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13. K.I.A.

When I was in the military, assigned as the paralegal to my command, we had a simple case: An administrative punishment for underage drinking. However, at this time in my legal position, I strived to shine by recommending obscure/unknown charges be added, get the paperwork done in time to hit the next payday, pretty much be an asshole to service members go had just been caught for something (usually) trivial. Well life goes on, we deployed to Iraq.

Said service member was KIA. Guilt began to creep in. Why had I been such an ass to someone who was just enjoying some beer before going overseas? Then the real drama came. Reports had been coming in from the wives of the higher ups that this service member’s wife had been seen around town with a new supposed boyfriend prior to her husband being killed. We found out that before he had been killed he had already started the proceedings for divorce, but had not changed his life insurance policy.

A policy for $400,000 USD. This time I used the legal savvy and command backing to help his mother receive the money instead of his cheating and clearly moved on wife. After that case, I tried my best to see both sides of the story and try to just keep the recommendations to a bare minimum.

14. “Big, big difference…”

I was a law clerk during law school, I worked at a major metropolitan public defenders office. I quickly earned a reputation as something of a boy wonder on things like search and seizure issues, I was good at it (still am). Some lawyers in the office had a murder case and asked me to look at the file to spot potential issues. I quickly saw the police had come up with a clever plan to violate the defendant’s right to have a lawyer present during questioning, the prosecution made it easy to spot because they tried to be evasive about it preemptively, which only drew attention to their problem.

I nailed them in a memorandum to dismiss, that motion became a bargaining tool (the prosecutors weren’t worried about losing the issue in trial court, that wasn’t going to happen, but they were very worried about how the case would look on appeal, a fairly common scenario) and, long story short, the client got a sweetheart deal, didn’t even plead to murder and got a fairly short stint in prison. The lawyers were ecstatic and told me my memo had made a big, big difference.

For the purpose of my tasks, I had only been give the part of the defense file that dealt with interrogations and that sort of thing, the part that dealt specifically with the details of the alleged murder were not given to me. After the sweetheart deal was in place, I was given the chance to look at that part of the file, including police photos of the murder scene.

It was a cruel, cruel murder and the defendant was completely remorseless. This case has haunted me to this day and I swear to you, if I ran into this man today I would throw him off a cliff for what he did. So much for the glamor of criminal defense work, you can sometimes find yourself with a case where everything is rotten to the core. But that’s rare, thank God. Most of the time you are helping people who really deserve to be helped.

15. Concerns

Not sorry we won, but sorry for the young man who lost because he was receiving such bad legal advice and bad technical advice from an online forum. Through the course of the case, his deposition and his trial, I got to know the young man and honestly liked him and felt like he was a good, but foolish, sort of person.

I felt bad for him because he could never tell he was being given bad advice, and despite my efforts, I could never get him to realize he was being screwed by his lawyer and led astray by random strangers on an online forum who thought they were mechanical engineers (but were not, and who were saying our technical explanation was impossible).

The case involved his claim that his vehicle was defective due to a defect in materials or workmanship from the factory due a pin breaking 3 or 4 times in his turbo. Problem was, he installed a cold air intake and exhaust system, both of which were connected to the opposite ends of the turbo. Another problem, his was the only car in the country that was repetitively breaking these pins, and we did testing where we put the car back to stock condition and compared it to the modified condition, and our testing confirmed that the modifications were causing an increased vibration in the turbo, and said vibration was breaking these pins over time. Fairly straightforward.

From my perspective it seemed like a simple misunderstanding, and in order to fix the situation I convinced my client to make what I thought was a fair offer – we told him to put the car back to stock condition and if the vehicle had any problems we would give him a new car and pay his attorney’s fees, no questions asked. If the car didn’t have any problems, however, we would want him to dismiss his case. We also made a cash offer if he wanted some money in his pocket he could just walk away.

The problem was, in my state, the law he was suing under provides for statutory attorney’s fees and costs. This means that the defendant has to pay the plaintiff’s attorney fees and costs. This means the plaintiff’s lawyer isn’t really working with the plaintiff in mind, but only thinking about how he or she can run up as many legal bills as possible and try and force the defendant to settle. Complicating this case, if we were right and his modifications were causing the problem, if he removed them he wouldn’t have any more problems and we would want him to dismiss his case.

His lawyers realized that they would have no chance of recovering any fees if we were right, so they told him not to take either of our offers and we went to trial. We won at trial, and because we made a statutory offer to compromise and asked some targeted requests for admissions that he denied, we were awarded $30,000 in fees/costs of our own. Now, the guy owes my client more than what the car is worth, all because he couldn’t tell his lawyers were more concerned about themselves than him, and because he refused to accept our technical explanation based on comments from random strangers in an online forum.

16. Just Short

I successfully foreclosed on an assisted living facility against a sweet old lady who was running it as a family business with her teenage son after she scrimped and saved and pawned to pay to redeem the property but was about $1,500.00 short on the $80,000.00 debt. My client kept the redemption attempt and still took the place and kicked everyone out in order to sell it.