Motion to Slay

My blog is called “Motion to Slay,” and this post will more of the “Motion” part than the “slay” part…although I’d take the “slay” part seriously if I could. When I tell you I was mad, I mean I. Was. Shaking. I was crying. I vocalized my cyclopean desire to walk into a particular Plaintiff’s firm’s headquarters strapped with 8 bombs and pushing the button before apologizing to the FBI who was likely watching (they always are). 

I was fucking furious. 

Typically, I’m pretty good about removing myself from my work. I keep professionally distanced; as any professional should. I do not allow an opposing counsel’s or judge’s or anyone else’s shenanigans get to me because ultimately, nothing is personal and I get paid to do what I do. Sometimes however, I do get angry. There have been two times in my professional career that I got so angry I had to step away from my computer and phone so I didn’t say something I would later regret; and when you are an attorney, the words you say matter and can have a very significant impact on your case, which means it can have a very significant impact on the lives of other people.  This is why it is SO important to keep your cool.

One of those two times was when a baby lawyer called me unprofessional on the phone. She had filed a motion to compel before our discovery responses were even due—the third time she had done it. This has no impact on me personally…but it can look bad on the docket when you have a bunch of motions to compel filed against you. So I called her to discuss. The conversation began very politely until I asked her why she kept filing motions to compel before discovery deadlines. A genuine question, I might add. 

She did not like this. 

She immediately went on the defensive—interrupting me , and getting quite sassy. So I interjected and said what she was doing was “not how you practice law.” 

She did not like this either. 

So she told me she didn’t like my tone and called me unprofessional. When I tell you I saw red…I was about ready to promenade my seething ass over to her office and  throw hands. But instead, I muffled a scream in my elbow and beat the shit out of my desk. My office door was closed, but when I emerged, I got some looks. 

The second time was this past Friday. 

I need to lay a foundation for this next story because you won’t get the full effect otherwise. So: I had no idea as a child, teenager or even young adult that I would be a lawyer; but when I was in law school, I went full in. I devoted myself to the study of law and drank all the KoolAids. 

The KoolAid about comradery within the legal community;

The KoolAid about the integrity and candor of the profession; 

The KoolAid about the importance of respecting the law and your power as an attorney to wield it.

They were all very strong KoolAids in themselves; but for me, they were amplified by my upbringing. I was raised by two highly successful, AV-rated attorneys (that means everyone else thinks they’re really good, too). It is not just your ability to argue that makes you a good attorney. You must be even-keel; you must be professional; you must be a quick thinker, and you must…

FOLLOW THE FUCKING RULES. 

There are lots. 

In fact, the entire legal profession is built on rules and laws. There would be no lawyers if there weren’t rules and lAws. 

Unless you’re Douglas McArthur, rules and laws are—surprisingly—meant o be followed. 

It’s when you break them that we get involved.  So when other lawyers don’t play by the rules, it makes me fucking angry. I was taught that  this profession is one of integrity and professionalism and I take it VERY seriously. Rules are not meant to be manipulated. It is NOT our job to find loopholes, or to manipulate the rules. It is our job to follow the rules and counsel our clients to follow the rules. It is our job to help enforce the rules. 

It makes me especially angry when big law does it. Even more so when seasoned attorneys do it. Because (1) they know better; and (2) they think because they’re so big, they can get away with it and often do. So on Friday, I learned opposing counsel was not going to allow us the discovery that we were unquestionably entitled to. Unquestionably. Like. NO. FUCKING. QUESTION. It wasn’t like, “hm…I could interpret this to mean that I don’t have to give it to you under certain circumstances.” No. 

UN-MOTHER-FUCKING-QUESTIONABLY.

Normally, such a flagrant disregard of the rules would be merely irksome. But that day, I had four answers that had to be done by the following Monday, and I did not have the goddamned time to deal with opposing counsel’s shenanigans. What made it worse was that because it was so obnoxiously flagrant, there was very little case law on the subject. As it happens, when things are just *known*, people don’t tend to deem it important enough to talk more about it (that’s how unquestionable my entitlement to this discovery was). So I spent three mother-fucking hours researching this shit only to come up with tangentially related case law, which I imagined was precisely why this gigantic plaintiff’s firm did it—because there’s no law on point for defense firms to use to support motions to compel. 

And that realization made me even angrier. 

