No matter how airtight a lawyer's reasoning may be, all it takes is for the client to utter one absurdly stupid sentence to unravel the whole thing. These lawyers were shocked at what exactly these clients didn't think were worth mentioning. At least they could bill by the hour. Content has been edited for clarity.
What Went On In Her Mind?
“So as a public defender, you get assigned to a case, and you get a file that generally consists of the police report and any witness statements that may have been taken by the police and/or DA. Because the State has a duty to disclose evidence to the accused’s counsel, if they know of the existence of video surveillance, generally the DA would stamp in the report ‘KS/WP’ (Known Surveillance/Will Provide).
I get a routine destruction of property case, where my client is accused of destroying a computer monitor. The officer’s account of the case was simply ‘Surveillance reviewed. Client taken into custody,’ stamped with the red KS/WP. The client called and sounded much more reasonable than she would turn out to be. She calmly explained it was a wrong place wrong time issue, where she was passing through and tripped to hit the computer at a receptionist desk. So we schedule an initial meeting for Friday.
Friday comes around, and about ten minutes prior to the client’s arrival, a runner from the DA’s office delivers the CD with the video. Being a bit busy at the time, I figured I’d watch it with the client when she arrived. She arrives and again, seems just fine. I mention that we have the surveillance and could go ahead and review it, and she pleasantly agrees. She and her reasonably well-dressed husband come in, joke a bit about how awkward this all is, and sit down across from me. I turn the monitor around so we can watch what happened. In the five minutes of surveillance provided, The first four minutes were a mundane scene of a receptionist answering phones with a pair of double doors behind her. I fast-forward. Then, cue the music.
I watched my client kick open a pair of double doors, screaming at whatever was on the other side. She leaves. She returns, screaming again, and re-enters the double doors. Then I see security guards gently escorting her out, as she is screaming at them. Security stops at the double doors. My client goes over to the reception desk. She leans over the counter to, you guessed it, grab the computer monitor, take it over her head, and bring it smashing to the ground. She gives the finger to security and leaves.
We watch the next thirty seconds in stunned silence, and the tape goes black. Now, I knew enough to watch my clients reaction during this, and she was a total statue. Didn’t move. Stared at the screen with the smile of someone who has killed before. Probably.
Then she turned to me and said, ‘So, what are you gonna do about this?’
I didn’t know what to say, so I just kind of stared at her. ‘Well, uh, probably work on a plea deal. Hopefully you pay them and get a couple of hour-‘
‘I didn’t do it,’ she stated
‘Well, yes you did. I just watched it.’ I respond.
She stands up and without breaking eye contact, grabs my computer monitor, lifts it up, and smashes it on the ground. She picks up her purse and walks out. Her husband follows, but he turns to me in my doorway and gives me the finger, shaking his head in a ‘for shame’ kind of way. I did not take the case.”
“Too Shocked To Even React”
“I’m a court appointed attorney for qualifying individuals in family matters. This was a termination of parental rights case. I had been fighting to argue that my client is stable, working lawfully, has a suitable apartment, doesn’t need psychotropic meds anymore, and is ready to be a parent. After a few months of negotiating with all the parties and the Department of Children, we have a pre-trial to try to convince the legal guardians. I meet with my client before the hearing to see if anything changed. ‘Nope, all good, let’s get my kids.’
Great, that’s not happening today, but let’s try. We get going in court. My client, who is super hot-headed and quick to anger, gets riled up and goes off on the guardians. She is screaming in open court. It doesn’t end there. She reveals that she is no longer working, no longer staying in an apartment, and doesn’t want to have a relationship with the guardians despite her kids loving them. She refuses to send her kids pictures of the toys that they left with her (she won’t return them), and she plans on moving out of state. She thinks they can live as a family off of state aid when she gets her kids back. AND she is four months pregnant. This information was revealed in a matter of fifteen seconds. I was too shocked to even react.
