Tuesday, July 11, 2017

This is what a lawsuit looks like: Goodbye and Hello

Litigation involves a lot of what soldiers call “hurry up and wait” – long periods of time when nothing much appears to happen, punctuated by bursts of frenetic activity. We’ll be slogging along here in the long Discovery phase during the summer and beyond.  I’ll let you know if anything exciting happens.  Lawyer exciting.

In our last episode, we discussed Party Discovery. (Only my mother said it was interesting.) I shared Defendants’ grueling demands for me to produce all kinds of documents having nothing to do with the case. I timely answered their interrogatories as well as I could. I also provided thousands of pages of emails and other documents, which I conveniently scanned and uploaded to Dropbox. 

We left the Episode 3 with a cliffhanger – Defendants Ogden Murphy (Seattle’s sleaziest bottom-feeding law firm®") and its partner Patrick Pearce’s responses to my interrogatories and requests for production were almost due.

Guess how many documents Ogden Murphy and Mr. Pearce and their lawyers from the Lee Smart law firm ended up producing on the due date? Zero.

Guess how many more documents have Defendants and their attorneys produced in the two weeks since then? Zero.

You’ll be pleased to know Defendants magnanimously agreed to produced copies of the insurance policies that are paying for their lawyers. Eventually. Of course, the gesture is a little less impressive when you know Civil Rule 26(b)(2) gives them no choice.

Ogden Murphy’s gesture is even less impressive when you read their actual response: “Applicable policies have been requested and this response will be timely supplemented.” I’m sure you’re dying to know when that request was made, and to whom. Me too.

The more interesting news is this: Ogden Murphy has hired new attorneys, and the Lee Smart firm has withdrawn from the case. No doubt to spend more time with their families.

I discuss my various experiences with Lee Smart over the years in an article for the blog's Sunday Magazine. Spoiler alert: the story includes one of the most embarrassing moments of my life, from my very first jury trial.



Click here for more information about my lawsuit against Ogden Murphy Wallace PLLC and Patrick Pearce

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