I was a second-year associate handling my first trial, representing the plaintiff. The defendant had hired an expert witness who had already testified in about forty similar cases. This man had come out to my client’s property and performed what could only be described as a joke of an examination. His report was just as worthless.
For those who don’t know, expert testimony has to meet a certain standard in court, the Daubert standard, at least in my state, to even be admissible. This guy took a few photos, put a ruler on the ground a couple of times, and called it a professional report. The partners at my firm told me it wasn’t worth filing a motion to strike his testimony because the case was worth less than a hundred thousand dollars, and those motions are complicated. They didn’t want to bill the client for it.
I was so furious that this fraud was being treated as an expert that I came in on a weekend on my own time and drafted a twenty-page motion to strike his testimony. I didn’t bill the client a dime. The defendant never filed a response. Instead, they waited until right before the expert was set to take the stand, after he had been sitting in court for two full days racking up fees.
The judge sent the jury out, put the expert on the stand, and allowed the defense to question him directly. The defendant’s attorney, clearly not taking my motion seriously, handed the examination to their inexperienced associate, someone just like me. His questioning was incredibly basic and didn’t address a single point I had raised. Then it was my turn.
I got to cross-examine this seasoned expert witness. It was my first cross-examination ever, and I tore him apart on the stand. I got his entire testimony and his report struck from the record. They had a second expert, who was also bad but not quite as bad.
I took him apart too. By then, the lead counsel for the defendant, a named partner at a well-known firm, realized they were in serious trouble. He did the direct examination for the second expert himself. I still managed to get almost all of that testimony struck, leaving only one tiny sliver intact.
The expert was effectively forced to testify with both hands tied behind his back. It was the most gratifying moment of my legal career so far. I’m still relatively junior, so I’m hoping to beat it one day. I defend professionals, and in one case, I brought a motion to dismiss because the plaintiff couldn’t prove my client was negligent.
She had failed to serve the required expert evidence. As opposing counsel and I waited for our motion to be heard, the judge, who I didn’t know and who clearly hadn’t read our materials, wanted to discuss an unrelated short trial scheduled after our argument. That matter was also a professional negligence case with no expert support. The judge spent ten minutes explaining that he had practiced in professional negligence for many years and was well versed in the evidentiary requirements.
He said, “I very rarely use the word impossible in this courtroom, but it is impossible for you to be successful without expert evidence. ”
Then our case was called. I reveled in explaining to the judge that he was about to hear a motion to dismiss a professional negligence case precisely because the plaintiff had no expert evidence. I won.
I called up my client’s disgruntled former employee about a contract dispute he had started, which had dragged my client into litigation. After two questions, it was obvious he was a lying sack of garbage. I didn’t want to call him as a witness because he was unpredictable. But as we talked, I took down his entire story, which was easily proven false by documents.
His version cast my client in a false and terrible light. I didn’t tell him I had caught him in his lies. A day later, I submitted a list of known witnesses to opposing counsel, as required by the rules. Witness number one was that lying sack of garbage.
Fast forward to trial. Opposing counsel called him as their first witness, and he acted exactly like what he was. He told the same story on the witness stand that he had told me on the phone. I took the notes I had written during that call, entered them into evidence, and proved him a clear liar.
My client hadn’t breached the contract. The party suing was the one who had. After he left the stand, I asked the court for a brief recess. I approached opposing counsel.
My client was still willing to sign the walkaway settlement, no money changing hands, no fault admitted. We had offered that deal two months earlier and it was angrily rejected. Suddenly, it was accepted. I mostly do solicitor work, so if I’m doing my job right, I don’t get many of these moments.
But I had a longtime client who was being sued, and I got to shut down the man suing him in a very satisfying way. My client had hired a guy, let’s call him Kevin, to be his right-hand man. The employment contract wasn’t finished yet, but they had an agreement: Kevin would work six weeks at a lower wage, then sign the contract and get the agreed-upon wage. He worked decently for five weeks, then was given the contract to sign.
He came back to my client saying he had a few small changes. When my client got the contract back, he found that the small changes involved removing the job description, the non-compete clause, and the confidentiality clause. Not only that, Kevin had written in a higher salary and added a bunch of new benefits for himself. My client told him to sign the original contract or find another job.
He chose the latter, but then sued, demanding payment for the six weeks he was supposed to work, which had already been paid, plus two weeks in lieu of notice and five weeks of vacation pay. I got the enjoyable job of telling Kevin in front of a judge that he was entitled to nothing under the employment legislation, and the only way he could get any of it was if he had signed the contract. The judge dismissed the case and awarded costs to my client, but not before giving Kevin a lecture on wasting the court’s time. I represented a man in a slip and fall case against a national restaurant chain known for grilled chicken.