She was clearly not the image of stability and parental fitness I’ve been trying to paint since last July. This client was working really hard to get everything right, and legitimately had everything going for her prior to this hearing. I was not making false representations or trying to get a monster reinstated. This was a true bombshell, as I did my due diligence to make sure things were on the up and up and statutory requirements were met. Things fell part very fast apparently. This was a very atypical situation, parents typically do a really good job working hard to meet their requirements.”
Worst Time To Uncover Secret Past
“Our client was a home health care worker for the elderly and home bound. One of her clients left his estate to her when he passed away, about a year after she was hired. The surviving family was upset and sued her for undue influence. From everything our client said, they just got along really well. She quit working for her company to care for him full time, they went on small trips together, and were together every day. In contrast, the surviving family was only a great niece who lived several states away and hadn’t spoken with the deceased in a decade prior to his death. So we thought we had a legit case of a man expressing his appreciation for the woman who cared for him in the last two years of his life.
Towards the end of the deceased’s life, he began making plans to change his will and leave his property to our client. In several produced emails, she ‘joked’ that they should just get married and avoid the hassle. Cue the accusations that she’s a gold digger. So we stress to her that they’re going to come at her from this angle and she needs to be prepared. Before her first deposition, we prep our client for days. She is a little out there, and her demeanor in general is rather off-putting, so we went above and beyond in preparation. There was nothing we didn’t ask her a hundred different ways and times.
During the first ten minutes of the deposition, our client is asked about her marital history. She states she’s been married three times, which we knew. She then goes on to say that SHE HAS BEEN ENGAGED ELEVEN TIMES BUT ALWAYS BROKE IT OFF BECAUSE THEY DIDNT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO SUPPORT HER LIFESTYLE. To top it off, she states that while she’s never been arrested, she did spend two weeks in jail for contempt for refusing to obey a judge’s orders and hiding evidence in a previous lawsuit. She spends the rest of the next 16 hours (during two days) alternating between arguing that she doesn’t remember basic information like her phone number, and insulting opposing counsel and calling him names.
Multiple times during breaks and such, we ask her what is going on, tell her to calm down, and review everything we went over to no avail. Finally, I end up in the restroom at the same time with her, and I watch her pop a handful of pills for her ‘anxiety’.
Ever watch a $4 million case go up in flames because your client is crazy? It was a rough day, and that woman still owes me $10k.”
Tampering With Evidence
“We had clients who said the bank wrongly foreclosed on their house. The wife provided bank statements (their checking account was in a different bank than their mortgage), showing that they had made their payments every single month for the past several years. I checked through each one to make sure they all showed payments and looked good. There was also proof that the notice of foreclosure was never actually delivered to them. The bank was baffled. Expert witnesses we talked with confirmed that during the recession, a lot of banks’ record-keeping had really gone down-hill, and a wrongful foreclosure could definitely result from that.
We got to mediation, and the first thing the bank comes back with was that upon close examination, they had noticed one tiny error on the bank statements, so they were calling off mediation and subpoenaing statements from the bank itself to check against our clients’ statements. Our clients were upst, and so were we. So what if the bank had made a tiny error?
The opposing side got the subpoenaed statements a couple weeks later and sent them to us, and I had the joy of comparing them. I quickly noticed that there were differences between the ones from our clients and the subpoenaed ones in the ‘electronic withdrawals’ section. Our client had used a PDF editor to delete an entry in that section on every statement, add the mortgage payment, and then adjust the totals, carrying them over each month.
We approached our clients about it, and we said, ‘These look forged. We can drop the case or you can explain what the issue is.’
The wife said, ‘We should probably drop the case.’
She never confessed to us about forging them, but without a doubt, she had forged them. Her husband had no idea. He actually wasn’t on the call where we accused her of the forgery, and he called a few weeks later asking for a case update. That was not fun telling him his wife had lied to him for the last year and a half. The opposing side said they’d be okay with us dropping the case as long as our clients paid their attorney fees. Our clients were happy to do that. It’s actually very lucky the defendant bank didn’t try to get them charged criminally.”
Justice Isn’t Blind
“It wasn’t my client, but the son of the opposing party (and presumably the party himself) who lied about being blind to make himself seem more sympathetic as a witness. We didn’t know either until he took the witness box, their counsel asked him to take the oath, and he picked the card up and read it.
