Quote:
Originally posted by CRad
RL - that was the best story you could come up with? I know a two or three as good as that and I'm a plain old housewife.
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Ouch! Hey, I never said I had good stories to tell! And when TR says jump, I have to at least do my best if not ask how high.
For you, CRad, I will try again. But don't get your hopes up, because I'm terrible at cocktail parties.
OK, I represent banks for a living. Sometimes can be a tough job.
When a young lawyer starts practicing, no client is going to stand for you arguing a big, important motion, so you have to get your experience in small cases. I was fortunate enough as a young lawyer to get some small cases in which I could get meaningful experience.
One of these cases was a frivolous wrongful foreclosure action. Basically, the plaintiffs failed to make their mortgage payments on time, and the bank foreclosed and took their home as it had the contractual right to do. The plaintiffs sued the bank, asserting that the bank acted unlawfully in foreclosing. They did not have a lawyer and were representing themselves.
So I'm taking the wife's deposition. She's an Israeli, and she insists on having a Hebrew interpreter even though she could speak perfectly good English and understood everything I was saying. We see this alot in this type of case -- she testifies in English most of the time and constantly corrects the translator's interpretation of my questions.
Anyway, one defense we had to some of their claims was that they didn't have the financial capacity to make the mortgage payments. (Thus, even if the bank made mistakes in serving notices and things, it wouldn't matter because they couldn't have paid anyway.) So I spent some time early in the deposition asking about their income, assets, etc.
Now the whole time, the husband is sitting there trying to defend the deposition like he's a lawyer, using a practice guide he had acquired. This is against the rules, but I just let it go because I didn't care. He's objecting to lots of my questions, and I'm having to explain to him why I'm allowed to ask about their financial condition.
So later in the deposition, the wife tells me that she has something to add to her prior answers: that they could have made the payments because they supposedly own this incredibly valuable art collection.
So I spend about 45 minutes asking about the art collection. Each piece, what its called, who's the artist, when and how did they acquire it, etc. The story is that they bought the stuff really cheap at a garage sale and later discovered that some of the pieces were by famous artists and were worth big bucks.
So when I'm done tying all of this stuff down, I pull out copies of their filings in their recent bankruptcy -- filed after the art supposedly was acquired and after they supposedly learned how valuable it was. When you file for bankruptcy, you have to disclose to the Trustee in writing all of your assets so the Trustee can use them to pay creditors. All under penalty of perjury among other things. And, of course, the artwork was not disclosed on the schedules, and I wanted to understand why.
And this is where things got interesting. The wife launches into literally a 30-minute speech on the record, principally attacking me for questioning her integrity. The husband jumps in several times with remarks like, "You're an asshole. You're a plain, flaming asshole for saying what you said." (Taken verbatim from the transcript) And she adds things like, "You ruined my life, and I never forgive you. Never. This has to be on newspaper, I'm telling you. It's -- I wish you -- I wish you -- what your bank did to me, I wish on you."
Finally we break for lunch. Before the deposition started, the court reporter tells me that the day before she had transcribed the weirdest deposition of her career. The plaintiff was a man who had a partial sex change so he was female on top and male on bottom, and he was suing the City of San Francisco seeking the right to use public ladies' rooms.
After the plaintiffs in my case walked out, she tells me, "that was even better than yesterday."
Hybrid Mode