The restaurant was not supposed to clean the grills until after closing, because it was a huge, sloppy mess. The process involved applying chemicals and using a garden hose to wash away grease. It could take two to three hours. They had to pack up food for the next day, scrub the grills, mop the floors, and so on.
Even though the corporation knew this, they refused to pay for more than one hour of work after closing. So the shift managers and cooks decided to start the closing process two hours before closing, while customers were still in the restaurant. That was dangerous, because employees delivering food could track greasy water into the lobby. On one fateful day, two hours before closing, a cook was cleaning the grills with the hose.
The slurry was so slick that the cook had to wear a plastic smock and slip-resistant shoes. While he was waiting for the chemicals to work, which took about fifteen minutes, he walked into the lobby, tracking the greasy mess into a hallway to wipe down some tables. My client walked out of the restroom and slipped in the greasy water. He hit his head so hard that it caused a subdural hematoma, which required surgery to relieve the swelling and the blood pressing on his brain.
Go figure, the video surveillance system wasn’t working that day. Right after the incident, the cook was fired. The corporation claimed they couldn’t locate him during litigation. I did some digging and found a relative, which eventually led me to him.
He admitted he had been cleaning the grill but denied he was the one who tracked the water into the lobby. He said all the other employees did it too. During the entire three-week trial, the corporation testified that cleaning before closing was against their policy and never happened. It had to be anything else that caused my client to fall.
Before trial, I talked to the cook, since we planned to call him as a witness. He was still furious about being fired. I asked, “Do you think they’re still cleaning before closing, seeing as they’re denying it? ”
He said, “Absolutely.
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On the first day of trial, I sent my investigator to the restaurant at the exact time my client had been injured, two hours before closing, to record video on his cellphone. Guess what? They had the hose out and everything. I couldn’t believe they would still be doing this at the very restaurant in question.
I told my investigator to go back when a different shift manager and cook were on duty, to see if they were doing the same thing. They were. At the end of the trial, the defense put their regional general manager on the stand. He swore up and down that this never happened.
He was their last witness. We got up and asked for a sidebar in the judge’s chambers. We revealed the videos to the other side. The corporation’s attorney was freaking out.
The judge allowed it for the defense. The last thing the jury saw before going into deliberations was five minutes of video with audio of the hose as they cleaned the grills two hours before closing. We completely wiped out their entire defense in a three-week trial with that footage. Needless to say, we prevailed.
Using surreptitious video against a defendant like that is rare. They usually stop doing what they’re not supposed to be doing during a trial. I guess that restaurant didn’t get the memo. One case always stuck with me, not because it was a long trial, but because of how clearly the law supported my position, to the point that it was in our favor entirely, and also because of how ridiculous the claim for monetary damages was.
A guy moved out of his apartment and turned in his keys. Then he came back fifteen days later demanding access to retrieve belongings he had left behind, which by then had been trashed. It was just minor furniture items, a lampshade, and a box of his college notebooks. He was furious and sued the landlord in small claims court for five thousand dollars, the state maximum, because his notebooks apparently had enormous value.
He hired me, and I filed a response, which moved the case out of small claims. That’s just how it works in my state. This put him at a huge disadvantage because he could no longer rely on the lenient rules of small claims. So he went out and hired a lawyer.
The lawyer called me to try to negotiate a settlement. I knew her pretty well, so I wasn’t rude, but I scoffed and told her that wasn’t going to happen. I directed her attention to a specific state statute and read it out loud to her. Unlike everything else in the law, that statute wasn’t overly long or difficult to follow.
It just said, bluntly, that when someone actually moves out and gives notice, items left after ten days are abandoned. Period. End of story. I could feel her deflate over the phone and encouraged her to dismiss the suit.
She didn’t. We proceeded to a short bench trial in district court, and we won. I was helping a client gain custody of his infant daughter. He insisted the baby’s mother was on drugs.
His first attorney had tried in vain to make him understand just how favorable the law was to the mother, split custody fifty-fifty, unless he could prove to a very high standard that she was using. The problem was that he had kicked her out based on suspicions, but then one day he found needles, a substance, a shoelace tied up like a tourniquet, and a spoon in the room belonging to the other baby daddy’s kids. She told him every lie in the book, that it wasn’t hers, that she had only tried once, and so on. He refused to believe her and threw her out.
He fired the first attorney and hired me. I went straight into client control mode, managing his expectations while doing everything I could to catch her drug use. We were getting nowhere. The problem was that it was a one-time thing.