It later turned out that he’d driven to court too. They had been demonstrably dishonest throughout the case. At one point, they tried to claim adverse possession of the land in question, a squatter’s dispute over some farmland. They said it had been lived on for more than twenty years. Really, they had owned the house next to the land for nine years, before which belonged to our client. The whole thing was just a cartoonishly dishonest attempt to steal a chunk of land.
Faking blindness was the cherry on top of a series of ridiculous events. The judge dismissed the whole thing in our client’s favor shortly after. I was a trainee at the time, but my boss, who was in her late sixties then, said it was the most ridiculous case she’d ever handled.”
A Disturbing Technicality
“The company I worked for at the time was doing due diligence before acquiring a small tech startup. The COO of the tech startup was a well-liked guy in the company, friendly, and outgoing. Though we had heard rumblings that the COO was rather hands-on with the work and with female employees. Apparently there was a walk-away package proposed to the COO that would let him keep a sizable portion of his post-acquisition bonus, because a young woman who worked in their sales department had filed HR complaints against the COO and obtained counsel.
I sat in on the meeting with the COO and the company’s retained lawyers while they grilled him about his contacts with the young woman. The COO denied ever having contact with her without multiple other people present (and those people said his behavior toward her in the meetings didn’t raise any flags). The COO emphatically denied having any contact with her outside of work. The lawyers asked the question a half-dozen different ways, and each time the COO denied any out of work contact.
Later we meet with the woman and her lawyer with the COO not present. Her lawyer gives us a rather graphic card that came with a bouquet of flowers addressed to her from the COO. The guy had an account with a florist linked to his credit card. When the company-retained lawyers confronted him he said, ‘But I never had contact with her. It’s not like I delivered the flowers myself!’
COO got terminated for cause, so no walk-away package for him. At her request, the woman was given PTO until after the acquisition, then moved to another one of the companies under our umbrella.”
One Small Questions Changed It All
“There’s a rule you’re supposed to follow when questioning trial witnesses, and that rule is to never ask a question you don’t know the answer to. Despite this rule, lawyers often ask small, apparently inconsequential questions which are necessary to set the scene, but are so inconsequential or obvious that their answers are fairly presumed. This case was an exception to that general presumption.
The defendant was arrested on a warrant and transported to jail. After booking him into jail, the officer returned to his vehicle and discovered a baggie of illicit substances sitting right in the middle of the backseat. The defendant was charged with possession.
At trial, the officer explained that he routinely searches his vehicle before his shift starts, and after any time he transports someone in the backseat. The defense attorney tried to poke holes in the story but the officer’s testimony was remarkably consistent. The officer was fastidious about checking his vehicle. The appearance of the substances coincided with the defendant’s presence in the vehicle.
Then, as the defense attorney was running out of questions, he threw out THE question: was there anyone else in the backseat of the vehicle. It was a Hail Mary. Even when there are multiple arrests, police tend not to transport more than one person at a time if they can help it. There was no reason to believe anyone else could have feasibly been in the backseat with the defendant.
Though it’s no surprise to you, the defense attorney and prosecutor were stunned when the answer came back as ‘yes’. Turns out, the defendant was with his girlfriend when he was arrested, and the officer courteously agreed to drive her to her apartment before taking her boyfriend to jail. This fact was not included in the police report, the officer never told the prosecutor, and, shockingly, the defendant never told his attorney. There was a palpable pause as this fact sunk in. Since there was another person in the back seat, there was more than enough reasonable doubt.
Proofs were concluded and the prosecutor threw out a half-hearted closing. The not-guilty verdict was a given. Because of this case, I learned to never assume a fact, no matter how obvious it may seem.”
A Huge Mistake
“Minor traffic cases can be the worst for this sort of thing, believe it or not. They are short and simple, and often times the client isn’t there, so if you get blindsided by something critical, there’s often no chance to consult with them to turn things around.
I had a simple speeding case. 70mph in a 55 mph zone. No big deal. If my client does a driving improvement course, the court will usually dismiss or reduce the fine, since her driving record wasn’t bad.
