge always made everyone wait at least fifteen minutes before entering the courtroom. He spent five of those minutes adjusting his toupee. The woman being committed refused to wear clothing and sat in only a blanket. During the wait, she screamed every racial insult she could at me.
The moment the judge walked in, her attention shifted to his toupee. She started laughing, asking why he had roadkill on his head. She ranted for five straight minutes. Her attorney turned to me, we were sitting two feet apart, and asked me to move to have her removed.
I said no. She was proving my case for me. Then I had a change of heart. I made the motion.
The judge warned her to quiet down or be removed. She kept going. A sheriff’s deputy took her back to the detention facility. Her husband testified about exactly how she was a danger to herself.
She was sent to the state mental hospital for a temporary commitment order, which had to be reviewed quickly. When she came back to court after being medicated, she was a sweet older lady. Her medication had needed adjusting. She was smiling, in a good mood, completely calm.
Her husband was relieved to see her back to her normal self. I once represented myself in a restraining order hearing. I was terrified. I sat in the same room as my abuser for the first time since getting the emergency order.
I felt better when their lawyer butchered my name, and even better when the judge told them off repeatedly. The best moment came when they declined to cross-examine my third witness because the first two had already destroyed every point they tried to make. A company once received an unexpected demand letter claiming we provided a defective piece of equipment and owed big money for repairs and downtime. Our in-house lawyer knew something was off.
These letters never appear out of nowhere. They are always preceded by phone calls and emails, and he was always copied on those. He told me to pull and print every email we had. There were not many.
Twenty-two from the company, all but three from over a year before, when they bought the machine. The last email was the only one I actually printed. I highlighted one line: machine was surprisingly intact for being hit by a motorcycle going that fast. I had never seen our company lawyer smile.
He did both when he read it. On an appeal, the other side argued for the better part of an entire day. Then it was my turn. I had spent days preparing, reading every case, cross-referencing the trial record.
I was ready. The senior judge looked at me and said, we do not need to hear from you, Mr. Blogs. My client panicked, sure that meant we lost.
I had to explain that it meant we won. A plaintiff in a rear-end accident case recently admitted in a deposition that she brake-checked my defendant on an open road. I had a custody case where we argued the father should only have supervised visitation until he got his PTSD and anger issues under control. His attorney claimed he had no anger issues and that mom was a deranged liar.
I pulled out an affidavit he had signed the year before, submitted to the disability office, stating he was disabled due to anger issues so severe that the women in his office were afraid to work with him. He had to admit to disability fraud or admit he had an anger problem. He chose poorly. Another case involved an unmarried couple who bought a house together and broke up.
She wanted her value out. The law says you sell the house and split the proceeds, but he lived there and did not want that. His lawyer argued the court should award her a judgment for half the value. I argued that was not a remedy under law, and that she already had an interest as an owner.
Becoming a creditor would only reduce her interest. The judge frowned the whole time. I could see his teeth grinding. I swung for the fences.
I asked for a vexatious litigant order, a restriction usually reserved for people who file lawsuit after lawsuit against the same party. This was her first time suing my client. The judge agreed it was appropriate and granted it on the spot. The woman was still swearing at both of us the entire time.
My state passed a child-in-car law that was not highly publicized. My client left her baby, who had the flu, in a locked vehicle in a car seat with the AC running while she ran into a pharmacy. She was gone for ninety seconds. A woman watched her get out, tried the doors, called the police.
They got there exactly as mom returned. At trial, the officer testified to everything that happened. The state called no other witnesses. I read all the statements and noticed something.
The officer testified about the child being in the car, the mom not being there, how they got him out. Then he added, the child was out of the car when I arrived on scene. Full stop. He had just testified to everything that contradicted that.
It turned out he was reading from his partner’s report. His testimony was struck. Directed verdict for the defense. There was a prosecutor who asked a man charged with pot possession, does not calling an officer a pig sound like something a guy on pot would do?
The man answered, sounds like the last thing a guy on pot would do. He was found not guilty. When I was an intern at a county prosecutor’s office, we mostly handled traffic stuff, but there were always a few other crimes mixed in. Drunk in public.
Minor possession. Criminal mischief. Domestic assault. One case should have been a slam dunk for the defense.
The accused was facing domestic assault and failure to comply with an officer. The domestic assault count got thrown out when the girlfriend showed up with zero evidence and a contradictory story. The second count was probably about to disappear too. Then the defendant said the words I will never forget.
Can I just say something? The public defender crumbled. The defendant was an idiot. He proceeded to contradict everything he had said and proved beyond any doubt that he had, in fact, failed to comply.
Opposing counsel called my client as their very first witness. They walked to the podium, opened a massive three-ring binder, and started asking a question. The judge stopped them halfway through the first one, reminding them he had already ruled on that issue and would not allow questions about it. Counsel froze for twenty solid seconds, flipped through the binder as if the answer might appear, then asked for a fifteen-minute break.
The judge refused. Counsel closed the binder and sat down without asking a single question. The next day, the defense shifted tactics and argued my client was too rich to win, so they showed up with a poster-sized picture of a helicopter. They asked if it was his.
He said no. My client did own a helicopter, but they had printed a picture of a different one. Then came the follow-up: what makes you say this is not a picture of your helicopter? My client replied, gleefully, to the jury’s immense amusement, because the words on the tail are written in German.
My best friend had a custody hearing to gain full custody of his son. His ex did not even show up because she could not be bothered to get the date right. Things went his way.
It was a win for the kid.