She was a good liar, even by legal standards, and we had nothing current to show a pattern. But he insisted, so I filed to restrict her time. We went to court. She was such a good witness that the judge bought every bit of it.
She testified that she had only ever shot up that one time, that it was the only time she had used anything illegal, and that she somehow just knew how to shoot up. I thought I had a pretty good cross-examination. It took some time, but I felt like we got what we needed. But we lost.
The judge gave her essentially fifty-fifty custody, ordered mediation, and set up regular drug screens. We went to mediation and agreed to a parenting plan that set up a more detailed fifty-fifty schedule, requiring regular urine drug screens. It was the best I could do with the facts. I cautioned my client that all we could do was stay on top of the tests and take her back to court on an emergency motion at the first slip-up.
But she was so good. She was supposed to take the screens within twenty-four hours of the request, but she always had an excuse and was just a couple of days late. Somehow, almost all of her screens were done on Wednesdays. Later, we found out a friend of hers worked those days.
She also refused to give me direct access to the screens, instead providing them to her lawyer, who faxed them to me. I immediately started sending faxes. Her attorney was old-school, no emails, and an asshole, so no phone calls. I told him I considered this contempt and he had better fix it, or I would file.
My client was furious at each delay, but the legal standard for contempt was so high, and we had already been in court once and lost, so I needed to build a case. After several weeks of ridiculous behavior and my more than reasonable attempts to address it with her attorney, I filed for both civil and criminal contempt, and we went back to court. An important detail: she had another baby daddy fighting custody at the same time for the same reasons, with required drug screens. I had been in contact with his attorney, and we were sharing information.
I found out that the night before our hearing, she had completed a urine screen and passed it. So when we got to court, I cautioned my client not to get his hopes up. It was a long game. She was late, and the judge started without her.
Her attorney then surprised everyone by withdrawing, claiming a lack of communication. She finally showed up as I was laying out my motions. I ran through the timeline: missed screens, delayed screens, a screen that failed because her sample was too diluted. The judge looked at her, and she gave all her excuses in her sweet, innocent way.
The judge listened, then asked how she would test that day. She said she would be clean. So they screened her, and she failed for exactly what we expected. The judge asked why.
She tried to give excuses, changing her story to fit the facts. He cut her off and told her he didn’t believe her. He ordered four hours of supervised visitation per week, and she had to pay child support until she completed an intensive outpatient drug treatment program, at which point she could regain some custody. That little girl just turned five, and her mother has never visited.
To my knowledge, she has never completed any treatment, and she hasn’t paid a dime. My client doesn’t care and doesn’t care to pursue it. It’s a small town. He told me he saw her in a restaurant once, and she walked right by her daughter without acknowledging her.
I’ve seen her out partying with friends, looking like she didn’t have a care in the world. In my first-ever domestic violence restraining order case, I represented a woman who had broken up with her ex-boyfriend after he shoved and hit her. She filed for a DVRO when he continued to harass her and show up uninvited to her place. The process, at least in my state, is that the victim files documents describing the abuse, and a judge grants a temporary restraining order with a hearing scheduled a few weeks later, where each side can present their case.
Even after my client got the temporary restraining order, her ex continued to contact her, even randomly showing up where she walked her dog at five in the morning. On the morning of the hearing, he was twenty-five miles from where he lived. At the hearing, before anyone testified, the judge reiterated that any violation of the temporary restraining order, including attempted contact, was grounds for a permanent order. The judge then called a brief recess before we introduced evidence.
During the recess, my client went to the bathroom. The ex decided it would be a good idea to follow her in and talk her out of pursuing the DVRO. He hadn’t noticed that the bailiff was also using that bathroom. The bailiff immediately ordered him out of the women’s restroom and threatened to arrest him.
When we got back into the courtroom, the ex took the witness stand. I asked him if he had just attempted to enter the women’s restroom to make contact with my client. When he answered yes, I smugly stated that I had no further questions. The judge tore him apart, and the permanent DVRO was immediately ordered.
In another DVRO case, I was defending a husband accused of completely fabricated abuse by his trainwreck of a wife. My first question to her on the stand was, “Isn’t it true you made these allegations and are requesting this DVRO solely to gain an advantage in the custody and support proceedings? ”
I obviously assumed she would deny it. I was just planning to get her angry so she would slip up and give inconsistent testimony.
When she answered yes, the judge looked as surprised as I was. I immediately said I had no further questions, despite having prepared forty or fifty questions for her, and sat down. The judge tossed the case moments later. A lawyer friend of mine had a case where his client moved into a newly built office building and did construction work to arrange their floor how they wanted.