When I showed up for her, I found out that she had been driving 70 up an unplowed snow lane, to get around all the others cars travelling in the lane that had been plowed, because they were driving too slow. I didn’t know it was even possible to drive 70 on fresh snow. The officer stated he’d already cut her a break by not writing the ticket for reckless driving, and the judge politely agreed he didn’t feel comfortable reducing it under those circumstances. When I called her up after court to confirm, she did. She claimed she’d just forgotten to mention it.
Now maybe I’ve lived too much of my life in the South, but that just boggles my mind as a detail you’d forget when hiring a lawyer for that incident. I would have told her in advance that hiring us was a waste of money, not to mention the hassle of taking an 8-hour class, and she should probably just go ahead and pay this one. At least she took it well and didn’t get defensive.”
“I Don’t Speak English So I Couldn’t Have Said That”
“The most memorable was probably during the hearing in this road traffic accident case. Based on all the evidence up to that point, it had seemed like a pretty clear-cut case of my client being cut off by the Defendant when he decided to exit the motorway at the last minute.
The Defendant takes the stand and says that in the aftermath of the accident my client’s friend, who had been her passenger, said to him that, ‘She (i.e. my client) was not looking,’
This friend (who is Polish, but has lived here for 10 years) is then giving evidence and it’s put to him that he made this statement. He responds in English that ‘I don’t speak English so I couldn’t have said that.’
Our barrister just looked at me horrified
I also recently had an employment law gender discrimination case where the whole thing essentially revolved around whether they had told her that her position was being terminated as a result of genuine redundancy (legal) vs. whether they terminated it after she got pregnant (obviously illegal). This distinction was emphasized to the client many, many times and she strongly maintained that they fired her right after she applied for maternity leave, without giving a reason.
We’re having a meeting with the client the evening before the hearing and going through what the Defendant will say. We tell her they’ll be claiming they told her it was redundancy, and how is she going to respond? She replies with absolutely no hesitation, ‘Oh yeah of course, that’s exactly what they said.’
And then there’s generally a shocking amount of people who will conveniently ‘forget’ what day an accident from which they supposedly sustained drastic injuries from happened on. The day is apparently significant enough to sue over, it can’t be that forgettable.”
“His Jaw Literally Hit The Table”
“I am actually a lawyer, but I was only watching this trial, not participating.
So the case was, that Woman A had hit Woman B in the head with a heavy pint at a bar, and Woman B got pretty serious injuries. The defense claimed that Woman A had not hit anyone with the pint, but instead had just thrown the pint into a random direction, and it happened to hit B in the head. Thus, it was an accident and not a battery. Well, the prosecution had a CCTV tape from the bar, and it was shown at the trial. The tape CLEARLY showed in HD as Woman A walked behind Woman B and smashed the pint to her head so hard that the pint shattered on impact.
I looked at the defense lawyer and his jaw literally almost hit the table. The prosecutor also noticed this and asked the woman, ‘Thrown, eh?’
And the defense lawyer said that due to technical difficulties, he couldn’t get the CCTV tape open on his computer when he was reviewing the evidence. Woman A was found guilty. So yeah, I was completely dumbfounded.”
Little White Lie
“This guy in prison hired me to request a modification of his sentence because he was doing very well, completing a lot of optional programs, and had no rule violations. He had his family come in and pay for everything to get started. I asked the family and the client if he had requested modification before, because the law said that for his conviction, he could only request modification twice for any one sentence, regardless of if they were granted or denied. He swore up and down he’d never filed before. You can see where this is going. After spending a few hours going over records and preparing documents, a copy of the case record finally arrived. He’d personally filed for modification SIX TIMES since he was sentenced, with handwritten pleadings that were all denied. So the one he hired me for was a waste of time and would never be considered at all.