AS I WAS RESERCHING, I got an email with a safe harbor letter and proposed 57.105 motion. For those that aren’t attorneys, or who otherwise are not familiar with these motions, they are called motions for sanctions. In other words, the person who files the motion is asking the court to punish someone—specifically, punishing someone for knowingly filing something frivolous or without merit.  The key words here are “knowingly” and “frivolous.” In layman’s terms, we get in trouble if we file something we know is stupid. 

And it’s not the client that gets the heat; it’s the attorney. So a 57.105 motion is very serious. You are essentially saying the attorney who filed the thing you don’t like acted in derogation of his or her duties as an attorney and in violation of the Rules of Professional  Conduct, which in turn implicates your license to practice.  It is an attack on your integrity as an attorney

So, yeah. Serious. 

At first, my stomach dropped from my body because I thought I had somehow fucked up. But because I tend not to fuck up often, and tend to follow the rules and tend not to file frivolous things, my panic subsided a little, and the anger started creeping in. The case in which this motion was filed was brand new—I had just filed our response to Plaintiff’s Complaint. The response was a motion to dismiss for failure to join an indispensable party. That means that plaintiff’s counsel did not add all interested parties to the Complaint as he should have.  In this case, plaintiffs alleged my client breached a property insurance policy, upon which Plaintiffs were both named insureds. In other words, if my client made any kind of payment of insurance proceeds, both of these people would be entitled to payment. 

It’s just like when you and your spouse are on a deed to a house—you both own the house. If you’re both named on an insurance policy, you both get paid. The check will have both your names. So when ASSHATS fail to add both named insureds on complaints, I have to file a motion with the court forcing them to name both insureds so that if we settle, we can put both insureds on the release, and both insureds on the check. This also protects MY client . For example, if only hubby is named in the Complaint, and the parties end up settling, technically, his wife (who was not named on the complaint) can file another lawsuit against my client for the same thing (now, there are lots of arguments we would have against that, but having both named parties on the complaint just makes it harder to re-file, and easier to pay them.)

Typically, when someone fails to add all named interests on a complaint, I just call opposing counsel and 99.9999% of the time, opposing counsel just fucking agrees to add the missing person. 

Not with this attorney on Friday. 

No. 

This asshat, who has been practicing for about as long as I’ve alive, and who is employed with the  one of the largest personal injury firms in the state of Florida, decided to accuse ME (not my client. Not my firm…ME, PERSONALLY) of knowingly filing a frivolous motion, despite the fact the motion was not only colorable, but in all likelihood would be granted by any court in this state because that’s how the law fucking works. 

Now, in my calm, cool and collected mind, I knew this was nothing more than a bully tactic. But then my feral brain took that musing and made me even madder. 

I do not like being bullied. 

I. Was. Shaking. 

My brain simply could not process the unmitigated AUDACITY of this piece of shit.

This absolute twatwaffle. This unapologetic used condom of a man. This embarrassing excuse of an attorney—nay—of a human being

This shameful , sad, angry, and miserable dingleberry. 

I was so mad that this small –penised man had the unfettered NERVE to  send ME a safe harbor letter.  At that moment, all of my frustration with the downfalls of humanity (evilness, stupidity, manipulative, arrogance, conniving, etc.) came to a head and exploded. I spent the next HOUR yelling at no one and coming up with scenarios in my head about how I would destroy this man’s life. 

Like…

I was a tad upset. 

But it wasn’t just the intentional disregard of the rules that govern part of our practice, or a baseless, but very serious threat. Sadly, counsel do this shit all the time. It was that at that moment I had had enough. I’d had enough of people being bad. I’d had enough of the conniving, the audacity, the dishonesty, and just otherwise the awfulness. When people are rude to me, I try to tell myself that they are probably going through something in their life which is making them act this way; but sometimes I think that being awful is a default. Why else would being good and honest be a virtue? Why else would people be lauded and awarded for honesty and goodness if it was not the norm? Perhaps it’s a product of my upbringing that I expect people to be good; because every time someone is not, I’m taken aback. 

I have never come so close to quitting than I did that day. I understand now the desire to live off the grid and away from other people. It’s because people fucking suck. The ones who don’t suck are not the norm; and if you find one, grab him or her and DON’T. LET. GO. Good people—genuinely good people—are hard to come by. But as it happens, being good is a choice. So, this is my advice to you: be kind. Be empathetic. Be compassionate. Basically be everything Jesus told you to be. Now, I’m far from religious, but I do know Jesus was an actual dude who walked on this earth, and who apparently had some pretty  good advice. 

It takes more energy to be an asshole than to just be nice.