There was an overly large gap between the elevator door and the floor, about an inch, which kept making people trip. Since they were already doing construction, they paid someone to pour a small concrete bore to fix the problem. The original construction company found out and used their technically incomplete contract to insist they could rip up the floor and fix it themselves. They did.
Now, instead of a small issue next to the elevator, the entire elevator lobby was ruined, with random half-inch dips and hills. No leveling was done at all. When told this was unacceptable, the construction company responded by sending the client a bill for the first redo they hadn’t wanted, and a quote to fix the damage they had caused. The timeline was presented to the court, along with an extremely scientific presentation using high-resolution topographic maps showing just how bad the floor was.
Then the lawyer, while talking with the lead engineer for the construction company, leaned in and asked, “Is this acceptable work for your company? ”
That question handed the construction company a win at great cost. If they said yes, the client had to pay the first bill and pay for another redo, but the lead engineer would go on public record stating that shoddy work was considered acceptable by the company. If they said no, the construction company had to eat the cost of the redo and go on record saying they screwed up.
I wasn’t a lawyer, but I was working with our corporate lawyers on a patent infringement case. I was an engineer specializing in the technology at issue, a document scanning system. We had a relationship with a company that provided OEM products for our lower-end scanning market, while we were working on a higher-end machine of our own design. As our new design was getting ready for market, they accused us of violating one of their patents.
The wording was very broad, and it looked bad for us. They invited us to their headquarters to discuss the issue and potential remedies. Best case, licensing fees. Worst case, back to the drawing board.
We had met several times before the trip to prepare, and despite our engineering team’s best efforts, we couldn’t find a hole in the patent. We flew out and met in the hotel lobby, prepared for the worst. Then I noticed some wording in the patent that was very specific about how the document scanning surface was held in place. Their patent described the surface resting on fixed rails with the scanning head moving beneath it.
But because we were concerned about maintaining a constant focal distance, our scanning surface was captured by the head itself, not the rails. The document surface would freely track any minor up-and-down or twisting motion of the head, compensating for rail deflection or dirt. In fact, if the head wasn’t in the machine, the scanning surface would just fall into the bottom of the unit. The lawyers looked at me in shock.
We talked it through, and they started grinning. Soon we were all smiling like idiots. It was bulletproof. We went into the meeting with their corporate lawyers, engineers, and business managers.
After all the righteous outrage and the desire to find a way forward and keep a good working relationship, it was show-and-tell time. Our lawyers simply said, “We don’t believe we violate your patent,” and using the prototype we had brought, I showed them why. It was beautiful. They just sat there at first.
Then their technical guys asked me to show them again. Then they left for a private conference. We tried to stay professional while we waited, but we knew we had them. They came back, all apologies, saying how they hoped our fruitful partnership could continue as successfully as before.
When we left, we went straight to a nearby bar and celebrated. By the end of the night, our straight-laced corporate attorney was wasted. It was a great day. Several years ago, there was a big drug bust in my town.
The cops arrested about a dozen people in a garage and charged them with manufacture, delivery, possession with intent to deliver, drug dealing conspiracy, and criminal organization charges under RICO. I was appointed to represent one of the people found in the building when the drug task force raided the place. The police filed an eight-page affidavit of probable cause, which was longer than usual, detailing their surveillance of the criminal enterprise, the comings and goings of various participants, and their roles. I read all eight pages and realized my client’s name appeared only once, on page seven, in a list of individuals present at the garage when the warrant was executed.
There was no mention of his involvement in the criminal enterprise. His bail was set at two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, which was ridiculous, and the district attorney refused to agree to a lower amount. At his preliminary hearing, I filed a motion for bail reduction and showed up loaded for bear. The DA called the case, I approached the front, and the judge jumped right in before I could even open my mouth.
He looked directly at me and said he had read the affidavit of probable cause. He noted that what was alleged was serious and a big deal for our small town. The task force had kept the place under surveillance for weeks to build their case. If the allegations were proven, the defendants faced serious consequences.
Then he turned to the DA. He said my client’s name appeared only once in the entire affidavit, with no mention of involvement in the drug enterprise. He asked, “Why shouldn’t I grant the defense’s motion for bail reduction? ”
The DA stammered, “We have evidence that this defendant was involved with picking up the material from Philadelphia and transporting it here.
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The judge looked at her again and said, “Did I miss that in the affidavit? ”
She replied, “Now, they just recently found that out. ”
The judge turned to me and asked if I had anything to add. I had been fully prepared to make a passionate argument about the deficiencies in the affidavit, my client’s advanced age, and his lack of a criminal record in the past twenty years.
I stood there, trying my best not to smirk, and said, “I have nothing to add, Your Honor. ”
Motion granted. Bail reduced.