He was in for several counts of burglary and armed robbery. The statute gives him two chances to request modification during his sentence, and he used those up and then some very early in his incarceration, before he’d completed any programs. I’m talking multiple requests in the first year. At that point he hadn’t done anything to show he was rehabilitated. He just wanted the court to reconsider his sentence, which is not the point of the modification statute. It wasn’t about the severity of the crime, it was a procedural issue. The limit keeps inmates from bombarding the court with constant requests like this and allows the courts to just automatically reject excessive requests.
So it had nothing to do with the merits, he had just messed up by not consulting a lawyer before filing a bunch of requests. And then he lied to me, causing me to do work on a matter that had no chance of accomplishing anything. I kinda feel bad for his family. They were the ones paying for all this. Thankfully, they got a partial refund of the flat fee. My boss charged half of the time value for the work we completed.”
Unsafe And Not Sound
“I had a client who, despite being a large man, had been domestically abused by his much smaller wife throughout their marriage. After the divorce she turned her anger on their son. He ran away one day to live with his dad, and we filed to restrict her parenting time and for a permanent modification. At the permanent hearing, she denied being abusive to the child or my client in front of the child. She said she never threatened anyone ever, and that she never made disparaging remarks about my client in front of their son. What she didn’t know, and therefore hadn’t told her attorney, is that he had recorded multiple instances of her abuse.
So I called my client back up for rebuttal and played an audio recording of her screaming at my client, threatening to break his face in, and calling him a loser, all while the child could be heard in the background begging her to stop. I looked over at the other attorney and she had her face in her hands. We won.”
How Did He Not Know?
“It didn’t happen to me, but my mentor. This is the reason you never ask questions that you don’t already know the answer to in court. During the trial with the judge on a divorce matter, the wife brought up that he had abused her during the course of their marriage. The client whispered to my mentor that this fact was absolutely NOT true.
On the stand, during his portion of testimony, my mentor asked, ‘At any point in the marriage, did you lay your hands on your wife?’
‘One time we were having an argument, and I held her down on the couch until she stopped arguing with me.’
What?
My mentor said it was like she could see it happening in slow motion, and all the alarm bells were going off in her head because he had NEVER mentioned this and, apparently to him, this was not abuse.
The judge gave the wife a lot more money as a result, and the husband was baffled. My mentor was fuming. The husband admitted this was the only time he had laid hands on his wife. My mentor was more peeved because she had thought the case was in the bag, since the wife had abandoned the kids to run off with her lover down in Florida. She literally only came back to the state to get the divorce done. The husband had been noted as being a great dad to the kids and a good figure in the community. Hence, why she was so incredibly shocked at his answer.”
Romance In The Courtroom
“This was a typical divorce case. This particular jury trial was about splitting assets and who would get what. It was a long and drawn-out case that took about five days. Right before the closing arguments, the attorneys wanted to talk to the judge. It seems as though a couple of days prior, the couple decided to get back together, and instead of telling the judge and their lawyers, they just kept it a secret.
We heard four days of evidence, arguments, brought in experts such as land assessors, financial planning people and the like AND THEY WERE BACK TOGETHER.
One of the attorneys asked to be dismissed from the case immediately and walked out the courtroom. The judge had to dismiss the jury, and the couple was adamant that they didn’t think that them getting back together was a detail any of their attorneys needed to know.”
One Man Against The World
“This guy was suing a business, said he got injured, and couldn’t work for three years. Defense council asks him, ‘Sir, isn’t it true that you spent 18 of those months in prison for armed robbery?’
This guy was saying he was shopping at a major grocery store chain and slipped in some water on the ground in front of a freezer. The guy has a cell phone video his wife made of him in the water, and we could hear her saying that the water wasn’t showing up on video and to splash it with his hand, so it would look better in the video. It also came out that he’d had three prior convictions for ‘crimes of dishonesty’ (that may not be the exact term, but something similar) for things like shoplifting and other petty crimes. This guy was representing himself in court, I might add.
The defense council asked him if his inability to work could originate from the two previous knee injuries he’d had. When asked how they knew about those injuries, he was told his previous lawyer had given the defense his medical records upon request. So this guy wanted to enter his MRIs as evidence, but had no one there as an expert witness to explain to the jury what they showed. He wanted to show us what the results were.”