Saying the wrong thing

I’m not an expert in trial strategy, but it seems to me there are some things that lawyers shouldn’t do.

This is from a recent Indiana Supreme Court attorney discipline ruling: “(H)e repeatedly attacked the Commission for incompetence and corruption, including calling the Commission’s Executive Director a ‘buffoon’ and ‘playground weakling’ and the Commission’s staff attorney an ‘errand boy.’ Respondent has also accused the judge in his defamation case of having ‘betrayed and shamed his oath and his office,’ he accused the hearing officer of being a ‘puppet,’ and he has repeatedly accused members of this Court of having improperly attempted to influence the hearing officer in this matter.”

Do you want to guess whether this guy won? Would you be surprised to learn that the lawyer’s discipline saga began with an argument with his ex-girlfriend?

I’m a little surprised he had a girlfriend in the first place.

The same ruling, by the way, contains a wonderful footnote: “The Commission claimed in a pretrial pleading that the grievances were not ‘dismissed,’ but rather, ‘the internal case management system number the Commission assigned to the grievances was ‘closed.’ The Commission wisely has not reprised this semantic distinction in its briefs to this Court.”

Imagine the relief.

Math problem. I do understand that numbers can be hard things to deal with but sometimes I wonder if people pay any attention at all to them.

A weird case in point: a recent ruling from a split three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8^th Circuit called Vines v. Welspun. The decision got a small amount of publicity because the judges split on whether to overrule a lower court’s decision to award only $1 to a law firm after it settled a wages class action.

The dollar thing is mildly interesting – the panel majority came out in favor of paying lawyers more than a dollar – but the ruling also described and then ignored a very odd thing.

Apparently, the lower court wouldn’t approve a settlement because the plaintiffs’ law firm didn’t negotiate the wage claims separately from negotiating attorney fees. That was bad because it was a conflict of interest for the lawyers.

Fair enough.

So, two months later, the same lawyers came back to court with a wage claim settlement that was the exact same amount as the one negotiated with the conflict of interest.

What do you think happened?

That’s right – the district court approved it “finding it reasonable and negotiated separately from the attorney’s fees.”

WTF?

It was exactly the same number and suddenly it was fine! The lawyers then asked the court, instead of the defendant, for the same amount of legal fees “because that was the amount the parties had previously negotiated.”

What follows, as far as I can tell, is further litigation over the fees – but not the wage settlement amount that was, once anyway, the product of a conflict of interest.

Sometimes I think class action plaintiffs need lawyers to represent them against their own lawyers.

I have to note here that the district judge did one other odd thing: he awarded the one dollar and then “noted that it would award $25,000 in fees if $1.00 was improper.”

I guess he figured the right answer must be one of those two numbers.

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