So yesterday I headed over to the office, and decided to sit in with Stu and his young Turk Josh on a Zoom depo. It was a garden variety case -- referred by one of Paul and my lawyer friends -- so I have a rooting interest. The case involves a woman who got a pedicure at a salon with less than stellar hygiene practices, and ended up with a nasty infection. She nearly lost her foot, but it was saved, though she WAS left with nerve damage and other nastiness.
The depo was of Plaintiff's expert, an infectious disease maven from Virginia. Stu found him though a woman I'd been begging him to use for years -- a retired nurse who has a stable of very qualified experts -- she merely makes the referral and steps away. I'll call her Kim, since that's her name.
Stu, the dinosaur who is slow to change, continued to use a beast of a consultant I'll call Ellen, since that's her name. Ellen is a Linda Richman-type woman who in the 80s had a good reputation for finding good experts, but evolved into a money grubbing, nasty creep who supplied flawed consultants, and charged heavily for it.
Paul and I had a terrible experience with her in the late 90s, and I've been asking Stu, to no avail, to stop using her. He finally saw the light after losing a trial because of a turban wearing, radical doctor Ellen supplied him in a med mal case, who wouldn't even leave San Francisco (surprise) because her partner was sick. The jury picked up on this, and totally rejected the Plaintiff's argument, and the defense lawyer, who I'll call Ilisa, since that's her name, beat Stu like a red headed step child, to use one of my favorite, now probably banned phrases, and Stu realized Ellen was taking him for bad, expensive rides.
So now he had a fine expert, and the young, female defense lawyer, named Diana, was deposing him about his opinions in the case. The fellow was well spoken, smart, and very clear in his position -- Stu's client got the bad infection at the nail salon, and not while traveling on a plane, which seems to be the defense's position.
Stu is unfailingly polite to other lawyers, sometimes to a fault. He avoids nastiness. He avoids conflict wherever possible. He objected a few times to the young woman's questions, but as the depo started dragging into hours, I could tell she was getting frustrated. She was making no points with the ID doc, and it was getting to her.
So, as is the way of some less than top of the line lawyers -- she essentially started arguing with the doc. He held up very well, calmly explaining to the young lady how her hypotheticals made zero sense. "Is it your testimony that it was IMPOSSIBLE that the infection came from somewhere other than my client's salon?" "Well no ma'am, we all know nothing is IMPOSSIBLE, but it IS my testimony that in my opinion, more likely than not, she got it there." She was seething.
And so Stu, on the Zoom video record, politely pointed out that she was no longer questioning the witness, but instead trying to insult him and badger him. And then it happened.
She went from regular defense lawyer to a "Me too" victim. "You're being rude to me, and trying to intimidate me into not being able to conduct my job, and I'm about to end this deposition and ask the judge to sanction you, and blah blah blah..."
Wow. I was there. Stu did nothing of the sort. I thought back about my former boss Ed, and how he would have handled the woman -- but in the age before everything was on video tape. He would have gone off the record and truly shown the young lawyer what cutting insults there were -- probably leaving her in tears with no proof of what he had done to take her off her game.
Luckily -- the depo continued. I left before it was over -- my attention span no longer allows me to stick around for this type of silliness.
But I was really disturbed. Has it come to this? A lawyer just pulls the victim card when things aren't going her way, to scare her white male opponent into being afraid to do his job?
I guess it has. I know one thing: if I ran a defense firm, I'd have LOTS of minorities and females on my staff -- the better to scare aggressive plaintiff's lawyers off their game. Or -- I guess I could play the Jewish card, claiming "Your objection, counsel, has micro aggressive anti-semitic overtones that make me uncomfortable as a Jewish man..."
Nah. That wouldn't work.
Anyway, the case is set for trial in August. The defense has already offered some serious money. If this thing plays out like I think it will, the offer will come up quite a bit as the case nears trial, and the case will settle. The young "victim" defense lawyer will have to report back to her claims adjuster that the Plaintiff's expert was compelling -- the jury will like and believe him. The defense expert is a well known jack of all trades whose opinions truly are absurd -- I read his report. He essentially says that no one gets bad infections from nail salons. Yeah, right.
But I'm just glad I no longer do this lawyering thing full time -- especially the deposition part. I don't know that I would have the restraint anymore when encountering this new opposing counsel as victim kind of nonsense. And I am MOST glad that I kept my Ds out of the lawyering biz. It ain't what it used to be.
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